News from NeoBoHo

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Mes chers dissipateurs touristiques,

Unlike the subway systems of Paris, San Francisco, and other cities with digital displays that inform riders of the number of minutes until the next train’s arrival, Prague’s metro system tells only how many minutes have passed since the last train left. In other words, when Prague trains are running late, the Czech people can ask not how long they must suffer, but how long they’ve been suffering. This is a sad metaphor to inflict on the people of Bohemia as a constant reminder that the answer (regarding their history, if not their efficient metro system) is “a really, really long time.”

The most recent suffering, so it appears, is the result of the Czech Republic’s switch to a market economy after the end of Communist rule. Capitalism has brought the country an astounding number of KFC outlets, McDonalds, and gambling casinos, along with every other Western store brand you can think of; tourist shops are awash with Russian nesting dolls in Harry Potter, George Bush, Osama Bin Laden, and American football-player motifs; and the streets of Prague’s historic center are clogged with so many foreign visitors that it’s hard to find a seat in which to suck down a six-dollar espresso at one of the city’s many Kafka-themed cafes. Today’s invaders, waging their assault with tourist dollars, pounds, and euros, cannot be beaten back across the Charles Bridge with stones and swords as were Prague’s aggressors of yore.

Of course it’s too easy to poke fun at the over-the-top tackiness of any city’s touristic pandering—such is the stuff that has kept the worldwide market for refrigerator magnets and commemorative floaty-pens afloat for decades now—but Prague seems somewhat more damaged by the phenomenon, more over-the-top, and a bit sadder than other cities.

There’s no doubt that Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders offer Czech gastronomes a lighter, healthier alternative to traditional Bohemian cuisine, and I’m not suggesting in any way that the yoke of Sovietism provided a more desirable or beneficial economic paradigm, but wander a few streets out of the well-kept and upscale historic center and Prague’s outer neighborhoods still exude a certain Soviet je ne sais quois, with some soul-deadening architecture and a shabby, unkempt air that’s often downright depressing. Graffiti cover vast surfaces of concrete, and weeds grow from cracked sidewalks. Save for the lovely, lush gardens surrounding Prague Castle, the city’s parks have gone to seed and untrimmed trees and shrubs force Sunday strollers to duck or push branches away to navigate their broken footpaths.

High above the Vltava River across from Prague’s former Jewish ghetto of Josevof, skateboarders and graffitists have taken over the area around a giant metronome (designed by either David Černý or Vratislav Novák, depending on whom you ask) that replaced the colossal Stalin monument which once dominated Prague’s skyline before its destruction by Leonid Brezhnev, who in a fit of post-Stalinist spin control ordered it razed in 1962. (The massive Stalin monument, which could be seen from nearly everywhere in Prague, took 5½ years to complete and its sculptor, Otakar Švec, dodged attending its unveiling by doing himself in three weeks before the ceremony. His was a relatively simple way of getting out of having to look at the damned thing; it required 800 kilos of dynamite to finally remove it from the sight of Prague's citizenry.)



By contrast, Josevof itself offers a fabulous combination of Jewish-persecution tourism and upscale shopping amid spectacular—and spectacularly maintained—architecture wonders. Visitors whose attention wanes in the long queues outside Josevof’s many synagogues and those which snake slowly through the ancient Jewish cemetery can load up their credit cards at Gucci, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Cartier between having their emotions jolted by the displays of artwork by doomed children at Terezin or having their hearts broken at the Holocaust memorial that honors the hundreds of thousands of Czech Jews who perished during World War II.

The Museum of Communism in the Nove Mesto district, which wryly promotes its address as “upstairs from McDonalds and next to the casino,” despite its relatively shabby and haphazard displays gives visitors a rather good history of the rise and fall of Czech Communism, most effectively through historic video footage and recreations of the classrooms, shops, and police interrogation rooms of yesteryear. It’s also a good place to find out the background of various historical landmarks, like the apartment building my friend Joanne and I stayed in on Wenceslas Square where Vaclav Havel announced the end of the Soviet era in a 1989 speech from the second-floor balcony and which now houses a well-stocked Marks & Spencer store for the well-heeled former Communist (or anyone with a few thousand extra Czech korunas burning a hole in his pocket).

For those who find the medieval charms of Prague’s oldest buildings not charmingly old enough, there’s good news come dinnertime: Doba Kamenná (Stone Age) is a caveman-themed restaurant in a basement in Nove Mesto where a young shirtless host wearing an animal-fur loincloth and face paint and dragging his knuckles on the floor leads you lumbering, apeman-style, to your table where he cheerily explains the ordering policy in a me-Tarzan-you-Jane vernacular: “You pick food from extensive menu; you pick drinks; you write food/drink choices on paper and pound fists on table, attract cavewaitperson’s attention.” (OK, that’s not verbatim, but close enough.) I was not aware of this, but apparently man learned to snap his fingers and whistle to get his waiter’s attention sometime after the Neolithic era. He demonstrates the proper use of Stone-Age #2 pencils and a promising fist-pounding technique and then lumbers off to greet and instruct new customers.

