Cafe Hopping

My new routine is to get out of the house in the mornings and go cafe hopping on the days that I don’t have yoga. Although the 35-minute bus to get to the outermost reaches of Prague is a drag, I am pretty used to it by now, so it isn’t too much of a hindrance. Once at the bus stop in Prague, called Zlicin, I have three options.

Option 1: I can take a free five-minute bus across the highway to the Avion shopping mall with its huge Tesco (sort of like a Super Target, I think) and the monster Ikea which I got lost in once and have been too frightened to venture into since. There is a beautiful Starbucks between Tesco and Ikea, so sometimes I like to go sit there for two or three hours. It is shaped like a circle with windows for walls and really nice chairs all along the edges. What do I do for those hours? News Flash--Starbucks in Prague have free wireless internet! This is very important, as it was in search of the internet that I began my cafe adventures. The internet at the house was screwy for about two weeks so it forced me on the 7:30 AM bus into Prague.

Option 2: A new Starbucks just opened up in the Metropole shopping extravaganza mall, which is a three-minute walk from the bus stop. There are nice stores there so sometimes I window shop for a bit before settling down. I don’t like this Starbucks as much as the Avion one because it is smack dab in the center of the mall so it isn’t as peaceful, but it has the advantage of being so close to the bus stop. I don’t have to worry about catching the bus from Avion to Zlicin so that I can catch my bus from Zlicin to the village.

Option 3: Hop on the metro from the bus stop and ride into the city center. About thirty minutes, but there are some lovely places where I can plop for several hours and have some quiet reading/internet/GRE subject test studying/graduate school applications filling out/Skype time. My favorite Starbucks in Prague (I could be a commercial for them. I did not go to Starbucks very often in America; usually I just hit the drive-through at the Elon exit halfway between Duke and home) but Starbucks is such a nice touch of home. Add the free wireless, a drink card that gives you any free drink, any size, after you have bought four, and the luxurious interiors...hard to resist.) Let’s rejoin that discarded phrase at the beginning and finish the poor thing:...in Prague is the Malostranska one at the foot of the Prague Castle hill. It is in a very old building with thick walls and arches, and it has lots of comfortable seating and windows so you can watch the trams pull up. But the one in Wenceslas Square has a beautiful upstairs (see picture) and the Palladium’s Starbucks are nice if you want something to go.

I tend to avoid the Old Town Square one since it is very touristy and busy. Not a good place to sprawl for hours.

If I am not in the mood for a bit of America, though that is indeed rare, I go to Tretter’s Cafe on the top floor of the Palladium shopping center. It is all white wainscoting and tables and relaxed, almost cabana-like seats. Nice selection of tea and free wireless. Julie recommended it to me. Although the waitresses are not super friendly, it is a nice place where you can look down and watch the shoppers stroll the four floors below.

Marks and Spencers! The one in Wenceslas Square has a newly opened cafe on the top floor. Behind the food (the labels are in English and they have British-y food like porridge and scones! I feel like I am in London!) is a modern, sleek cafe with tasty baked goods and teas and coffees.

I like CoffeeHeaven, too. It is basically a European Starbucks. Their drinks are about ten crowns, or 50 cents, cheaper than Starbucks. The baristas speak English, and they have almost the exact same stuff as Starbucks. I don't like the interiors as much, though. And although they apparently have wireless internet, I have not been able to connect.

What happened to the cukrarna in the village? For one thing, I don’t like their coffee—instant cappuccinos are not as tasty as what I can make myself at home. More importantly, the people aren’t very cheerful with me. I kept hoping they would warm up to me and get used to my face. But when I am there I feel like that face has “American” tattooed on the forehead, and “Stranger” and “Doesn’t Speak Czech” across the cheeks. So I don’t go there very often anymore. And no internet.

Although I may not be able to tell you much about Kafka or the Astronomical Clock, if you need to find a Starbucks or other pleasant resting stop, I am your gal. As I was writing this (in Starbucks, natch) a woman came up to me and asked if my internet was working. Unfortunately, I am having trouble connecting this morning, and so was she. She asked me if I knew of any other wireless hot spots in the city, and I shocked myself by rattling off all the different places she could go. I am half-proud of my knowledge, but also aware that cafe hopping does not always qualify as an enriching cultural experience, and that I must continue to explore the country, not just the cafes. But for now I am pretty happy with my free grande latte (four drinks, baby!) and my morning hours of freedom.

Movie of the Week XI

Top Hat (1935)

I am in the city with the Fred and Ginger Dancing House, so I thought it was time for a Fred and Ginger movie.

