A day at the races

Horse racing, whether you win or lose, whether or not it's a Derby, is a damned fine day out.

U.S. race tracks, though, can be admittedly gritty affairs. There, one witnesses humanity at its least rational, rashly betting exactas, trifectas, perfectas, convinced of success in the face of nearly unwinnable odds. The floor and the stands end up littered with crumpled losses which thwarted bettors seem ashamed to even consign to a trash can.

When we go to the races, on the other hand, we like to think that we're making savvy analytical decisions. We carefully weigh past performance, speed, and lineage; odds that are okay but not outlandishly favorable; jockey reputation; the sprightly look of a horse as it's paraded around the paddock; and sometimes, yes sometimes, just the animal's name. "My Boy Bill" or "Runaround Sue"?  Both are sure things.

We do pretty well, considering. We stand at the railing, cheering our chosen animal on and grinning at the youngster standing next to us who's cheering for the same beast. We've been known to bet right along with a kid whom we happen to know is at his first race, because he's sure to have beginner's luck that will rub off on us. That works ... sometimes.

My favorite part: marching up to the counter to collect winnings, and being sure to return to the same cashier if it happens more than once. But cashiers rarely spare you a smile. They know the odds pretty well.

Sunday at the races in Prague isn't on every traveler's bucket list. In fact, many locals aren't even aware that it's a possible Thing To Do.

You take the train from the big city to a depot that's seen much better days and might very well be there only because of the Velka Chuchle race track. Velka Chuchle was founded in 1909, was submerged during the great Prague floods of 2013, and now flourishes every summer Sunday. During the winter, it's converted for snow sports. The Velka Chuchle station sign is clearly visible from the tracks where you arrive, but is faded almost to illegibility on the soot-covered depot facade. It seems you need to know only that you've gotten there. Apparently no one other than visitors to Velka Cuchle race track depart through the front of the no-frills station, which has only stairs to each side of the track--no ticket window, no restrooms, no benches. Most visitors seem to drive to the track anyway.

A short walk from the station, and you're immersed in the topsy-turvy world of Czech horse racing.

This Sunday was Children's Day, which only added to the festive diversity of the place. There were at least four different bounce houses, feeding of goats (they prefer grass), camel rides, and jumpy stuffed steeds on wheels, on which kids raced each other along the sidewalk. A six-foot-tall bear mascot padded about handing out goodie bags.

Aside from kids and dogs underfoot, the crowd was a zany Czech mix of stylish young clothes horses betting side by side with responsible parents and grizzled workmen in overalls. Half of them would have been at home at the seediest of U.S. greyhound tracks, while the other half appeared to be training to be seen at Ascot.

To accommodate them, three enterprising sales teams had set up little shopping stalls that were briskly selling out of flowery Derby hats, bottles of champagne, and, unaccountably, scented candles.

While we struggled to decipher the racing program, whose only recognizable bits included horses' names and numbers, and numbered races as well, we heard two young Czech gents conversing in English. We asked them for advice.

"Oh, he's the expert," one deferred. It shortly became clear that neither one of them knew much more than we did. "Er, that's the horse's name," the expert pointed out helpfully. "And those might be the odds."

When asked why they dressed so nattily for the races, they pointed out they were doing their part to elevate world perceptions of Czech racing to parallel Churchill Downs or Ascot, then listened intently as we explained the fine points of the Triple Crown.

A pleasant young woman at the Information counter was equally helpful. "Well, that's the horse's name," she began, then lapsed into bemused confusion.  We were clearly on our own here.

Eventually, the same way it happens at a U.S. racetrack, clarity emerges from just observing things--scrutinizing the boards to see which numbers change, which ones are the odds, which horses appear to be the track's own picks (three horses named across the bottom of each race's stats), the length of the races in meters, which became longer here as the day wore on--from 1200 to a mind-boggling 2400 meters on turf. The original Kentucky Derby was that long--12 furlongs, or 1.5 miles--but changed in 1896 to a more reasonable 10 furlongs, or 1.25.

At first we couldn't even see where or when the horses left the gate, it was so far away, toward the base of a range of distant mountains. But a large projection screen helped convey what was going on, as did loudspeakers that blared a running soundtrack of stirring music not that different from a hockey game's, interspersed with tense anticipatory ticking as the horses were stuffed into the gate.