The restaurant is dark, furnished with roughly hewn furniture and decorated with animal hides, bones, antlers, and enormous tusks that are hung in rough sisal netting, the effect remarkably reminiscent of the fishing nets entangled with lobster traps and buoys that New England seafood restaurants commonly use to add a seaside ambiance.

The price of dinner includes a floor show whose story line loosely concerns a caveman named Toro and is acted out by a few of the waitstaff who grunt out the script in Czech (which to someone like me who knows not a word of Czech sounds surprisingly Paleolithic when spoken by a guy with his tongue tucked between his lower lip and teeth), although it is hard to hear much of anything over the din of frantic drumming by the three or four secondary players whose bit parts have no dialogue.

The menu, to simplify the ordering process, assigns IKEA-style nonsense names to all the dishes: Grilled tenderloin of pork in cream-pepper sauce served with mixed vegetables is “Býk,” Rib-steak with sautéed snow peas and roasted eggplant is “Pán," etc. Red wine, white wine, and beer are “Toro’s blood,” “Toro’s sweat,” and” Toro’s pee,” respectively; “non-alcoholic Toro’s pee” is available for Stone-Aged 12-steppers. (Mojitos are “mojitos.”)

A woman scantily coutured in simulated mammoth and Nikes brings plates of Býk and Pán and mojitos in rough clay cups, but no silverware because, of course, forks and knives would not be epoch-appropriate. The cocktails have plastic bendy straws. Every detail of the Stone-Aged theme has been attended to; a primitive roll of paper towels substitutes for the more-civilized man’s napkin.

Napkins bad. Food? Food good. Yum! Individually wrapped toothpicks, good! Take Visa? Good! But what does one tip in a place like this? European restaurant-goers aren’t as generous as American ones and, in France at least, over-tipping is seen as vulgar. Is it possible to be vulgar in a place like this? On the other hand, what is vulgarity in a city that sells “Czech me out!” tee shirts and Silvio Berlusconi nesting dolls and advertises Day-Glo performances of Cats under black-lights and abbreviated versions of Mozart’s Don Giovanni staged with opera-belting marionettes?

Back to anni domini and above ground, there is much of Prague to see nestled midst the Kurt Cobain and Che Guevara tee shirt vendors and street artists selling Angelina Jolie and George Clooney caricatures. Most of the attention to Prague’s historic architecture is paid to the more-ornate churches, municipal buildings, and apartments, but as spectacular are early 20th-century Cubist structures. The cubist movement in Czech architecture and furniture design borrowed from the style best-known through the paintings of Picasso, de-structuring familiar or expected forms into flat and angled facets. Amid Prague’s plethora of uber-fancy iron and stonework, the Cubist buildings don’t beg for attention, but to stop and admire them is one of the unexpected pleasures of Prague sightseeing, and a museum dedicated to the Cubist movement is housed in one of the city’s finest examples, the House of the Black Madonna, and inside the delightful building three large galleries tell the story and display examples of the most influential Czech practitioners of Cubist art, architecture, and design.

Another hidden treasure awaits the inquisitive visitor willing to search and repeatedly ask locals for clues to the whereabouts of the tomb of Tycho Brahe. The 16th-century Danish astronomer was buried in one of the interior support pillars of Prague’s old Tyn church after his untimely and rather bizarre demise in 1601. As the story goes, Brahe did not wish to offend Petr Vok, the aristocrat at whose home he was dining, by excusing himself to the little boy’s room before Vok had finished his chow. Apparently Vok was a really slow eater, and poor Brahe’s bladder burst before an opportune time between dessert and coffee arose for him to make a crotch-clutching beeline for the loo. (Talk about suffering! Oh, the humanity!) Brahe was a well-recognized man-about-Prague in his day, easily spotted by his false nose made of gold and silver. The sniffer his mom gave him was lost in Rostok before his arrival in Prague, sliced off with a sword by a man with whom he was dueling for the love or honor of a woman. (I’m unsure which, although knowing how polite-to-the-point-of-bursting Brahe could be, I’d like to assume he was defending the latter.) The relief carved in marble of Tycho Brahe’s likeness is a dead giveaway of who’s interred there, with his prosthetic proboscis clearly scribed in the stone. Had the carver who completed the tombstone not been such a stickler for detail, it would be easy to mistake an adjacent tomb for that of Brahe, as the bug-eyed expression on the face carved upon it seems to be of someone else in serious need of a whiz. Anyone who knows the sad tale of the noseless man’s passing from not pissing would be forgiven, by me at least, for any confusion.

Bons voyages,

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