Santa Claus strikes me as being a bit creepy. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
After getting over my Bruceville gloom (see previous post), I set out, eastbound, for French Lick, hometown of hated former Boston Celtic, Larry Bird. “The hick from French Lick,” they called him. Still do I guess. Back in the day, I had other choice names for him. None quite so flattering as “hick.” It was the 1980s, the era that many consider the golden years of the National Basketball Association.
I was a Los Angeles Lakers fan and naturally my favorite player was Earvin “Magic” Johnson. The Johnson and Bird rivalry that went back to their college days when Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans defeated Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores to win the 1979 NCAA Championship captivated basketball fans worldwide. That classic matchup still ranks high in number of viewers.
You were either Bird or Magic. There was no in-between. No self respecting Laker fan could feel anything but enmity towards Bird. “Larry Legend,” could’ve cured cancer and then walked across the oceans to feed the world’s hungry and he would still be that fucking guy. Of course, the ill will went both ways. And still, fans of the one bestowed grudging credit to the hated other.
So why drive eastbound, halfway across Indiana to French Lick when I should be heading due south to New Harmony?
Because.
Because decades after the rivalry that was so magical, a rivalry that literally lifted the NBA out of the doldrums that it had been languishing in, I’m feeling a pull. Fucking Larry Bird broke my heart countless times during that fabulous decade, but still, I realize that without Larry Legend, that golden age of basketball would’ve never existed except maybe in some cheap sports novel. I have to pay homage to the villain of my early adulthood.
“Leaving home was one of the easiest big decisions I’ve ever made. But once I left home, continuing the journey until it reached some kind of sensible conclusion or fully played itself out, was another matter – one of the hardest things I’ve ever attempted.” ~ William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways.
‘Just drive,’ I tell myself. ‘You’ll get over it – again.’
I’m a month into the road trip and the next stop is New Harmony, Indiana.
I hadn’t planned on New Harmony when I started this trip. In fact I hadn’t planned on most of my destinations with the exception of Omaha, where I landed, and from where I’ll depart back for home.
I decided on New Harmony only a week ago while staying in a Best Western in Hannibal, Missouri. I’d already planned the next two stops. Two nights in Springfield, Illinois to visit the Lincoln Presidential Library and then two nights in Marshall, Illinois as a base to go take in the Parke County (Indiana) Covered Bridge Festival.
Where to after that?
Fuck if I know.
Stuck.
With a mind to drive into Kentucky and then touch West Virginia, I spread some maps out on the bed. I’m not averse to using Google but spreading out a paper map or three provides a bigger picture.
Part of the goal of this excursion has been to hunt for some names that stand out. I’ve touched Nimrod, Ten Strike, Athens (not Greece), Paris (certainly not France), and Virginia (not the state). Scanning the maps I saw, Princeton (likely not the university), Poseyville, Mt. Vernon (not New York) and Geneva (absolutely not Switzerland). I found the town of Santa Claus which I considered for half a moment before trashing that notion. I can only stomach Christmas for three weeks max and certainly not in October. Hell, in some of the places I’ve been, the retailers are already jamming Christmas down our throats and it’ll only get worse.
There, in the southwest corner of Indiana was New Harmony.
Harmony is a good thing. Right? New Harmony, contemporary harmony, any old harmony; one can never get enough harmony. New Harmony it was. Not only did the name attract me, but its location, on the shore of the historic Wabash River, helped close the deal.
Lodging was an easy find. There it was, The Old Rooming House. The Old Rooming House, in New Harmony. It doesn’t get any more seductive than that. The price per night was a mere sixty dollars. There was no online reservation system so I phoned the number and got Jim. Jim was chatty and started giving me a tour of New Harmony even before I told him I was looking for a room. Was I talking to the innkeeper or the tourist bureau?
When I made the reservation Jim told me he only takes checks or cash. That was fine with me. He also instructed me what to do if he wasn’t there when I arrived. He explained that around the side of the building near the little parking area there would be a chalkboard which would have my name and room number. Just walk in and make myself at home. Final payment could be made by leaving the check or the cash in my room if he wasn’t around. There was a lot of trust involved. When I told a friend of mine about the arrangement she was convinced that Jim was a fool. I felt otherwise. Jim trusts in the goodness of people and lives by that, and if someone takes advantage it’s more the perpetrator’s problem.