That any of the races got off successfully was miraculous. Our first pick lived up to his name, which meant Thunderstorm, by trying to buck his rider off, and continued erupting in kicks and bucks right up until he was forcibly hauled into the gate. The track clearly didn't care to invest in friendly helper horses to calm these high-strung Bohemian thoroughbreds. They might have benefited from having the petting-zoo goats as friends, we figured.

But perhaps it's all part of the excitement that Czech races combine bucking broncos, horse-pulls, many female jockeys, and elaborate ride-arounds before they're finally off.

Our first bet, the nearly unprounounceable and recalcitrant Boor-zhka, ended up keeping his jockey aseat but came in third, despite the young lad next to us hollering, "Boor-zhka!! Boor-zhka!!" just as enthusiastically as we did.

Even Black Bard, chosen for name alone, didn't pay off. If his name had only been "Bart" instead, he might have.

What is that thing for?

A place like Prague will take you back in time if you give it half a chance.  It might have emerged from hardships and shortages 30 years ago, but some habits aren't lightly relinquished.

Objects from the past are a constant surprise. There's our flat's little washing machine studded with cheese graters. Bill vaguely remembered seeing something like it decades ago, when he was a GI in Europe. At least it isn't the kind with a crank and rollers instead of a spin cycle.

Many working-class Prague apartments like this one still have wash lines strung across the bathtub and from poles extending from each balcony. These aren't "nice to haves," designed to leave clothes with the linenlike scent of sunshine and crisp air. They're necessities, leftovers from the day when a clothes dryer was either unheard of or a mark of affluence. I also discovered, folded up beside the fridge for rainy days, an indoor clothes rack the like of which I haven't used since the 1970s.

Each flat's wash makes its occupant an open book. The lady upstairs likes to do her wash first thing Saturday, when it drips onto Bill as he sits on the balcony with a morning cigarette. Below us to the left is a healthy sort who runs through puddles, grows herbs, and likes fresh-smelling towels. Above us two floors is someone who either works for the city or runs after dark, wearing a reflective vest. Apartment clothes lines quickly make the privacy of a home clothes dryer seem so luxurious that I found myself asking Bill, when we noticed some upscale apartments without balconies, "I wonder where they hang their damp clothes?"

And then there's the implement that I've seen only at restorations of colonial New England homes, now open to the public as museums. Like 18th-century property owners who aimed to keep their imported oriental carpets and pine floors pristine through muddy Massachusetts winters, the housekeepers in our Prague apartment block demand boot scrapers that Americans couldn't find even at a vintage hardware supply outlet, let alone know what to do with. Our Airbnb hostess also requests that guests remove their shoes upon entering the flat.

Compared with a U.S. supermarket's hundreds of varieties of, say, waters, sodas, cookies, and cereals, there are relatively few different choices here. But take away the Czechs' hundreds of varieties of handmade breads and sausages, and there'd be hell to pay. More space is devoted to baked goods  here than to Winn-Dixie's fresh produce, deli, fish, and butcher sections put together. We don't know what half of this stuff is, but we're doing our darnedest to find out.

At the Kolbenova flea market we could not only purchase our very own cheese-grater washing machine for $110, we could take home a creative, but outrageously dangerous, means of heating the lanai on a chilly night. "You have to light it with a match," Bill said.

"Foom!" I thought.

The unlikely happiness of Prague

Czech faces and psyches still bear lines embedded in them by every hour of their history. It doesn't matter that a photo might have been taken in May 2018 at an antique auto show in downtown Prague. It could as well have been 1938 or 1948, at some point when the people were under the thumb of another power, as they were from the end of the Second World War until the Velvet Revolution.

A woman who heard us conversing in English one day at the tram stop asked if she could help us find our way. She gave us perhaps our most useful piece of advice since arriving in Prague--a real-time app that searches for the perfect tram route to a given destination. (Only once did it go so wrong as to suggest we needed to make five different connections and wouldn't be back home until past midnight.)

She admitted that the predominant Czech personality trait is pessimism and that what most older Czechs like to do best is complain. Although over 60 herself, she seemed not to be one of them.

Jan Schubert, owner of a vast antique warehouse in the old Zizkov Freight Station, volunteered that his main regret was that he could not make himself be more trusting. Having looked over his shoulder throughout the communist era, he can't shake a deep-rooted pessimism about human nature.

