And now for Part Two!
The Big Babies and Freud
On the Castle side of the River in Prague is a park you can visit that has huge baby sculptures in it, designed by Czech artist David Cerny. Now when I say the sculptures are big, I am not joking: they were taller than me, and they had no faces. From memory, the lack of faces showed the artist's belief that new-born babies have no unique personality, and that they develop one over time based on surrounding stimuli. It is certainly an interesting theory, and made for quite disturbing looking art. You can also see giant babies by the same artist climbing up one of the TV towers in the city.
Also by the same artist is a sculpture of Sigmund Freud hanging by one hand from a pole suspended over a city street.
The Prague Castle
Crowning one of the hills overlooking the city is Prague Castle which is where the President is based. The Castle has a long and delightful history of conflict, including one incident involving people being thrown out the windows....
On the Castle grounds you can find a Singing Fountain, which has been designed in such a way as to be quite musical when the water tumbles into the pond underneath it. Sadly it seemed the Fountain had laryngitis the day I went, but I did see a really cool robo-mower zipping around and keeping the lawns trimmed while I was looking for it.
There is also a ceremonial guard and if you get there around lunchtime, you can see the changing of the guards. It doesn't have the same pomp and ceremony as the Buckingham Palace one seems to have but it is quite cool to watch.
The Concert
After checking out all the formal touristy attractions for a couple of days, it was off to the concert that I won tickets to on my first night at the hostel.
As I had two tickets, I found someone at the hostel to tag along, as the Aussies who helped me win were feeling, er, 'under the weather' as it were. Turns out they took part in a rather complicated drinking game that they lost quite badly.
That concert would have to rank as one of the weirdest things I have ever experienced. I knew none of the acts and the MCs were bizarre. One of the MCs was Czech and the other was British. The Czech guy spoke his native language while the British girl spoke English and they both seemed to understand the other. The result: monolingual me getting only about one-third of the whole story. But hey! it was free and kinda fun.
Oh yeah, the other really strange bit: about two hours into the concert my vision switched from analogue to hi-def digital (only way to describe it). I'm still not sure what brought it on though the guy just a few feet away working his way through a serious amount of weed could have had something to do with it...
The Market
After a day spent in Kutna Hora, which I will talk about in a separate post, I decided to spend my final day in Prague looking for a market I had been told about. It turned out to be a couple of blocks from the hostel and was run by Vietnamese people. The market was huge and EVERYTHING was counterfeit. The salespeople were really pushy and would say things like "you like this bag? I put whatever logo you want on. Converse, Adidas, you pick".
I did make a purchase but I won't tell you anymore than that, other than the fact that it took a lot of haggling over price and ended with me getting a 70% discount off the original price plus a feeling that I had been screwed as the item was probably only worth half what I paid for it...
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| John Lennon Wall |
The following morning I concluded my European sojourn and flew back to Copenhagen. But that is another post.
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