The aircraft is on approach, circling the regal city known as “La Dominante.” Forehead leaning against the window I look down and easily pick out the features. There’s the Grand Canal, busy with water traffic; vaporettos, working boats, and pleasure craft. I can even see the gondolas, little water bugs bobbing on canals big and small. Over there is Piazza San Marco and across the water the distinctive Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute.
Venetzia.
As the plane circles, my view becomes blurred by tears. My heart, the heart that has always rested in the warm Tuscan soil, is happy. The ancient voices of the Caesars speak to me. Il Tevere, (the Tiber River) courses through my veins. The delicious aromas of i mercati di Roma kiss the air I breathe. Looking down I realize that the pull I’ve always felt is stronger than I could’ve known; an irresistible connection. Even though I’ve never spent more than a month in Italy at one time, this feels like my homecoming.
I was nurtured in the Italian way by my mother, an Italian war bride, and her mother, my Nonna Maria. They molded our family culture and founded our traditions. My ties to Italy have tightened, as the country of my birth, the place where I’ve spent all of my life has turned into an angry place, a dis-United States that has pivoted from the place I’ve known, loved, and been proud of, into a burgeoning autocracy, ruined by a cheap carny turned president who, with the help of his acolytes, has ripped away the decency of the office, torn down national traditions, and disdained the Constitution. Now I turn to bella Italia for solace.
The plane completes its lethargic arc and straightens its approach. As we lose altitude I watch the highway of boats, the vaporettos and swift water taxis maneuvering between an aquatic highway delineated by strips of buoys. The water, even from high above, appears choppy and I worry about how Cora, a non-swimmer, suspicious of boats, will fare.
***
Close to touchdown, water looms. It isn’t unlike landing at SFO, where you get the unnerving feeling that the plane will splash down rather than touch down. Old timers like me know the drill at SFO. Just a moment after you see the strip of airport hotels on the San Mateo Peninsula to the west, you look down and there’s land.
Of course old locals like me can remember back to 1968, when a JAL DC-8 ditched into the fog bound bay near Coyote Point, two and a half miles short of the runway. There were no casualties except for the egos of the pilot and the copilot, and the jangled nerves of passengers, but had the plane landed a short distance further from the runway it would have exploded into a public park.
Call this a memory jogger. Or call it a cautionary tale. Call it both. This is a look back to that period between June 15th, 2015 and, well, now. It’s also a peek into what America’s future might look like.
The way we were
We didn’t know it at the time, but that June day in 2015 kicked off what was one of the darkest periods in the history of the world, certainly of the United States. That was the day that Donald Trump announced his candidacy in what was not so much a speech as it was an angry, racist rant. It was also a warning of what was to come. A warning that wasn’t heeded in November of 2016 and what might be ignored again this coming November.
There was no ambiguity at all. Trump laid his filthy cards on the table for all to see. In the best known riff from his speech, Trump put his racism out for the world to see as he blamed Mexico for willfully consigning criminals to the U.S. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Trump’s announcement warned us all that he and the truth are not on speaking terms. Hell, they’re barely acquainted – if at all. Among his lies that first day, Trump claimed that the Islamic State had built a hotel in Syria. Well, they didn’t build a hotel, they appropriated the Ninawa International Hotel after it was closed down in the middle of a war. And they didn’t run it as a hotel. And, it isn’t in Syria, it’s in Mosul.
With his boorish behavior on that day in June, Trump flashed a bright yellow warning light that told the world he’s a lowbrow, no class, asshole.
In those early days, most Republican office holders saw the impending iceberg and started heading for the lifeboats. Over the successive days, weeks, and months to come, when it appeared that Trump’s populist snake oil was being bought by the electorate in giant, economy sized jugs, that iceberg started looking more and more like an ice cube to far too many of those Republicans and they decided to take a ride on Trump’s ship of fools. (My apologies for the mixed metaphors. Sometimes I can’t help myself.)
Trump showed everyone exactly who he was when he publicly humiliated his opponents. He called Marco Rubio, “little Marco;” Jeb Bush “an embarrassment to the Bush family;” and called Ted Cruz’s wife ugly and his father an accessory in the JFK assassination. And all of those individuals showed just how cowardly and feckless they could be when they all folded like cards and ended up as disgraceful, whimpering lap dogs to Trump.