A local watering hole for working-class sorts tried to offer them a bit of a treat one night by presenting them with a topless young bartender. There was a larger crowd than usual, but it barely gave her a glance. More wives than usual showed up, to keep their eye on things, but not one of them cracked a smile.

A Liverpool couple, who were taking shelter at an Old Town Irish pub that stood between streams of walking tours with flags and parasols, observed, "The Czechs aren't very friendly, are they? We asked one for directions, and he said, 'I'm not a tour guide!'"

And yet, for every survivor of the communist era who can't unlearn the traumas and shortages of occupation, every cranky local who can't bear the influx of tourist kitsch that also means tourist dollars, there are happy Czech people everywhere in Prague, sometimes where you least expect to find them.

The Kolbenova flea market, the largest in Europe, if not the world, displays the full cross-section of Central European emotions--not just iron-jawed pessimism and despair, but also hopefulness that a big sale will be made today.

 

Even at Kaufland, our large local supermarket, a moment that could have been captured at a local bistro passes contentedly in a wine bar just beyond the checkout lines. These happy folks had nothing to complain about that day.

And even though Jan Schubert complained that Czech schooling is too tough and stressful for its children, this group of young gymnasts didn't seem exactly beaten into submission while enjoying a celebratory pizza meal at Don Vito's.

Another local bistro brimmed with diversity--30-somethings on dates, including one lithe young woman who put away three sliders all by herself, licking her fingers afterwards; students; an Estonian family on holiday, whose kid needed to be taught how to twirl spaghetti; a young Oriental couple; an older businessman humoring a grizzled old gent from the neighborhood; and us Americans, trying not to look like tourists.

A little night music

Last night we went to the 5-star-rated Mozart dinner--three courses interspersed with Mozart arias, duets, and short instrumental pieces (divertimentos and, of course, "A Little Night Music") in a lavishly restored underground ballroom whose parquet floors, made of nine kinds of wood, give slightly under your feet to pamper dancers there.

Before the soup course we heard the famous seduction scene from Don Giovanni and, later, pieces from Barber of Seville and The Magic Flute. The singers, from Prague opera houses, and the string quintet have to do this three times a week, so we could forgive them a few missteps and sniggering among themselves. Overall, the performance was beautiful to watch and hear, especially if you love Mozart, which Prague has ever since the composer's first visit there.

But the menu, inspired by traditional 18th-century recipes, was not itself too inspired. One can apparently eat better from a local supermarket deli (see photos) than Praguers could in the 1700s. Tasteless pea soup with mint, tough beef cheeks with mash swimming in gravy, and a dry piece of strudel. What was all the TripAdvisor fuss over the strudel about, we wondered.

Beef cheeks with mash, swimming in gravy. Everywhere else in Prague salts its food almost to excess. Here, where it was needed, no salt could be found.

Luscious lunch bought at Kaufland supermarket: multigrain bread with corn kernels, fresh tomatoes, tete de moine Swiss cheese, ham, and roast chicken

Still, it was a lovely evening with good company at our eight-person table--three charming ladies from Atlanta; Shane, a staunch solo travel girl from Sydney who hadn't slept in nearly two days and can be excused falling asleep during an especially moving duet; and a grim mother-daughter pair from Siberia, who eventually cracked a smile when the baritone offered a rose to various audience members.

There are no tourists here

No offense to the Spanish, but airline protocol in Madrid, where we changed planes en route to Prague, is a special kind of chaotic. 

Madrid announces only that your flight might be at Gate H, J, or K, but withholds until an hour before takeoff which of the three it will be. Gates H, J, and K are 6 to 12 minutes' walking distance from one another. This means that passengers cluster intently in front of whichever departure board is closest to most of the gates. At the dot of the hour before takeoff, a gate pops up on the board and the crowd streams there, where it lines up willy-nilly--wheelchairs, infants, and the lame side by side with hale and hearty sorts, every man for himself--and plows en masse past a single checkpoint and down the chute. 

One almost yearns to be boarded section by section, reprimanded for jumping place in line, herded like sheep.

