Northern Germany rivals Kansas in flatness, making it a perfect site for thousands of windmills, which blink red in the night like a scene from the X-Files. Similarly odd, but also supporting the German economy, was the string of RV’s with cabin lights on signifying they were “open.” My friend Chad invited me and two Chinese colleagues to join him for a weekend in Prague, and I welcomed the liberating excursion. I let Chad explain the RV’s to our two colleagues.
A brief tangent: incongruous systems of measurement and voltage make some sense to me because of the cost of standardization, but why can’t we all agree on names for places? Is Praha too hard to say? Why does each language create a name for various countries?
Prague has an interesting mix of disturbing history, architectural class, and reserved vivacity. Communist and Nazi occupation left mental and physical scars- in Wenceslas’ Square workers replaced the marble chipped by Communist bullets with off-color material in remembrance, and Hitler’s failed plan for a museum of an extinct race left a remarkable treasury of artifacts to help us grasp the atrocities of recent history.
A brief tangent: incongruous systems of measurement and voltage make some sense to me because of the cost of standardization, but why can’t we all agree on names for places? Is Praha too hard to say? Why does each language create a name for various countries?
Prague has an interesting mix of disturbing history, architectural class, and reserved vivacity. Communist and Nazi occupation left mental and physical scars- in Wenceslas’ Square workers replaced the marble chipped by Communist bullets with off-color material in remembrance, and Hitler’s failed plan for a museum of an extinct race left a remarkable treasury of artifacts to help us grasp the atrocities of recent history.
Prague has a reputation for being a musical city (they have a giant metronome keeping rhythm for the city for Pete’s sake), but I was a bit too eager, and ended up getting duped by an overly commercial gig. Real classical musicians don’t play just the 3-5 minute popular themes of pieces (which pissed me off enough to write “pissed off” here- sorry Mom), and it took focused effort to relax and forget the fact that I had been had so I could actually enjoy it. The musicians weren’t bad, it just wasn’t heartfelt. Sort of…plastic.
But back to the metronome- I looked up the story behind it after I got home, and the explanation of the metronome is weak, but before the ‘nome, a 50 meter tall 17,000 ton marble statue of Josef Stalin stood there. The statue took 7 years to build, yet only 7 years after its unveiling, on the orders of Krushchev, the new Soviet head who denounced Stalin, it was blown up with 800 kg of explosives (what else could you possibly do with a 17,000 ton statue of Stalin? (source: http://www.radio.cz/en/article/66095)).
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