The whole world witnessed the mayhem that characterized Trump’s term. His foreign policy, if you could call it that, was an abject disgrace. He cozied up to Kim Jong Un while North Korea bloated its nuclear stockpile. He lionized Putin. He withdrew the U.S. from international agreements and institutions. He nearly broke up the NATO alliance.
At home? The list is long and undistinguished. He botched the COVID response that left millions to die when they probably didn’t have to (remember the dark comedy about injecting bleach?). He passed a tax cut for the rich that was supposed to benefit the middle class, but was just a game of three card monty that screwed the people who needed the relief the most. He packed the Supreme Court with two conservative hacks who likely perjured themselves, and one religious zealot. It’s a court that has done more to take away rights than any previous court in history.
And of course there was the boorishness, the misogyny (“grab them by the pussy”), the racism (fine people at Charlottesville, and the mingling with known racists), the meanness (remarking about a trip to a WWI cemetery that contained American dead, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”), the autocratic leanings, and the countless episodes of turning on people who weren’t reverent enough for his liking. The wretched cur that bites the hand that feeds him.
He was an absolute disgrace. He refused to hang Obama’s presidential portrait in the White House. When he invited the National Champion Clemson University football team to the White House he feted them with stacks of McDonald’s hamburgers (who in the fuck does that?). There were the temper tantrums that left ketchup on the White House walls. There was the violent removal of peaceful protesters at Lafayette Square, done just so that he could pose in front of a church, while holding a Bible (a book he’s never read).
After criticizing President Obama for taking a few golf trips (98 over four years) and promising he would be too busy, Trump spent all, or part of, over 260 days on the golf course at a taxpayer expense of over $144,000,000 (in his first term, Obama played 113 rounds of golf).
And then there were the lies. Donald Trump proved to be a world class liar. During a mere four years, Trump tallied an estimated 30,373 lies, from little stretchers to colossal whoppers. That comes out to an eye popping 20.9 prevarication per day. And that only accounts for the ones that could be reported. It’s actually a truly marvelous feat that could be worthy of a spot in The Guinness Book of World Records.
And it all culminated on January 6th, 2021 with an insurrection. That, after he damaged American’s faith in the legitimacy of elections.
For nearly four years, Trump has been throwing a nationwide, oh woe is me, pity party. Hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear, “treated unfairly,” “treated badly,” “persecuted,” and his all-time favorite, “witch hunt.” All of this from a pathetic snowflake who has made a career out of bullying people. Any parent would send such a petulant child to timeout, if not a trip to the woodshed.
Trump’s reckless, self-centered behavior has caused destruction that will likely not be repaired for years if not decades. As my wife often says, “He’s ruined this country.”
And maybe the most maddening part is that the ruination was caused, not by a man with a political philosophy or a cogent world view, but by a mean spirited two bit con-man; a narcissistic charlatan without a cause.
“Western fully understood that he owed his existence to Adolf Hitler. That the forces of history which had ushered his troubled life in the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West.” ~ The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy’s fictional character, Bobby Western, and I share a common beginning. Western’s mother and father met while working on the Manhattan Project, the enterprise that built the atomic bomb which would have been forestalled but for Hitler starting a worldwide dust up. My own debut also came about as a result of World War II.
While I was aware that my parents met in Rome sometime during the closing months of World War II, I didn’t know the particulars of their chance meeting. My parents never volunteered to tell me how they came to meet and I never asked. They were never very forthcoming about their past. Hard to say why. I guess we just weren’t close in that way. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that in some ways we were strangers to each other. We just weren’t close in many ways, particularly my mom and I. When I moved out of the house and into an apartment with my friend Scott, Mom and I didn’t part on good terms. We’d had enough of each other. It’s hard to say whether she felt sorrow over my leaving or if it was just plain old good riddance. The chill thawed over time, warmed by my marriage, and warmed even more by the birth of her grandson, Matthew. He was the apple of her eye.
