WanderLost

What is it about the name of a place that calls out to me like a siren-wail? Not like an ambulance but the spine-tingling melody of the sea maidens. Ulysses’ men lashed him to a mast but I have no such team and I follow the call, tracing my footsteps all across Europe in the form of colored pins on my wall map. The names I gather together on a string like jewels, a shining necklace that I touch over and over, like an old woman’s smoothed rosary, repeating the names to myself like a prayer. Oaxaca Honolulu Madrid Sevilla Lagos Tangiers Granada Barcelona Rome Florence Venice Vienna Salzburg Munich Geneva Lucerne Paris London Prague. Over and over, with many in between, my necklace, my travel rosary, gathering more and more in hopes of somehow finding a use for them.

Travel is more than just the big monuments, the famous places. Yes, it’s partly these things, but that’s not what hooks you; that’s not what keeps millions of people taking time off from work and school and dragging huge backpacks through train stations and airports. No, it’s the little things, the everyday. It’s walking down cobblestone streets while ivy and sweet Spanish words curl in the air above you. It’s the way the shadows play across the water and brick walls in the winding alleys of Venice. It’s ordering bread at a Parisian bakery and eating it on a bridge overlooking the Seine. When traveling, the small becomes beautiful, special. Food tastes better, the slightest tasks become great accomplishments in foreign languages. In short, we live life more fully, more immediately, when traveling. That’s what keeps us packing those bags.

People watching. The tourists I like best are the backpackers. With beat up packs and scruffy faces, they look well traveled. Potential Jack Kerouacs with jaded all-seeing eyes and poetic hearts. They sleep in hostels, wander the cobblestone streets with a practiced step, their bags perfectly contoured against their back. They’ve seen things, will see more things. Their roads stretch out before them, rich and winding. The rest of us, on our way to work, living the steady beat of daily lives, can only gaze at them with jealousy and longing, and later, sitting at our desks, think of them wandering the streets of Old Town, discovering hidden nooks and alleys in the shadows of the castle’s spires, discovering, as it were, life and what makes it worth living.

They call Prague ‘the golden claw’ because it traps you and never lets you go. Indeed, I can see how. It’s bright with the neon lights of clubs and bars and restaurants, flashy with the flags of tourism, yet it has that older, eastern influence smoldering in the background. The sky is bright and blue but also bleak in a heartbeat, punctured by spires, the bars of your cage. Its cobblestone streets swallow expats and tourists into their shadows. The idea of Prague broods in the backpacker’s mind long after he has boarded the train: the image of a castle overlooking a bridge.

The hardest part about travel, which at first I didn’t understand, is that you can’t hold onto it. It’s not something physical. You can take as many pictures and buy as many souvenirs as you want, but you’ll never fully capture it all. Some part of it will slip away. Even writing only saves a small part of it. But experiencing it’s the thing. In your mind, it’ll always be there. Even if the memories get fuzzy and rosy over the years, even if the little details disappear, it’ll always be there, stamped across your brain. It becomes a part of you, and you it, and both of you become something else entirely— something beautiful.

The other tram speeds past my window, making me think of that poem by Someone Famous about watching people on a subway and how their faces were like wet petals plastered against a branch, and I think that guy was right and that there’s no way I could say it any better.

The first night it snowed I was standing outside at the tram stop ready to get in and go home. The flakes came down and spoke of snow and nature and I stared up into the sky at them. A wind gusted and they swirled around the church spire, powdering the window ledges, brushing the stained glass, blanketing the bushes and trees growing around the holy concrete walls and I decided that I could not ride the tram, not tonight, and I started walking home, continually looking up at the white snow falling from the dark sky and I smiled and could not stop smiling because it was winter in Prague and it was snowing.

A couple entered the tram today, and with them were two wolf-dogs. The dogs were muzzled and on leashes as thick as my wrist, but they still seemed dangerous, seemed wild. Their fur was tan, tipped with black. They were lean and narrow, their tails long and bushy. They hunched their heads like predators on the hunt, their pyramid ears pricked up at every sound. Their eyes were what thrilled me most— yellow, with a perfect black pupil in the center. The kind of eyes that would look out at you from behind a bush or the shadow of a tree. The kind of eyes that would be the last thing you’d ever see.

