Prague Spring - revisited.

We're in Prague.  The city where I was born, so long ago, while my father was working as a Reuters Correspondent, a civil rights lawyer, a photographer, and a communist.  My parents had been in Europe for almost nine years, having left immediately after their 3 week courtship and marriage, on a troop ship, into the European war zone.  I know little about this time in Europe.  We escaped during an uprising because my father's friends were being "dealt with" in a way that made them permanently invisible and the net was closing. In order to get married in December, I'd had quite a rigmarole to get my Czech birth certificate, as all I knew was that I'd been born in Provaznicka Street, Prague 1. And that we fled in the dead of night leaving all our papers behind.  It was a time my mother didn't share with me, and I didn't know the questions to ask.

It was Reno's idea to visit Prague. I'd been here 15 years ago with Liza, my daughter for a few days and remember so much of it, especially that the time had been too short.  Reno wanted to see my origins, although those are so complicated. My mother had told me so little, and I hadn't known my father since I was about 10 - so my origins are vague, although I have always felt European, ridiculous as that sounds.  Reno, who found me, is helping me find myself.  A task he has set himself assiduously to do.

That is was winter, and would probably be cold enough for snow, made visiting Prague for more than a few days more enticing.  We flew from Venice, over the chilling, snow covered Alps, and in an hour landed in an entirely different environment from that of insular Venice and its narrow lanes and enclosing walls.

But Reno was silent and anxious for the half hour taxi ride from the airport. Anxious I suspect because he may have been wondering about the efficiency of the Czechs as our airport/hotel pickup didn't materialise; soon sorted with an apologetic phone call and a speedy taxi ride in a Skoda.  Skoda. Skoda. Skoda.  Is it the only car in Prague? Mine is a luxury car in Australia:  here everyone from the Police to Taxis own them.  From stately buildings, canals and bridges, to Skoda filled traffic jams moving at 120kms an hour past concrete blocks, advertising billboards, buses, trams and the usual urban detritus that surrounds an airport, was quite an aesthetic jolt,  and Reno felt every tremble, rumble and hiccup.  I watched him watch this old city of mine, could feel him wondering what we could possibly do here for two weeks.  Then we entered the old city, and Reno relaxed when  our cab lunged over the cobbles and through narrow streets to leap the curb and stop jubilantly outside our quaint, cigarette smelling hotel - Residence Leon D'Oro,  just 100 metres from where I was born, we quickly discovered - a co-incidence as, when visiting Cezsky Krumlov and Saltzburg were still on our agenda, we'd booked a different hotel.

The sun was out.  The gothic buildings gleamed.  The markets were busy.  Streets were wide enough to run a pair of horses through.  Our room was high up, overlooking the three copper embossed domes of the Church of St Gallus, with sloping terracotta tiles.  We had a kitchenette! Miracle of miracles!  The Albert supermarket was across the road, inside an art deco building with a domed, frescoed roof, where we spent two hours trying to buy milk, and butter, struggling to decipher not only language but also an alphabet that had more consonants than vowels and preferred most of them backwards.   When I asked a woman for help, beginning with "Do you speak English", she replied NO! and walked off, muttering.

We bought roll mops, gherkins, black breads, watery tomatoes, tea bags, olive oil and spices. Our fab kitchenette only supplied a kettle, some plates and table cutlery.  It cost us less than $30.  This supermarket didn't sell knives or tea towels. Finding these would be another adventure. The front desk attendant fell over himself to help us, drawing on maps, offering to get us tickets for theatres, and pointing out the street where I was born - just 100 metres away.