It was my wife who spilled some of the details of my parent’s meeting. I guess it was during one of those late night, woman to woman talks at the kitchen table when my mother told Cora the story of the American Sergeant who was relaxing in a park in Rome, and saw the young Italian girl who was walking her dog, a terrier named Tommy. Tommy’s leash somehow got tangled and when the girl struggled with dog and leash, the sergeant approached and helped her gain control. That’s it. The story begins there, and that’s where it was left. That short story and hundreds of photographs and letters in various boxes, bins, bags and albums left a puzzle that will never be completed. There’s nobody left to offer anecdotes or clues.
Back when I was a tweener/teener, that is to say the olden times, when describing Mick Jagger as spry wasn’t meant as a compliment to a nimble octogenarian rocker, and Dick Nixon was seen as the ultimate in political corruption (Little did we suspect), my three favorite magazines were Playboy, Mad, and Sports Illustrated.
Playboy, for a pimply faced kid’s obvious reason, but also for the oft doubted reason that there was some good copy to be found between bare boobs and bottoms. “Oh sure you liked the writing,” said the doubter. No, really, Playboy is where I discovered not just the female mysteries that parents of their innocent boys didn’t want them to know about. It’s where I discovered the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Jean Shepherd (He’s the guy who wrote A Christmas Story. You know, “You’ll poke your eye out kid.”). I remember trying to stifle my laughter at midnight whenever I was reading a Shepherd short story under the bed covers by flashlight. Since I knew that my parents wouldn’t be down with their kid gawking at the naughty bits I hid the copies that I managed to get my hands on in a field behind the house (Under the mattress is too obvious).
Mad was something I shared with my dad because we shared a love of satire.
And then there was SI. In 1970, a copy of Sports Illustrated ran you 60 cents and it was worth every penny; hell a hundred times that. Sports Illustrated was my first subscription, one that I kept for more than a decade. Every week, I looked forward to the new issue’s arrival in the mail. It took me maybe an hour to devour it cover to cover and I kept stacks of them in my closet.
It’s a Britishism; one of those slang phrases from across the pond that has us Americans scratching our heads trying to solve an expression that sounds contradictory at best and at worst, like downright gibberish.
“Too clever by half,” was coined in 1858 by George J. Whyte-Melville in his book,” The Interpreter, and it means “too smart for one’s own good.” It was a futile head spinning exercise for me to try and squeeze the meaning from the idiom. In the end, I failed at it and turned to Google. And it’s possible that Google doesn’t have it right either.
***
During the course of the past year or more, President Biden has been hemorrhaging support from the progressives who helped lift him to office in 2020. It’s been impatience and anger over a variety of issues that includes gun control, student debt and climate change. It hasn’t helped that during his 2020 campaign, Biden made an implied promise that he would be a one term transition to a strong bench of potential candidates for 2024. His decision to run for reelection ran counter to polling that made it clear that Americans do not want to see a rerun of Biden versus Trump. To make matters worse, if not downright dire, support for Biden has been cratering among progressives over the administration’s handling of the war in Gaza.
Those voters, mostly progressives, and I consider myself a progressive, who plan on sticking it to the old man, for whatever reason, are being ‘too clever by half.’
I can speak about Biden annoyance because I’ve experienced it, I’ve written about it and I’ve spoken about it to anyone who will listen. I’ve railed against Biden on this very site, going so far as to promise not to cast a vote for him in November. I’ll admit it. I was being “too clever by half.” I was dead wrong.
***
While bashing Joe Biden, I’d managed to push aside the memory of four years under Donald Trump. Quite frankly, I don’t know how on Earth I could forget the incompetence, the tens of thousands of lies, the kowtowing to the world’s autocrats and the divisiveness that man sowed in America and around the world. And it hasn’t – fucking – stopped.
In normal times a former president would write a memoir, take to the rubber chicken circuit and fade quietly into history, as America separated from the previous administration and moved on. I wish that I could say that there’s been a separation from Trump, but we haven’t been able to enjoy a single fucking solitary second of separation. It’s been a fire hose gush of whining and threats and vile rhetoric and outright unmitigated bullshit from a man who is promising to the world that he intends to be America’s first autocrat.
“Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
Food. Glorious food. Pure food. Real food. Food that you can taste just by looking at it. Food that you never knew could smell so fresh and look so perfectly beautiful. This is the food that was always featured on the Travel Channel, before Travel Channel morphed into bizarre bullshit that has nothing at all to do with travel. It’s the food that you would swear must be Photoshopped.