I bought water today, two large gallon jugs of it. Each jug is equipped with a handle for easy carrying. It felt strange, walking up the modern day streets, boarding a tram, while holding a water jug on either side of me. I felt like the provincial country girl returning from the well. In a way I was— strange juxtaposition of era and purpose. In the end we can’t escape from it— our humanity.

Wenceslas Square becomes very different at night. The darkness shrouds the fancy buildings, the ancient architecture, and all you can see are shadows in the lamplight, while along both sides of the square blaze the neon signs, creating worlds of their own. Bright and eye-popping they beckon, advertise. Whispers during the day they become shouting voices at night, stealing your attention, distracting your eyes with unnatural colors. They are not for the night but against it, cutting into it, waging war against the darkening of things, yet without which they would be nothing. The square is buildings and statue by day but restaurants and clubs and cabaret (pulsings of neon suggestion) by night. Some cities are completely owned by the neon signs at night. Prague is not yet, and therefore the signs stand out more in their awkward unnaturalness, filled with that in-your-face-attitude that comes from all such trashy man-made products. What are they really? The screaming of some poor pathetic inventor to be noticed in the face of the infinite starry sky.

How to explain it? The weirdness of living modernly in an ancient-times city. America’s past howls in the winds of the prairie but Europe immobilized itself in spire and stone.

Living here, you get to look beyond the city’s general image. At first you’re a tourist, and all you notice is the stone majesty of Charles Bridge, and the dazzle of lights from Wenceslas Square. But then you blink and look around and see so much more— like how the Praguians take their dogs with them everywhere, and how the bakery sells fresh rolls out the back at 2 am. You’ll find yourself picking up small phrases, wishing “dobry den” to the grocer and throwing out a casual “naschla” when leaving a group of friends.

Overall the Czech Republic, I like it. Once you get over the initialities— the Praguians’ gruff exteriors, the devil-may-care attitudes about official formalities— it can be quite nice. That is, you can come to a truce with it, and the two of you can get along quite well, and enjoy each other. Strange sights become familiar and welcome. Statues and marvelously facaded buildings become friends to greet on your daily trek to work. The hieroglyphic names of tram and metro stops transition from nonsense (Masarykovo Namesti, Bila Labut) to meanings utilitarian and beautiful (train station, white swan).

I like it best when I’m walking down the street, especially some non-central everyday street where people actually live and work because it’s where I most belong in that just looking at me I might be Czech or European or anybody instead of my confused non-tourist American self, citizen-in-limbo by choice but not really.

Walk around Old Town Prague. Walk around Prague, through the shadows of the tall buildings, the fancy buildings of color, brick and stone. Walk through the shadows cast by stone angels, smiling cherubs. Hear the Vltava river flowing by. See the seagulls rise and fall above it, their wings flashing in the light like sparkling confetti. Tourists walking by in expensive coats, snapping pictures. Watch them march across the bridge, endless procession of hands, feet, scarves, wallets. Baby strollers. Small poodle dogs on leashes. The crunch of sandy grit underfoot, the clatter of cobblestone. Sunlight glancing off surfaces into eyes. Grafitti on the park benches. Signs advertising ‘Souvenirs from Prague’ as though Prague were something you could buy and put in your pocket. Imagine the disappointment when, returning home, you unwrap it and find it’s just a thing, like all other things, and can’t capture the dark spires or sculpted facades or the motor of the boats going by, the call of the captains to the tourists, the flapping of 30 pigeons’ wings, the sound of a coin falling to the pavement. Prague at night is a lighted city. Small alleys turn into squares. Lampposts and sometimes neon signs. It’s like no matter where you are, or when, the city knows you’re looking at it.