Aboard the dated Iberia aircraft, flight attendants took so long to explain the menu, displaying the different options as if they were game-show prizes, that we feared we'd never eat. It was like the old days on airplanes, but without the smoking--though the ashtrays are still there. If a passenger got up to visit the loo, the cart rolled the length of the plane to let him or her pass, then rolled back to restart its agonizingly slow service.

To its credit, Iberia claims the most punctual arrival record in the industry, though nothing was said about its maintenance or safety.

So, we traveled for 24 hours, slept little, and arrived in a foreign country at 5 in the afternoon the following day, having dropped six hours somewhere along the way. Every inch that we'd traveled had carved a line in our faces and scrambled our thoughts.

"Did I give you my sunglasses? Fuck, I must've left them on the ATM,"  Bill muttered while we waited for a taxi.

I fished around in my bag for my own sunglasses and pulled out his instead.

I handed them to him and asked helpfully, for the fifth time that day, "Do you still have your passport?"

~~~~~~~~~~

Airbnb can be an intimidating, if affordable, way to stay in a foreign country. You're on your own, bereft of the comfort of a concierge available at all hours, a cleaning service, and a TV that works, albeit in Czech. On the upside, you're plunged immediately into life in a foreign land, which is exactly what we wanted.

You live in someone else's space. Even though they aren't at home, you're still surrounded by their lava lamp, toaster, tattered cookbook and recipe binder, books (here, mostly in a foreign language), hookah and weed grinder, couscous, leftover yogurts, and unfathomable espresso and washing machines. All instructions are in Czech.

All of the comforts of home, including a hookah, lava lamp, and, yes, two "Shades of Grey" books, in English, awaited us at Ivana's place. It was like being in 1970s Berkeley again. Prague is Bohemian, after all.

All of this challenges you to adapt quickly. You instantly become part of a neighborhood where everyone has their own routines, none speaks English, and there seem to be no other tourists. Not that that's a bad thing.

Our host, Ivana, had unfailingly answered all our anxious questions beforehand and left us in the hands of a young man named Jakub, a friend of hers charged with checking us in. 

Jakub was obviously in a hurry that day, punctuating his explanations with a disconcerting "Wuzh, wuzh, wuzh," which I think might be Czech for "Hmm, let's see." 

He got us in the door with a pair of stout keys and pleasantly tolerated my fumbling with them to make sure I could work them. (To prove that I couldn't, I inadvertently relocked the door five or six times, guaranteeing that I couldn't easily unlock it.)

Jakub whisked me through the operation of the infernal espresso machine, which I at once decided to abandon in favor of Nescafe, and neglected to explain an Electrolux that somehow washes clothes in a spinning metal drum covered with cheese graters. The Internet connection was good, so I later downloaded the thing's user manual. In English.

Who among us would know what to do with this device that we found in the corner of our bathroom, much less recognize it as a washing machine?

The most valuable thing Jakub provided was a Prague public transport map and directions to the station where we could purchase a one-month tram and metro pass. More on that later.

Our first adventure was a trip to the corner supermarket. On the way there through our tree-shaded new neighborhood, we learned (a) that every day is garbage day in Prague, which has recycling and trash bins on every corner; and (b) early evening is when all the neighborhood panhandlers park their bicycles at the corner store, bum cigarettes off one another, and make remarks in Czech, probably about the new people in town. 

Every day should be an adventure in a place where, soon, even we won't be tourists anymore.

At the beginning of our trip, we still look relatively refreshed. By the time we arrived, I refused to have my picture taken. Bill agreed that was best.

.

We're going back!

"Want to go to Prague?" 

I raised my head from the keyboard, blinked twice, and rustily shifted gears to emerge from the story I'd been writing.

Bill had found a bargain air fare.

He could think of no reason not to go and, just like that, had us revisiting a city we last saw three years ago, when it was grey and wintry. 

This new trip came about just as suddenly as our last, a daunting postretirement odyssey that spanned three months and six countries, also planned by the seat of our pants. When Bill decides something might be a nice idea, and I don’t hesitate, it comes to pass quickly.

This time, the trip will be entirely different, of course. Instead of a week rushing through Prague, we’ll spend a leisurely springtime month in Airbnb superhost Ivana’s cozy flat, from which we'll venture forth, unhurriedly and sanely exploring the city. (Don’t hold me to this. It might not be that sane.)