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire made ten movies together, nine at RKO studios in the 1930s and a final film, The Barkleys of Broadway, at MGM in 1949. I have picked Top Hat since it is my favorite. Though, honestly, it is hard to keep their movies straight. Besides Flying Down to Rio (1933) in which the pair are not the featured couple and only appear infrequently, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), a biopic about the famous dance team, and The Barkleys of Broadway, their movies blend together into a series of fantastic, almost impossibly wonderful dances held together by silly, redundant plots. I am extremely gullible and ready to be entertained, so I will go a long way with a movie, but the Astaire-Rogers films can stretch even my loose limits. The films are filled with Shakespearean mistaken identities and simple misunderstandings that could be cleared up quite easily if people would just talk to each other for a few seconds. But instead they run around, or dance around, in confused love or mistaken anger. The confusion is certainly comical and the anger is a very light, cheerful type, but still. It frustrates me sometimes.

Now that I have said that, let me modify my criticism. Audiences then did not watch the movies for the plot, and audiences now don't either. We watch them for the dancing and the costumes and the sets. The plot is there just to get Fred and Ginger in beautiful clothes on a beautiful dance floor so they can do their beautiful thing. (It is easier for me to keep track of the movies by the dances in each one and the dresses Ginger wears than by the plots.)

The dances are magical--even if you don't like dancing you will probably still enjoy watching these two dance. They make it look effortless and romantic and the dances always tell a story. It is either a story of dislike turning into like (early in the movies), or like into love (a little later), then disappointment and sadness that the love cannot be (even later), and finally celebrating the impossible love becoming possible (the end.) Ginger Rogers is especially brilliant at using the dance to express emotion and forward the narrative. Someone said that women dreamed of dancing with Fred Astaire because Ginger Rogers made it look like the most thrilling and wonderful thing ever. That is very true.

Fred Astaire is well known for being a perfectionist who would rehearse and rehearse and then shoot take after take until he was satisfied. There are stories of Rogers' feet bleeding inside her dancing shoes and the costume people scrambling to find another pair after the hours and hours of dancing. Most of their dances are filmed in just a few shots; there are no quick edits as in most modern films. So they might dance without a cut for two or three or four minutes. Which means that the first 3 minutes and thirty seconds might be perfect but then they make a tiny mistake and have to start all over again. No wonder Ginger's feet bled...

Anyway, point is, the dancing is fabulous.

So why did I choose Top Hat? I think it is fun. Silly but fun. Fred, who plays a professional dancer (shock) named Jerry, dances in his hotel room at night and his tapping wakes up Ginger, a model named Dale, who is in the room below. She fusses at him and he falls in love. Astaire and Rogers' perennial sidekicks, Edward Everett Horton and Helen Broderick, play a married couple, the Hardwicks. Mr. Hardwick is producing Jerry's show, and Mrs. Hardwick is a friend of Dale's. (Though Dale and Jerry are strangers, hmmm....)Well, Dale mistakes Jerry for Mr. Hardwick, and so she is disgusted by Jerry's persistent attempts to win her. Jerry can't understand why Dale is so hostile. To add to everything else, Mrs. Hardwick keeps encouraging Dale to spend time with Jerry, so Dale thinks that Mrs. Hardwick is trying to push Dale into an affair with her husband! Confused yet? Because I haven't even gotten into the side story of Dale and her Italian fashion designer friend, Beddini. He pays Dale to wear his gowns to fancy hotels and dinners. Their relationship borders on an indecent sort of "kept woman" arrangement but I guess it is okay. Also, Beddini loves Dale. Somehow everyone ends up in Venice. Here they all are. The Hardwicks, their comedic butler, Eric Blore (who is also in loads of these movies), Dale, Jerry, and Beddini.

The dances and songs (Irving Berlin) in this one are especially great, and I love the end of the movie because it takes place on the Lido in Venice. Although it is a highly stylized Venice that looks nothing like the Lido. But they spend the last 15 or so minutes of the movie in a huge production number dance sequence called "The Piccolino" twirling about this crazy stage. (The next images are from the trailer.)

The look of the film is very typical for the Astaire-Rogers movies and 1930s musicals in general. Highly stylized with no attempt at reproducing reality. Huge, shiny white monsters of sets (known as the "Big White Set" since they were so ubiquitous) with staircases going nowhere and crazy designs on the floor with lots of mirrors and other art deco-y touches.

See what I mean?

