Photos of Prague by Paul Wells

December 21 - 28, 2006 Christmas in Prague

•December 21, 2006•

It feels much longer than two months since we've been here. It's unlikely that we will move back to California but we're having difficulty deciding where to settle next. Of our own choosing, we are displaced persons without a home here or elsewhere to go to. Strange feeling. It was fine when we were young, moving from place to place, but age tends to make us all want to sink roots.

The best advice I would give any young person is to travel. Young people are welcome almost anywhere and have the flexibility to adapt to situations and minor hardships. It doesn't take a lot of money to travel if you're willing to stay in hostels, camp out or meet other young people who will let you couch surf. At best, I think travel can teach tolerance and broaden human understanding and at worst it makes you appreciate home more. Having extolled the virtues of travel, I must admit I'm ready to go back to the U.S.A.  I've begun to count the weeks until we return. So much for life as an ex-patriot.

•December 24, 2006•

A traditional Czech Christmas dinner includes a baked carp. Two men have set up a table on the corner of our busy street. They have big, beautiful carp in water filled troughs and people line up to buy them. The men pull the fish out by the tail and then smash them over the head with a heavy wooden mallet. It's horrible. On and on it goes, thud, thud, thud. I makes me think of the lyric from that old Beatles song, Bang, bang Maxwell's silver hammer came down on their heads. Puts me right off fish. Two blocks from our apartment is the Flora, a large, multi-level shopping mall. It's lavishly decorated for the holidays and full of shoppers. In the Levi's store they are selling an ordinary looking pair of jeans for $200. Am I out of touch or is that nuts? Everything in the Flora is expensive but it doesn't slow down spending. 

Credit cards are a fairly new phenomenon in the Czech Republic so now the Czech's can dig themselves into debt just like the rest of us. It's a real sign of prosperity when people can buy what they can't afford. Eva goes to Germany where she can get quality merchandise for less money. It's only a two and a half hour drive to Dresden and a four and a half hour train trip to Vienna. I bought Paul an etching and a beautiful book on Czech Cubism for Christmas.

•December 25, 2006•

Today we went to Eva's for a couple of hours. She made sandwiches and cookies and that was our Christmas dinner. It was just the three of us. Very grim. Now I know how lonely the holidays can be for people with no family. One year in Oakland I decided not to cook Thanksgiving dinner and we went to a restaurant instead. I remember feeling so sad to see people eating a restaurant turkey dinner all alone. To me the holidays aren't about presents or parties. Holidays are about family together, telling funny and touching family stories and remembering loved ones who are gone.

So this was our Prague Christmas. Pretty dismal but Christmas, like paying taxes, comes every year and there will be others.

•December 28, 2006•

We went to a fabulous exhibit in Old Town of Czech Cubist and Expressionist painters and print makers. You would have difficulty finding the name of a Czech artist in most of the books on Modernism, Fauvism and Cubism. it's a shameful omission that artists like Emil Filla, Josef Capek and one of my favorites, Jan Zrzavy, have been so overlooked. We saw an exhibit of paintings by Rudolph Kremlicka, one of the first Czech Modernists, and friend of Andre Derain at the Tower of the Stone Bell in Old Town when we first arrived. I was very inspired by his paintings. He made me want to come home and paint.

At last a dusting of snow! Excuse my enthusiasm but I'm from California and haven't seen snow since I left Ohio at ten. There is so little of it that it will be melted off by tomorrow but for the moment I'm enjoying every flake on my coat and in my hair.