Adventure Babies

Prague, then from Decmber 5th to December 11th 2007 was to be our own cocoon of love and delicious foods! sumptuous hot wines and spiced cheeses abound in these parts as they compete for the attention of thine craven nose!

simmering with urgency and preoccupation Prague is indeed an architechtural delight ,full of intricate designs and almost absurdly delicate yet powerful merchant houses, refined with culture yet financed with the spoils of European commerce. Bizarre Gehry modernism, or sly Czech Cubism, lots of crawling and frozen monuments to the dead, Jews especially, a bizarre mix of post communist capitalistic planning and seedy areas of Wensclas Square combine with unabashed traditional markets, noveau styled cafes with chandeliers, and piano playing yeomen in cheap suits. There is fantastic beer a plenty! and lots of delicious pigs prepared in one way or a paradoxical other.

on one particular evening we found a simple Czech wine bar, that on further discovery turned into myriad labyrinth with seven underground chambers playing music and selling cheap drinks in many bars! we met some guys from Eastern Slovakia who as it turned out were table football champions of the central bohemian area, we lost about 10-0 8-2 9-1 10-0 repeatedly, but brilliant fun. Prague was really enjoyable! on a grand scale, its a bit sickening, but finding little gems,little backalleys with hidden delights, bars, scupltures and bizarre graffiti make it a city which will reward you for touristic endeavour. The train Station was a seedy buzzling dirty disorganised shagpile of Eastern European oil and alchol lovers, but it really gave us a fresh perspective on prague as we crawled out from its smoky bosom; the train winding over the Vltava into decrepid moss sewn stations with crubmling facades and glazed men in long trenchcoats; the city quickly giving way to wooded areas and embankments with tiny matchbox houses of yellow, blue green, purple, orange and black.

Underneath the very arches of charles bridge exists a candelit bohemian outdoor wine cellar, something like or akin to a romantic torture chamber of high christian pantheons, purgatory for the crusaders.. candles and germanic flavours, dripping seething with the turnng of the river, damp bricks.... rich tomberic German accents.... a place to unwind..... with atmosphere............. A castle of epic proportion, a testiment to extreme wealth, churches stuffed with the brazoned bones of dead saints and monstrous lesions of gold, icons to the mythic past of blood, sacrifice, and power over the unpowerful.

As Kafka said of Prague " this mother has claws"