In 48 hours, I’ll be en route to Prague. Including a brief layover in Frankfurt, it’ll be 13 hours before I’ll emerge from the airport with my heart stuck in my throat.
Since I was 18, I’ve wanted to see Prague. Others swooned about Paris, but it was always Prague for me. Prague, Edinburgh, Dublin, Essouira – the cities I most want to see. Period.
To say I’m anxious and excited is an understatement.
There is much to do now, though. Time to clean house and begin unpacking and packing. With a huge living area here, I finally have an easy place to lay out everything I own and weed objectively through things. Whilst drinking wine, of course. A leaner, meaner duffle bag shall emerge!
If you think a nomad gets cynical about travel after doing it all the time, no. I’m like a kid the night before the night before Christmas. I’m so giddy I might just pop.
Photo by Radovan Císař, PraguePhotoTour.EU.
“Old Prague was a story-book city caked in grime: ancient, soot-blackened. History lived in every detail: in the deerstalker rooftops and the blue-sparking trams. He wandered the streets in disbelief, photographing everything, images from Kafka crowding into his head. With the turn of every corner it came back to him: the special frisson you get behind enemy lines.”
― Philip Sington, Zoia’s Gold“The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century—or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks. Thugs wore Mozart wigs and pushed chamber music on street corners, and marionettes hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind velvet.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone
Creative commons.
Steff – is the header image photo for sale? I love it. Do you sell the digital photo, or how does it work?
D’oh. Just saw it is Creative Commons. I wondered how you got it since your re not there yet! Blonde moment If you get a similar shot, let me know. The dusky blue, the street lamps, the old, old church (?) dome … captivates me.