Groggy notes written after waking from a nap, and a couple of photos of Prague, too..
I woke from my nap two hours ago and I’m still in that groggy stupefied state – so sleepy and so tired. My afternoon of last minutes Prague sight-seeing was interrupted by a text from Matt; he had headed home earlier and we forgot to do the key exchange. So back up the hill I went. For a burrito, a sweet Jaritos soda and a nap. You can tell I was in Prague, right? It wasn’t a bad end to the afternoon, but it involved a little less Prague than I would have liked.
And so I spent the rest of the afternoon lounging around our apartment (a comfortable little number in Praha 3, if anyone is looking for a recommendation I can send you the airbnb listing) – reading, snacking, internet browsing, future wondering. So achieving little, really.
The first time I really heard of Prague was when my cousin visited there, gifting a pair of earrings to me in the process. It sounded so exotic to me, so European. And we finally went. And there were so many people! There’s that travelling in August thing again. Never a good idea. And that wave of heat has still been sticking around.
So the old city was so hot and so crowded. And yet we still went out in the heat of Thursday to do one of those Sandemans three hour walking tours. And all those tour groups (ours included) kept having to squeeze past each other to reach such and such monument or sight, or such and such piece of shade. It’s around this point that a city starts to stop looking like a city and more like something of an amusement park. And the buildings are so beautiful and so ornate that they only add to this illusion, they could almost be unreal.
Often, halfway through these longer trips that we sometimes take, I start to wonder why I am so keen to travel, on the idea of travel. That conversation in my head starts to revolve around the same points, of whether this is all just one long holiday – nothing more enlightening or worldview expanding about it. Just another form of mass consumption, of pleasure seeking and leisure.
And, actually, on this trip we have both been working, so these thoughts are a little more unnecessary than usual. Even my holiday reading is an Italian book, so I’m still studying alongside. I would likely write more here, but we’re travelling with only Matt’s computer and he needs that for real work. So.
On the walking tour, our guide was discussing different perceptions of history around the world – what 1000 years looks like to someone from New Zealand, compared to someone from Europe, compared to someone from Egypt. This haphazard European history lesson we have been putting ourselves through the past two years has been one of the many valuable things i have got our of our regular travel. (That, and the food.) I know far more about empires, kingdoms and wars than I ever used to. It could have been learned through books, but, if anything, any desire to read those history books comes from visiting certain places. And of course, all this can only help next time I play Trivial Pursuit against my dad. So it’s good for something!
Molto Molto 