Our last trip abroad also predated my immersion in a freelance gig writing restaurant news columns and other miscellaneous bits for our local daily. 

I still can't quite believe the newspaper tolerates my cheeky pieces on how to properly eat and pronounce pho and paczki, where to find good chicken gizzards and whole-belly clams, local celebrity chefs (there aren't many), health code violations, and food trucks’ right to thrive. But I'm told that people like them.

The editor who signed me up four years ago claims to have discovered a star. He recently won a Pulitzer Prize and might know what he's talking about, but I suspect him of buttering me up to compensate for my low journalist’s pay. I remain convinced that a sharper pen can replace me in a heartbeat. That's part of what makes me so reluctant to take a breath or a vacation.

But here I am, bravely facing vacation, and rather looking forward to it.

There’s nothing like voluntarily plunging back into a place that you already know well enough to know better. Its fiendishly difficult language bears no resemblance to any Western tongue. Electrical adapters are deceptively simple but incompatible with everything we know. The national dishes are elephantine pork knuckle or beef tartare, there used to be only one laundromat (Andy's), and there are still real gypsies happy to fleece you of your koruna.

We’ve seen the great medieval astronomical clock, Charles Bridge over the Vltava (Smetana’s “The Moldau”), and Prague Castle, as well as stern Slavs and dogs so well behaved that they often trot after their owners leashless.

The first time we visited, it was all so novel that I could be left wide-eyed with delight by a writhing bagful of street performers, a keyboard player wearing a horse’s head that he bashed rhythmically on the keys for emphasis, and gypsies wanding the same giant bubbles that kids chase in tourist squares worldwide.

This time, we’ll live more day to day.

If we’d wanted, we could have rented a no-frills Airbnb “communist concrete box,” or a “retro cabin near to river Sazava,” or a looming grey “1930s house” whose description referred darkly to its owners’ “history.”

Instead, we opted for an apartment with a balcony where Bill may smoke in peace, a coffeemaker that looks much more clever than we are, and a bedroom decked out with the whimsical red-and-black prints that Czechs seem to love as much as their handmade wooden toys. Most important, it has a nearby market and tram stop, wifi and a TV—not that any of the channels will speak English.

Maybe we’ll finally learn what a divadlo and a námĕsti are. They seem to be all over the place.

Will we learn to make coffee in this monster? Stay tuned.

Our Prague apartment's bedroom, whose wall hanging has a stylized astronomical clock.

  

The faces of Prague

How to describe Prague?

I had come to believe that this city, once oppressed by the grey strictures of communism, must be gritty and grim-faced to this day. To be sure, local neighborhoods have their share of stern men in watch caps and buildings decorated with stolidly carved workers and soldiers.  But the city is also, and at once, medieval, Bohemian, crafted in Art Nouveau and cobblestones (forget your stilettos, ladies), Classical, Romantic, hilariously inexpensive, bursting with tourist traps and bizarre street performers, a delight for students and backpackers who come here to party. It has Roma, of course, dark gypsies working their hustles up and down the midnight streets, but it also has a Roma Pride festival.

One of the more creative street performers we saw, far better than the usual painted people acting as statues along tourist routes.  This horse lay sleeping on his instrument until someone on the sidewalk stepped tentatively forward. Then he sprang to life and launched into a lively, discordant tune, punctuating the score by bashing his snout on the keyboard. Another pair of performers demonstrated the gullibility of any audience when it is presented with a mystery. In the middle of a square stood a six-foot-tall, squirming bag. "I think it is a bear!" one little girl cried. "Maybe it's two bears," I replied. By the time the performers peeled their way out of the sack, what a let-down to find they were merely two young backpackers with a gimmick.

The town sells more whimsical toys, brightly colored and pop-up children's books, and marionettes than were ever dreamed of in FAO Schwartz's imagination. They are grotesque in such a playful way that few could truly frighten a child.

Prague is plastered with signs reading "Divadlo this" and "that Divadlo," so of course I had to ask what divadlo meant. That the city is so full of these signs reflects what a concert- and performance-oriented place it is. Divadlo means "theater," and any day of the week, one has the choice of countless concerts and performances to attend.


But one can also hear strains of Mozart and Dvořák on the street. We heard a Strauss orchestral piece played, entirely pizzicato, by a virtuosic seven-person string chamber orchestra in the grand Municipal House. The crowd went wild.