Tomatoes by the thousands. Cherry tomatoes; dazzling, little crimson orbs hang in clusters from the top rails of booths and look down at their larger, plump cousins of different varieties and colors; bright red, green, purple, black, and some decorated with stripes of orange. A sea of green vegetables broken up by islands of bright orange carrots and gleaming yellow and red peppers and gleaming purple eggplant. It’s autumn in Rome and seemingly bottomless baskets of chestnuts are surrounded by a variety of squashes.
Butchers wielding razor sharp knives slice steaks from giant roasts and with their mallets pound slices of veal paper thin. There’s a boundless selection of meats here, where the butcher is as likely to have rabbit in his case as he is pork chops.
At the fishmongers, there are fish and seafoods of untold varieties, colors and sizes; filets, steaks, roasts and whole fish. While the variety is endless, there is one thing that they all have in common. These fish stare, in their eternal repose, through eyes as clean and clear as newly polished glass, just as they did when they swam alive and free. That’s how you know that the fish here is as fresh as you’ll get.
Over on the other side of the great hall, a tall slender young woman made even taller by her deadlocked hair that’s stacked and bound in a burnt orange scarf, slices strips of lasagna from a giant sheet of fresh pasta. The girl stacks the strips on a scale and looks to the attentive customer for approval. The customer, a middle aged woman, pauses for a moment of serious consideration and then points at the sheet. “Di piu, (more)” says the customer. The girl slices a couple more strips, pauses, and glances back at the customer. “Va bene (is that good)?”
“Bene,” the customer.
At the delicatessen, rows of whole shanks of prosciutto hang above display cases filled with cheeses of all types and textures. The deli man reaches up and snips some sausage links from a meters long, coiled rope of goodness that dangles over a display of salamis; sopressata, calabrese, finocchiona, and, of course, a great log of mortadella, it’s face daubed with slivers of pistachio and splats of fat.
This, is Mercato Trionfale, just a short walk from Vatican City in Rome.
At one of these deli booths a young woman deftly shaves slices of paper thin prosciutto from a whole shank. Back home in America the prosciutto is sliced on an electric slicer somewhere in the nether regions of the deli section. Here at Trionfale, it’s done in front of the booth, where the young woman puts on a show, wielding a scalpel sharp knife with the concentration and precision of a surgeon.
Bottles and tins of olive oil rest on shelves behind stacked jars of olives, condiments and preserves. Wine merchants offer wines from Piedmont, Tuscany, Lombardy, and Liguria. There are breads, pastries, dried fruits and rolling hills of bulk spices. Mercato Trionfale is an homage to all that’s good and right about food.
If the breeze is just right, the aroma hits you just as you’re stepping off Dlouhá Street into Staroměstské náměstí, Prague’s Old Town Square. It’s a savory, intoxicating blend of a wood fire and slowly roasting meat.
The smell is reeling me in. And why not? This smell is built into the human’s sustenance DNA. Oh sure, you might be a militant vegan, but buried somewhere in your genes is the olfactory memory of juicy roast. It’s the original smell of cooking, the aroma that goes back nearly two million years before the abomination called tofurky, when man first married meat, fire, and smoke. And oh what a beautiful marriage it was. I would’ve volunteered to be the best man at that marriage; except that it was well before my time. Hell, I’d have volunteered to be the flower girl.
***
Scientists call it the Maillard reaction, a response that occurs when heat hits sugars and proteins. Maillard, schmaillard; scientists and doctors have an annoying habit of sucking the air out the balloon of life with their frigid, barren dialects.
This is meat over a fire and it’s the same siren that beckons from a ramshackle looking barbecue joint somewhere in the American south. A little old place with a small mountain of hickory logs stacked against a brick smokehouse. Every now and then a stooped old guy will toddle out to the stack, grab a log or two, and feed a fire that’s slow smoking racks of ribs; meat off the bone deliciousness that will be served up wrapped in butcher paper, and sold out by sometime before sundown. Maillard, my granny’s fanny.
But this is Prague. It’s not Memphis, or Kansas City or some roadhouse outside of bum fuck Mississippi. Why am I smelling barbecue here?