It’s 12:20 of a Friday afternoon and I am at the train station in Prague waiting in line to buy my ticket to Dresden. My three months of allowed tourism is up tomorrow, so I’m heading over the border and back to get my passport stamped so I can walk the streets without fear of deportation. The train I want leaves in ten minutes but the line isn’t moving, and I’m getting antsy. The lady at the front of the line is talking and talking in Czech to the woman behind the glass, apparently asking about every train ever scheduled to leave Prague in the history of trains, and the rest of us behind her tap our feet and roll our eyes at the clock, its hands marching relentlessly onwards.
Finally I switch to another line and buy my ticket just in time, clutching it in my hands and walking briskly through the station. I make it up the stairs and onto the platform and I have a flashback to my last European train trip, how we waited on the platforms in the snowy cold of Germany and Switzerland, packs on our backs, train schedules in our hands. It’s not snowing now and I get on the train and have five glorious minutes before it leaves the station.
The city of Prague rolls gently past my window, then outer Prague, and then suddenly it’s all trees and bushes and little Czech towns. The houses are mostly small, some even one-room tiny in a row on the hillside. Most are white or cream colored with that Praguian style red tile roof, although occasional walls of bright green or orange break the monotony. Stone and brick show through the cracked and peeling whitewash. Muddy yards with patches of soggy grass. Sad yellow dog lying on a doorstep. Black chickens beside a plastic swimming pool. Smoke rising from the chimney. Each town has its own small stone church— the wide arch, single spire, rows of narrow windows.
The train follows the river the whole way, almost along the same level. Petite houses nestle between the river and the rocky sides of the rising hills. Farther on, the hills get rockier and more dramatic, yet still the little colored houses clustering in the cracks and folds.
We finally leave the river with its toy-like houses and enter the city. Layers upon layers of buildings, railroad tracks, poles, wires. Leaving the train station, I see an interesting-looking dome in the near distance and head towards it. On the way I run a gauntlet of outlet shops, growing bigger and bigger, straining the flow of humanity from the train station— retaining the money and letting the people trickle out at the end, wide-eyed and dazed, arms filled with shopping bags.
The first dome is a church, and next to it an impressive government building. More spires loom in the distance and I wend my way towards them, bypassing strange landmarks such as a statue of a man holding grapes while hugging a mule, and a fountain depicting a young man attempting to pick up several alarmed-looking geese.
Crossing the road, I come to another square. At the end of it is the Frauenkirche, a church completely bombed to rubble during the war. It has since been rebuilt. Its facade is a light tan color, speckled with darker bricks— originals dug from the ruins and painstakingly put back in their original places. A nearby construction crane looms in the background. The square is quiet, nearly empty. A woman in a red coat stands with her back to me, watching one man working alone, placing cobblestones. The clink clink of his efforts echo across the square.
Inside the church is beautiful, overwhelmingly white and pure. The silver pipes of the organ gleam, surrounded by twisting white and gold designs. On one side, rows of candles flicker, and tourists pour in a steady stream to light more. I join them, then walk back out into the square.
Continuing onward, I walk up some stairs and am suddenly confronted by the waterfront. Amazing old buildings stretch along the waterfront behind me. Nearby is the bridge, and above it, a large swarm of black birds. Like a whirlwind of black leaves they rise, whirl and dive together, twisting gracefully as though every move has been consciously choreographed. Fascinating. Eerie. The ghosts of Dresden above the grave of bombed-out ruins now rebuilt. Doesn’t matter that there are cranes in the sky; memory goes deep.
I walk along the waterfront, across the bridge and back again, taking photos. The sky is overcast above me, steel gray, and the birds still glide in it, giving an occasional caw. A man sits in a tunnel archway playing the accordion— not a lively tune, but hopeful. I toss some money in his case because his song matches my mood and keep on walking, soaking up the dark grandeur of the stone buildings around me.
At last it’s time to catch my train, and the procession of buildings and sights reverses as I turn my feet back towards the station. It’s getting dark, with shadows starting to stretch across the squares. Then I’m sitting in the train, watching Dresden slowly trickle by my window, the buildings getting shorter and scarcer, until we are alongside the river once again. It quickly grows too dark to see and I hurtle along in the night towards the bright city of Prague, yet the dark towers of Dresden rear up in my mind’s eye, and I can almost hear the whisper of wings and a faint caw as a slight chill of memory runs down my spine.

Poem: Frauenkirche

The church of Dresden rises again
against the cloudy sky,
crossed by a construction crane.
A woman in a red coat
stands with her back to me.
Clink clink echoes across the empty square,
the sound of one man working.

Well I’ve finally taken the step and gotten myself a blog. I’ll do my best to keep it updated on all my various experiences and thoughts about my experiences while I’m wandering around abroad. My influences in this arena include John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac. Just so you know. Enjoy!