Beautiful words from a Beautiful Visitor
Just to make things perfectly clear, this Blog entry was NOT composed by either me or Ben - it is the views and expressions of one of our visitors and I must apologize to her that it took me so long to get her amazing composition up here. So, read on and enjoy...
Looking out the window, I can see faint color emerging from the the fog. I've heard this is "the city of a thousand spires..." so where are they? I crane my neck to try to see.
The day before I was introduced to Europe - the sight of people who look the same as me. They would lock eyes to begin a conversation and then, out from their mouths spilled a strange set of noises and sounds!
It's not that I've never heard another language before. Far from it. It's just that it's been indirect, around me, or maybe in a school classroom where I know if I speak English instead, everyone will understand.
Not here! Not in Eastern Europe. Maybe they know a word or two, but dive too deep into English and be ready for the blank stare of confusion.
For me most of travel is about the people I meet. I was frustrated not being able to talk to those people, not being able to find out where they come from or what their father does of if they have a boyfriend or why they hardly smile. No, our interface was limited to dobre den, prosim and a few numbers I can't even remember now.
Even without language, though, the stories were all around me. They were in the spires - which I did manage to see and fall in love with. The stories were in the walls of the castle, and in the cobble-stones streets. They whispered through the Jewish ghetto and screamed from the walls of the Pinkish Synagogue and the cemetery it opened into.
The angels and demons in the reliefs above the churches, the organs, the Astronomical Clock, even the wind had something to say.
Oh, Powder Gate, why are you called that? Why are the doors in Golden Alley so small? Where did the Hunger Wall begin and end and why?
Prague is so much more that a place to look at from above or below. It is more than the five-story club at the end of the Charles Bridge. It is a place to be in, a place of tales, of people both good and bad, of horror and delight, of pleasure and pauper.
It is like the woman, perhaps not immediately beautiful, but intricate - and mysterious. She perhaps has a crooked nose, winding ever so gently like the disjointed Prague streets. Maybe she has a faint smile and eyes that invite questions, mirroring Prague's crannies that beckon exploration. She has a sing-song voice that speaks through pursed lips...a sound that comes from deep within like the music flowing from Prague's many hidden chambers.
And both, the more you look at them, the more you study them and the more you interact with them, become ever more beautiful, simply because they are alive and bursting with character.
Looking out the window, I can see faint color emerging from the the fog. I've heard this is "the city of a thousand spires..." so where are they? I crane my neck to try to see.
The day before I was introduced to Europe - the sight of people who look the same as me. They would lock eyes to begin a conversation and then, out from their mouths spilled a strange set of noises and sounds!
It's not that I've never heard another language before. Far from it. It's just that it's been indirect, around me, or maybe in a school classroom where I know if I speak English instead, everyone will understand.
Not here! Not in Eastern Europe. Maybe they know a word or two, but dive too deep into English and be ready for the blank stare of confusion.
For me most of travel is about the people I meet. I was frustrated not being able to talk to those people, not being able to find out where they come from or what their father does of if they have a boyfriend or why they hardly smile. No, our interface was limited to dobre den, prosim and a few numbers I can't even remember now.
Even without language, though, the stories were all around me. They were in the spires - which I did manage to see and fall in love with. The stories were in the walls of the castle, and in the cobble-stones streets. They whispered through the Jewish ghetto and screamed from the walls of the Pinkish Synagogue and the cemetery it opened into.
The angels and demons in the reliefs above the churches, the organs, the Astronomical Clock, even the wind had something to say.
Oh, Powder Gate, why are you called that? Why are the doors in Golden Alley so small? Where did the Hunger Wall begin and end and why?
Prague is so much more that a place to look at from above or below. It is more than the five-story club at the end of the Charles Bridge. It is a place to be in, a place of tales, of people both good and bad, of horror and delight, of pleasure and pauper.
It is like the woman, perhaps not immediately beautiful, but intricate - and mysterious. She perhaps has a crooked nose, winding ever so gently like the disjointed Prague streets. Maybe she has a faint smile and eyes that invite questions, mirroring Prague's crannies that beckon exploration. She has a sing-song voice that speaks through pursed lips...a sound that comes from deep within like the music flowing from Prague's many hidden chambers.
And both, the more you look at them, the more you study them and the more you interact with them, become ever more beautiful, simply because they are alive and bursting with character.
posted by Pam at
5:06 AM
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