Now I think we are more obsessed with movies reproducing reality. We want our historical films to be "accurate," or at least to be told that someone did a little research, and we like special effects to look "real." There is no attempt in these movies to be "real." People don't dance and sing like Fred and Ginger in real life, and there aren't places like the places they inhabit in real life. And that is part of what makes the movies magical. And also a little dated. There, I said it. I can't help comparing the Astaire-Rogers movies with the comedies of the same decade that I am so fond of. Those movies, many of which I have written about on this blog, seem fresh, quick, clever, sharp, and vibrant so many decades later. They seem so modern. I don't think the same can be said for Top Hat and the others, though.

Famous scene: the "Cheek to Cheek" dance. It is famous for a few reasons. The song is famous (so many of today's standards appeared in these movies), the dance is famous, and the dress is famous.

Ginger Rogers reportedly requested a pale blue dress all covered in ostrich feathers. She got it.

But as soon as they started dancing the feathers started flying. They tried take after take but the feathers shot out of the dress every time Ginger moved, and stuck to Fred's tuxedo and covered the floor. Fred said of the dress and the dancing, "It was like a chicken being attacked by a coyote." Ginger was upset, Fred was upset, the crew was upset. Finally, every single feather was re-sown and reinforced so that the next day they could shoot the dance without it looking like a chicken massacre. Though if you watch closely you can see the odd feather floating off the dress.

Fred Astaire nicknamed Ginger Rogers "Feathers," after this incident, and in Easter Parade (1948) Judy Garland and Fred Astaire parody the episode--Garland wears a dress trimmed in ostrich feathers for a performance. The feathers fly off and get into Astaire's mouth and in his face until he can barely see or dance.

Isn't Fred Astaire funny looking? There is a possibly apocryphal story about Fred Astaire's first screen test in Hollywood. The producer's conclusion was something like this: "Can't sing. Can't act. Going Bald. Can dance a little." I hope it is true, and if it isn't it still makes for a great story.

Another possibly true tidbit: Katharine Hepburn said about Fred and Ginger: "He gives her class, and she gives him sex." Ha. He wasn't the hunky dancer like Gene Kelly or Gower Champion, or Tommy Rall, my fave. But what talent! Pretty amazing.

I am a big fan of Ginger. One of my favorite all-time quotes is "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels." Perfect. Although she is best known for being one of the Astaire-Rogers team, she was an excellent actress who appeared in loads of non-dancing movies.

I like Stage Door (1937), Bachelor Mother (1939), Kitty Foyle (1940), Roxie Hart (1942) (a version of Chicago), and the silly The Major and the Minor (1942) and Monkey Business (1952) with Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe. Rogers made 73 movies, and won the Best Actress Oscar for Kitty Foyle (1940). So dancing with Astaire was just a small part of her career, really.

There is so much to say about Fred and Ginger and their movies! I feel like I have just scratched the surface...A nice thing about their movies is that they are all available on DVD and there are some excellent boxed sets out there with all of their films together. So if you are interested...

Kutna Hora

On Saturday it was off to Kutna Hora, a town about an hour by train to the east of Prague. It is a super-old city--we're talking 10th century here--and it was once a rival of Prague in terms of wealth and importance. Kutna Hora's power came from its silver mines and its prime position for trading in Europe. But the Hussite wars devastated the city. Unlike Tabor, this was not a Hussite town and it was unfortunately continually attacked by the Hussites, specifically the Taborites (these wars are much more fascinating than I thought!). Jan Zizka, the one-eyed leader who led the Taborites and the Hussites, conquered Kutna Hora briefly in 1420 and brokered an uneasy peace. But fighting broke out again, and the Holy Roman Emperor, who had made Kutna Hora his base for the war, had the town burned so that the Hussites couldn't take it. Sort of like if Lee had burned Atlanta before Sherman could get to it...oh the things we do to each other. (there is a point to this historical wandering, I promise.) The town recovered after the wars but in 1546 the best silver mine flooded, the plague loved to sweep in and kill everyone, and the Thirty Years War in the 17th century knocked off the people that the plague missed. Oh, and a huge fire destroyed the city in 1770. And then the mines stopped producing. Not a happy history.

Kutna Hora saw an awful lot of death and destruction. Where did they bury everybody? There were so many bodies to dispose of that the graveyard was soon totally full. So they started digging up the older corpses (skeletons at this point) to make room for the new dead people. They stacked the bones around the church, which came to be called the Sedlec ossuary, and then inside the church, until 1870 when a Czech wood carver had an idea. He would take the bones and use them as decorations inside the church. I think he must have been a little strange. The results of his efforts certainly are, ahem, unique. Let's get to it. Here is the chandelier, made of human bones, that hangs in the center of the Bone Church.