Every dog owner here seems to be a Whisperer who has trained his or her pet to follow leashless and sit like a statue outside whatever shop or bar the owner is visiting. These dogs are strikingly different from U.S. and (now that I've seen them) Italian canines. Not only are they either prancing, foxlike mini-Pomeranians or long-legged Viszlas, but their training regimen seems to have come from the communist era. The dogs in Italy, by contrast, are just dogs. There, one finds golden retrievers, schnauzers, min-pins, and bulldogs. They are leashed and act like dogs.  No dog statues in Italy.

Here, as in the rest of Europe that I've seen, restaurants allow a leisurely pace just slightly above a napping state. Unlike American establishments that rush one out by presenting the check as soon as a dessert fork is set down, one must ask for the check here. What must they think of us Americans for finishing our meals and paying up so quickly? I could have stayed in any number of places all day long.

In Amsterdam, we feared for our lives crossing the street. Here, motorists screech to a halt at crosswalks as if pedestrians were surrounded by force fields.

And, unlike we Puritan Americans, Europeans, male and female, have neither a problem with public nose picking--sometimes up to the first finger joint--nor with giving one's nose a good loud blast when necessary. The Seinfeld episode in which a new girlfriend dropped Jerry for the mere appearance of picking his nose, in the private space of his own car, would thoroughly baffle these earthy people.  "No pick!" Jerry protested.  "Huh?" a European would reply.

Of course there were fellow travelers and other transient workers whom we met as we moved through the city, and will remember.

The formidable Sasha, guardian of the breakfast room at Hotel Golden City-Garni. Nothing was allowed to leave the breakfast room, so I smuggled out Bill's bread and cheese stuffed into paper napkins. Nothing went quite as expected at the Hotel Golden City, whose rooms looked like turn-of-the-century classrooms.  I tried to phone Bill in the room while I was out doing laundry (see blog about  laundromat), only to learn that I must first call the owner's cell phone to be put through. It was easier just to leave a message. One pleasant girl at the front desk spoke very little English, instead nodding and smiling, "Yes," no matter what one asked. We prayed for her days off.

Our tour guide, Ladislav, who gave us a Cliff's Notes overview of all the places we want to see in more depth later, when we return. He spoke English in an earnest, robotic monotone but was also able to answer such complex questions as "Are those rain spouts in the gargoyles' mouths?" and "Whom were the people in Prague Castle defending themselves from, exactly?" (Somehow, it was the Swedes.) See how attentive and puzzled Bill appears.

Erna, from Belgium, and Janine from Normandy, retired and on holiday in Prague. In the hippie days of 1969, Janine's great adventure was taking the Greyhound across the United States, seeing the moon launch from the beach near Cape Canaveral, then watching it on TV.

Anand and Sonavi Desai from Mumbai. A marriage based, not on caste, but on love, for Anand (whose name appropriately means "happy") could not have even spoken to his wife twenty years ago. She brightened when I told her I worked for a publisher, knew of Cengage, and told us she is CEO of Indus Source Books, a press specializing in spiritual topics. She taught us--though they are so alien to our thinking that I can't remember them--the key questions one asks of a potential date in India. Fortunately, love mattered more to them.

One day, we were sitting at a sidewalk cafe when a street musician began playing "La vie en rose"
on his accordion, in front of a Lebowski shop across from us. "I bet his moustache is penciled on," I quipped. The store's staff shooed him away, but we stopped to thank and tip him for his performance. Trained as a pianist, Dominic spends the cold half of the year on the street corners of Florida and St. Croix. His moustache was penciled on.

Eventually, we somehow found ourselves at an underground neighborhood joint (pun intended) called the Woodoo Bar, where one must prove one is not polizie by being embraced by one local or another. We managed this, and Pavel proved to be one of our most poignant encounters. He had lost his father just three days earlier and couldn't bear to talk about it. So we talked of other things--travels to Bali and Scandinavia, and where one might safely find weed. "Geez, I can't make this the 'Weed Tour of the World' blog,' I whined. "Why not?" laughed Pavel. Then he proceeded to tell us how he once made herb pancakes at home, left them on the kitchen counter, and fell promptly asleep. When he awoke, he found his mom splitting her face laughing at Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and his now-deceased dad asking her what was so damn funny. One of the pancakes was missing. She never knew, and he never told her.