Read part 1
In the morning I wake up from troubled sleep, and I feel like I'm clinging to a spiderweb. If I was back home in Canada, I would've been getting ready for bed, but here in Prague, on the other side of the world, I have to do my job in spite of the dizzy spell of jet lag that has got a hold of me.
The room is spartan in design, right out of a Bahaus functional dream. Appropriate for a place with such a long history in art and graphics design. It'll be my home for about five days.
The day is a surreal dream of voices, technology, theories that all go by in the hum of interaction. I feel as if I’m moving through a liquid medium.
Prague is a maze of labyrinthine streets and twisting alleys, its architecture stretching so far back in time that, as someone born in the New World, I cannot even begin to fathom. I can only stare in awe at the complex history and layers of cultural transformation underpinning their foundation.
I remember standing one night on a corner and having that sense of being in an old spy movie. Deja vu. Another lifetime perhaps. Prague hides its shadowy secrets. Its streets narrow, winding among the whispered enigmas, the towering buildings and spires, which served as beacons for the counter-culture, are now artifacts of a bygone era.
Artists, writers, and intellectuals of all colors have been drawn to this city. It is the cultural capital of Bohemianism, the humanist movement of the late 19th and early 20th century that placed the loci of creativity on its nonconformists. On the eccentrics who raised their brushes and splashed their avant-garde flourishes. On the mad ones who feverishly wrote in secret notebooks their prophetic manifestos on literary theory and criticism. Who dared say no to neo-classical orthodoxy and explored new oceans of visionary style.
I can’t help but notice that people in Prague are reserved. Back in Vancouver, you enter a store and restaurants, and you’re usually greeted as if you’re an old friend. Some chit-chat or small talk is common. In Prague, people do their work without too much fanfare or overt expressions of emotion. I feel a somber disposition. In restaurants, I notice that they speak in hushed tones, not in the loud laughing boisterous manner that I’m used to back home. They even lean close to each other as if trying not to be overheard. It gives me a sense of unease, as if some weird political mayhem is about to break out. But I enjoy my meals and after a while, I relax and realize that they’re a measured gentle people with a social wisdom learned through the ages.
I look at the buildings and admire the ancient architecture. It intrigues me how close they are to each other, and for a moment the grand designs seem like a thin veneer hiding deeper secrets.
Lost in a haze, I walk on along the enigmatic and inscrutable city of jet-lag dreams, and a sense of cultural alienation washes over me. I miss the rain.
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