To give you an idea of the scale:The chandelier is surrounded by four obelisk things with skulls and leg? bones. At the top of each obelisk is an angel clutching a skull. I am really not sure what to say about this.

Bones hang like fringe from the ceiling...

and decorate the walls...

It was a little like being on the set of a pirate movie, or maybe a horror movie. But it is a church and they are real bones, real people. In each corner of the church are huge piles of bones in the shape of bells. I couldn't tell that they were supposed to be bells. I was distracted by the thousands of skulls.

Should I smile? It doesn't feel right to smile...

This nifty shield is made of, yes, human bones. It is in front of one of the bells. They estimate that the bones of about 40,000 people are in this ossuary. Told you the plague and wars and fire hit the town hard.

Naturally, the wood carver who designed all this signed his name and the date in bones.

I was disturbed by this church. I think a lot of it is my American avoidance of mortality being suddenly confronted by nameless bones arranged in a macabre, almost mocking design. I am used to having death hidden, and when it does pop up it is clean and neat and sanitized. I suppose one can consider the ossuary as being a respectful way of dealing with all the bones. I tried to think of it like that. But all the tourists with their cameras (including myself, obviously) gave the church sort of a dark Disney World feeling. It is such a curiosity that it is hard to feel terribly respectful or contemplative. It is definitely an interesting place and I am glad that I saw it, but there are so many bones and no one has any idea who they were. It is a fine line between respect for these human beings and gross awe at the human bone bells....

We walked into the main part of the town, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, by the way. Here is the Church of Saint Barbara and the walkway which is purposefully similar to the Charles Bridge in Prague.

A shot from the other direction, which is not straight into the sun. So you can actually see more than dark shapes. It is a cute little town.

This is a lion on one of the groups of statues on the walkway. I liked it because it looks as though the lion went to Burger King and got a paper crown. Do they give those out anymore?

Me and Ondine on the walkway.

We saw three weddings happening around the church.

And here is the church. They began building it in 1388. It was completed in 1905. So not the quickest construction. The church was supposed to be twice as large, but with the wars and the silver mines flooding and the plague they had to curtail the construction. I took loads of pictures for my buddy Norris. He likes cathedrals.

There are double arched flying buttresses and eight radial chapels. I liked the gargoyles particularly.

You approach the church from the side, but here is the front. Not as imposing as the rest of it. The front is still undergoing restoration. The entire church was being restored from 2002-2008, and it was closed for a lot of that time. But, fortunately for us, now it is fixed and open.

I like the curvy staircase.

Here is the inside. It was not as big as I was expecting. The flying buttresses can be deceiving.

The church has a cream vaulted ceiling with shields and coats of arms painted on it. It is interesting to me how one's eyes are drawn upwards in Gothic churches like this, to the glory of God and heaven and all of that, yet signs of earthly power are placed at the very top. Paradox.

The stained glass windows date from the early 20th century. As I mentioned, the church wasn't completed until 1905. The windows have a pleasing art nouveau style and lovely colors. It is a little strange to find such "modern" windows in such an old, old church. But I like it. Most of the windows had names of businesses like banks on the bottom, which must have sponsored the particular window. Love the sunflowers in this one.

Beautiful angels and morning glories. Unlike the more traditional stained glass windows, the designs did not fit neatly into the stone tracery. They seemed to flow regardless of the sculpture.

Nice light effects on an actual 16th century wall painting in one of the side chapels. There were some cool old paintings on the walls. I like this one of the false door and windowsI have never seen confessionals like this.

Or candlesticks, for that matter.

Ondine and I pointing at the map. Thanks again, Julie, for the pictures of us! And aren't you proud and perhaps shocked--I actually found the church on the map and knew that I was inside of it! I am getting better with my sense of direction.

We needed some ice cream after our day of churches. And one place had a big cone out front. So you can guess what happened...

It's contagious!We headed back to the train station where a very long train carrying wrapped up Audis rolled in and stopped.

At the train station I met a couple from Charlottesville, VA who were staying in Prague and had ventured out of the city for a day trip to Kutna Hora. It is always nice to see and talk to other Americans, and their suth-un accents were delightful to my ears. Julie and Ondine thought the accents were pretty funny. I told them they should hear some of my family...

My parents sent me some pictures from a Harvey Girls exhibition at the Grand Canyon. See the Movie of the Week X. The movie does a good job of reproducing their actual uniforms! Thanks to my mother and father and Virginia for their Harvey Girls information.