But I wanted to find it myself, unaided. We walked up towards Wenceslas square, not a square at all, but a wide, glorious boulevard, now lined with high end shops, like Marks & Spencer, Calazione, La Borsa, sausage sellers, donut makers, the Palace of Books, the largest commercial bookstore I've ever seen, selling JK Rowlingova, amongst a million more on three floors. It's to the left, I shouted to Reno, wanting to do it mapless ... no, it's to the right .. and there it was, my street. Small square hand carved cobbles from the 16th century; four storied houses with domed windows and dormer windows and huge doors and magnificent architecture ... and ugly graffitti and papers blowing around and clogged gutters .. Where was the Prada shop I saw 20 years ago, that explained my handbag fetish?Where were the other icons of fashion?  I clomped down the street, and picked up a cobble to take home, to tell me hopefully, stories about myself.  We walked to the other end of the street, and then!  Viola! Eccola! There they were, jostling for my attention.  Zara, Burberry, Chanel, Zegna, Max Mara, Cardin, Versace.  I yam what I yam, no doubt about it.  My genesis found, we could keep walking.  Through the back streets, finding small, smoky places to have coffee and bagels, seeing evidence of hard times for so many decades. The mood is not Venice, so filled with light.

Surprisingly, unlike Venice, my internal GPS hadn't yet been programmed. We seemed to walk in circles, but eventually we found Charles Bridge, thronging with artists and tourists, dogs on leashes and musicians, including the blind woman who sang Ave Maria with her piano accordion all those years ago.  This time she was accompanied by a young woman with an equally angelic voice - I'd hope it is her daughter.  I remember when I heard her singing that I'd hoped one day to have that played at my wedding. And so it came to pass.

Prague is a fairytale.  It's history is breathtaking. The architecture other worldly. The cobbles tell tales from the 12th century. The art deco remarkable.  The people getting friendlier, in direct proportion to their English language skills.  Add to their tangled tongues the more familiar Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Spanish and Italian - they're doing very well.

But the food is revolting.  There's no other word for it. Huge slabs of pink fat globbed onto plates with gravies and dumplings.  Choose from pigs trotters, goose legs, liver dumplings, pigs ribs, lambs brains, duck liver, pig's ears.  The smell of pig wafts from mid morning to midnight, as piglets, wrapped in alfoil, are turned on the rotisseries, and sold from numerous food stalls.  Thousands of sausages, promised with sauerkraut and tomato ketchup, tempt the palate.  But they're all made with pork. 

And everyone wolfs it down (sorry ... couldn't resist that) with gusto. So we're shopping for pasta and spinach and cheeses and SuperReno is once again doing all the cooking on our tiny little hotplate in our apartment. I reminded him that our love story began when he sank in my arms, and he is now spending more time with his arms in the sink ...  for as I write, he's washing our clothes in the bidet!

We walk for miles and hours, rugged to the eyeballs for it's so cold the air sneaks in where it can and bites.  Sunglasses stop our eyeballs from freezing.  But the blossoms are waiting for the first temperature jump to burst out and adorn the city.  Gnarled magnolias hide their tender buds, and some vivid yellow mimosa is already colouring the generally grey look of Prague.

We wandered into the grand and glorious Municipal Buildings, which has a concert hall that can hold 2000 people, and I wander into a restaurant that I immediately recognise as being the one in which the fabulous and funny "I served the King of England" was filmed.  If it didn't stink of roasting pork, we'd eat there.  The head waiter was as disdainful as the character in the film, and not the least bit impressed that I knew his restaurant was in a film.  We explored the gorgeous Hotel Paris, were almost as impressed in the Hotel Imperial, and booked ourselves into a Mozart Opera dinner in the grand ball room of the Hotel Grand.

We revisited the Don Giovanni marionette puppets that I'd been so impressed with when I was here with Liza, and Reno enjoyed it equally, although it had changed. We found a place for chicken and beer and chips, loading up on protein.  And we spent a whole day moving from one hotel room to another because the roof leaked ... just as well because the bathroom door didn't open, the shower rose was broken, the hot tap was really cold, and the cold hot. And were incredibly excited because we'd been given a suite - for fifteen minutes, unfortunately not enough time to invite Francine and Pippo to join us for some Czech frivolity.

And listen to the banging and knocking for two days as the leaking roof is repaired.  But we've booked for Beethoven at the Rudolfinium, where Davide our Venetian cellist played.

Roll it over, Beethoven.  We're excited.