After watching the Denny’s Nanerpuss commercial no less than 100 times, I had to make one. It is seen here protecting Easter eggs.

Time Capsule

A year ago I took this photo in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I ended up there as part of a fieldtrip with my P.O.V. writing class with James McBride. I’m fairly certain I don’t know what mystic truths I have to reveal, but I still love neon.

Gypsies in the Czech Republic

Katerina* lives in a two bedroom apartment with her three-week-old daughter, her sister, and her parents. Her mother has cancer. The outside of the apartment building is strewn with waste and there is no grass, but rather mud, for the many small children in the community to play on. The stove in the kitchen provides the home’s only heat. The kitchen opens up to the bedroom in the back where the family sleeps. The room has only one bed and a couple chairs upholstered with a leopard print material. They pay 3000 crowns ($150) a month to live here.

“My dream is to live alone,” she said.

When her baby started to cry she clutched her to her breast and told us that she was three weeks premature. She was tiny, but her mother looked so happy to hold her.

Katerina’s daughter was born in the hospital where many Roma women have been involuntarily sterilized over the past 15 years or so. At least 70 Roma women in the Czech Republic have publicly accused state-run hospitals, like this one, for pressuring them to sign consent forms immediately before giving birth with little to no information.

Traumatized by Techno

Photo from Flickr.com (not by me)

As soon as I left the convention center into the brisk morning air I vowed I was only going to listen to acoustic folk music for the next month straight. When my friends and I bought tickets to the I Love Techno music festival in Ghent, Belgium that happened on November 10, 2007 we had no idea that we had just committed ourselves to attending one of Europe’s largest raves where we would have to stay awake for over 36 hours.

The following is an account of one of the longest days of my life:

Jan Zrzavy’s Valley of Sorrow

At Prague’s National Gallery the rooms of paintings and sculptures stretch on and on. Each time you turn a corner you find another massive room of art that was not expected.

While wandering through the Czech symbolist, expressionist and cubist wing in this museum I thought we had reached the end of the Czech artists of these movements yet there was more to see. This room featured the paintings of Czech artist Jan Zrzavy. I was compelled by the odd nature of his paintings. Each one I could tell was painted by the same artist because similar shapes were used and each had a very dark or creepy aura to them, but there was a change in the colors from earlier works to later works from what I could see.

The one painting that drew me in the most was called The Valley of Sorrow in which a lone woman stands in the foreground of a landscape of a mountain range. While the subject matter is simple the shapes and colors that the landscape and the woman are painted emit an early avant-garde feeling.

Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial

Photo by Joe Puglisi

After wandering around Berlin all day my three travel partners and I were mentally and physically exhausted. Our bus from Prague left at midnight and dropped us off on the outer periphery of West Berlin at 5 am at the beginning of a cold November day.

Prague Monitor runs Prague Wanderer article

Prague through kaleidescope eyes (Lennon Wall article)
My picture is there with my byline.

This is cool because we just went there today to tag it. I’ll put those pictures up soon, but probably when I’m back in California in 24 hours or so.

A short time to be with you, a long time to be gone

I leave the Czech Republic in less than 48 hours.

I’m finished with finals and we put up the last issue of praguewanderer.com last night (check it out!).

Now it’s time for Christmas shopping! I just hope it doesn’t rain like it has been for the past few days.

Other things I’d like to do before going home:

Tag the Lennon Wall

Have one last smazeny syr (This probably won’t happen, but my cholesterol level is thanking me, I’m sure.)

Have one last meal at Bohemia Bagel (Scrambled eggs deluxe…mmm)

Go to the Mucha Museum

… and, of course, drink one last time legally (for the next 7 months at least)

The sun sets over Prague

The other evening I was out wandering about and saw this from Old Town looking out at the Prague Castle. I’m going to miss wandering about and just happening upon some of the most achingly beautiful sights in the world.

Here is the rest of my pictures from this moment.

St. Nicholas’s Day in Prague

I fondly remember celebrating St. Nicholas’s Day as a child at church. One of the older men in the congregation would dress up in the traditional bishop’s robes of St. Nicholas and pass out gigantic, soft gingerbread cookies to us.

The Czechs also celebrate St. Nicholas’s Day, or Mikulas in Czech, but they do it with a sinister twist.

Around 5 o’clock this evening groups of three dressed like St. Nicholas, a devil and an angel set out into the night to judge the children of the Czech Republic and decide which ones have been naughty or nice. The ones who behave get candy while the bad ones get shoved into the devil’s sack to be “taken to hell”.

Most of this revelry was centered around the Old Town Square Christmas Market which was jam-packed with Czechs and tourists alike wearing glowing devil horns or angel wings.

While the children aren’t literally taken to hell, they do get literally put in a burlap sack and dragged around the square. Terrifying, right? Some Czechs defend this tradition by saying it “builds character”. I suppose this is true.

This was simultaneously one of the funniest and most terrifying things I have ever witnessed as parents stood back and had a good laugh as their children were mentally scarred.

It made me think of all of those Santa Clauses in malls across America having to deal with screaming, crying children. If American children are scared of a jolly man there to give them gifts, they probably would have peed their pants if they saw these devils gallivanting around Prague tonight who threw explosive rocks and yelled in children’s faces all in the name of a good laugh.

While I did see many crying children here, there were also quite a few who looked like they were enjoying it. They must have been the well-behaved ones who had nothing to fear.

I saw at least five of these trifectas wandering the square and several more on the metro on my way home. A majority of them were teens. I can imagine that they were just trying to retaliate for being tormented as a small child.