***
As we walk across the square, past the ebony statue of Jan Hus, who was himself barbecued at the stake in 1415 for having the effrontery to challenge the Catholic Church, and on towards Staroměstská radnice, the looming town hall, the aroma escalates with each step. Past the horse drawn tourist carriages we see a row of kiosks. Some are selling souvenirs, others are selling beer and still others are selling trdelník, the Czech street dessert.
Two of these kiosks have roaring wood fires off to the side, and over each fire are rows of huge hams in varying stages of doneness, rotating on a spit. The ham is called prazska sunka. These meat mongers also offer gigantic sausages, which are sizzling on flat top griddles.
The two are nearly identical except that one offers manhole cover sized potato pancakes as a side order and the other offers something that is more intriguing.
We walk to the second kiosk and stare in hungry wonder at a giant pan that you could bathe a couple of large dogs in. Bubbling in the pan is a street food called halusky, a mixture of potato dumplings, cabbage, spices and bacon. Bacon? Of course, bacon.
A temporary return. So, WordPress offers this fantastic service of sending the site owner all of his/her posts in a zip file in the event that the site is going to be closed down. I took advantage of that service only to find that the file is only useful if you want to publish the posts again on a new WordPress site. Not so fantastic after all. Well, it’s going to take some time for me to go through all of my posts and copy and paste them into my own document file. I have until April to finish the copy and paste. I’ve been in Europe for three weeks now and while I’m writing, I’m certainly not doing any copy and paste. That’s for when I’m home watching sports.
Meanwhile –
We quit the main room of the Reduta Jazz Club just as the band began its final song. Best to miss one song and skip the line at the coat check. Coat check at the Reduta is mandatory. The place is small and customers are sitting cheek by jowl at small tables. No room and no tolerance for bulky coats or backpacks. As we waited in line to check our coats a man in front of us argued so insistently to be allowed to keep his coat with him that one would have thought he had a kilo of blow hidden in the lining. In the end he harrumphed and walked out.
As we were waiting to get our coats after the show, a woman in front of us snatched her coat from the clerk and remarked, “The music was not so good tonight. I don’t know if I will be back.” Well why did you stay for all three sets? The young man behind the counter offered the woman a disinterested shrug, as if to say, “I just man the counter, man. Got a beef about the music? Talk to the band.”
Contrary to the opinion of the critic, Cora and I found the show to be good, club worthy music. The band isn’t ready for a stadium tour, but how many really are? A mix of New Orleans Jazz, some old jazz standards, and a dusting of blues and pop from “back in the day”; “the day” being the musical genres during and before my childhood. For a time, I enjoyed the music that my parents listened to until “the day” passed and I discovered The Beach Boys and then the bands that came with the so-called British invasion. That was when I entered my teenage years and became a music “critic,” much in the vein of coat check woman, dismissing my parents’ music as “not so good.” When I hit my forties I had an epiphany and realized that I’d been nothing more than a twenty-five years long music snob.
***
Cora and I step outside into a crisp night where a crowd, mostly young, and mostly smoking, is milling around on the sidewalk on Národní, a major street, busy with cars, buses and trams. This is a different world from Stare Mesto, the old town. where our hotel is located. Národní is asphalt and modern. It reminds me somewhat of San Francisco’s Market Street, but only in a physical sense. Both are wide boulevards with buses and trams, and both are well lit. That’s about where the similarities end.
Národní
In a human sense there’s no comparison. Narodni has life. It has a soul, and vibrancy. There are no discernable threats, no shady looking characters here, nothing to raise the hairs on the back of your neck and put you on alert. Market Street, at almost any hour, is a boulevard in need of a biblical flood; a multitude to wash away its crime, its strange denizens and its overall filth. Businesses on Market aren’t waiting for the flood. Tired of criminals and weirdos, they’re closing shop and moving out. I feel safe walking Narodni at night. An evening walk on Market Street feels like a suicide mission. Prague, like the other European cities I’ve visited, Madrid, Barcelona, and Granada are in full vigor. San Francisco is on a ventilator.
In a few meters we turn onto Na Perštýně; back to narrow, cobblestoned, fourteenth century streets. The old world cobbles are charming but a full day of sightseeing raises hell with your ankles.
The fourteenth century philosopher, theologian and martyr Jan Hus, an icon of Czech history, wouldn’t recognize today’s Na Perštýně. He might appreciate it though. Hus became famous for being an iconoclast. Continue reading
The Life in My Years 