Københvn (2)

The chronicle of my Copenhagen tales continues.

12:45pm, July 29th:
I made my own bike tour for free!

Just a moment. Before I expand on this, it must be said that four middle-aged German women just passed, all wearing identical white capris. What’s more, all but one wore matching black shirts. The fourth woman, who donned a hot pink shirt vest, didn’t get the second memo, I believe.

Regarding the DIY tour: geographical skills + + +
I made it all over the place, biking like a Dane on one of the city bikes, courtesy of Copenhagen’s bike share program. You put 20 crowns, which is approximately 2,70 Euro into the slot, unlock the bike and proceed to gallivant around on two wheels. The deposit is returned if you find one of the racks elsewhere and drop off the bike. On the handlebars is a map of the city (mine was ripped off, but I wasn’t dissuaded in the least) and the seats are rather cushy and comfortable. The bikes are designed for travelers, as Copenhageners statistically own two bikes each. The share program is encouraging and more widespread than in Barcelona, or in most cities, for that matter!


After dropping off the bike and walking around a bit, I stepped into Overgaden, a small gallery filled with contemporary Danish artists’ work. I liked the feel of it a great deal and actually got a lot more substance out of an essay one artist wrote about his work than his actual creation of stacked soda cans. Articulate man, weird execution. I then strolled over to Café Wilder, a place I’d highly and emphatically recommend. It has the best atmosphere and great, inexpensive organic food. Everything tasted so fresh and crisp, but as I am not a food critic, I’ll trail off here. My legs, especially my upper thighs, are unbelievably sore from the night of dancing and few hours on the bicycle. This is the good kind of pain, though; the kind that reminds you that you are living. Oh, another note about the café: they play music from Jack Johnson’s first album, which is always remarkably effective in putting me at ease. Two other minor observations were that of a father teaching his toddler the names of different draft beers and the conclusion that Danish sounds like Simlish mixed with French and Dutch.

I became so enthralled in an exhibit at Charlottenborg, the contemporary art museum, that they had to usher me out at closing. Lonely Planet lied and claimed the hours went until 7pm on Wednesdays, but I was promised that I could return tomorrow, free of charge. Now I am in Kongens Have, or the King’s Gardens, relaxing after the overwhelming nature of Christiania and a great deal of walking. I think I’ll nap and mellow out with a Radiolab podcast before heading back to Nørrebro to find a small restaurant that serves veggie burgers. I’ve an irrationally powerful craving for one right now, and the walnuts and raisins do not suffice. A short note on Christiania: no photos are allowed to be taken there, which perhaps lets it retain a bit of its magic, but I will say that it’s a combination of Saturday Market, a modernized hippie commune and the Sunnyside neighborhood in Portland. It didn’t feel like Santa Cruz, oddly enough. I bought a turquoise ring and abruptly stopped myself while admiring the pattern on a pair of those wretched bohemian balloon pants now in fashion.

Later that evening:
Two housemates just went dumpster diving, biking off into the night armed with multiple plastic bags and grungy clothing. This made me think of my friend N. as well as a girl I used to work with during the summers. We once salvaged decent cupcakes from a ritzy specialty bakery in SE Portland on 4th of July and ate them together with apples taken from a community garden while we watched the fireworks in a park. I’ve recalled this memory numerous times, yet it still feels accurate and good, despite the difficult emotional backdrop it stood against. The dumpster divers are back with a [purchased] bottle of wine and some organic cookies that taste of chocolate dust. In the background, the Juno soundtrack minus Kimya Dawson songs is playing. Piazza, New York Catcher, one of my favorite songs of all time, was just on. Ok, wine. Adieu.

July 30th
I stopped at the botanical gardens today on the way to the Staatens Museum for Kunst. It was, without a doubt, one of the most spiritual moments I have experienced since doubting and then rejecting the validity of what religion could offer me in terms of explanation and comfort. I idled around outside at first, comparing it to the Portland Rose Garden or the Desert Botanical Gardens in Arizona. I circled the greenhouses and was initially distraught by their shut doors. Then I found a lake with willow trees, lily pads and a small rowboat just down the hill. It was nearly identical to how I had imagined the backyard in Sophie’s World. I was entirely at peace there and just stood, taking in the serenity of it all in the lightly falling rain.

Shortly after, I made my way up to a gazebo-style greenhouse full of trees. If there was ever a trace of doubt in my conversion to lover of science and its beauty in nature, it evaporated in this instant. At first I walked the perimeter of each room, eyeing the tropical and familiar plants alike. As I came closer to the final room and the air turned thick and muggy, I dove straight into the heart of the area and relished in the divine greenery all around. It was quite fitting and certainly over-the-top that I wore a dress covered with a leafy pattern and golden brown leaf earrings today. I felt like an unintentional chameleon, blending in with the trees.


I smiled at the enormous dog ear leaves that licked my face as I passed and marveled at the elaborate dangling flowers, which posed motionless and with complete grace. The walls were glass windows and, though such bright light was let in, branches and trunks had entangled themselves to form impressive crevices and dark, mysterious corners. The rounded metal object at the top of each greenhouse room looked rather like a chandelier, and vines had taken the liberty of crawling up the sides of walls and railings to reach it, creating a circus tent effect. In the final room, I was beside myself with oversized water lilies, numerous rare trees and spiraling antique staircases that stood out like a Victorian house in the jungle. I climbed one staircase and took it all in while having vaguely megalomaniacal but mostly light-hearted thoughts like, “this is your kingdom!” Simba must have felt the same when looking over the Pridelands. Beautiful, beautiful place.

Now I’ve just reached the Staatens Museum for Kunst, which is enormous and kostenlos. I must tell Steve of the “Flying Steamroller” piece outside that looks like a NASA flight simulator device holding a medium-sized steamroller. Truction truck, as baby Steve would say. Really I have no idea as to the accuracy of this story, as I was negative five to three years old. Still though, I think he’d love this creation.

Oi. Just spent two hours in the museum and now I’m taking a break for soup in the café, This is painfully oversimplified, but the only way to describe the collection is ‘thought-provoking.’ So for the time being, I am stewing in my own thoughts and far too preoccupied to write them down. It’s raining today, which, truthfully, is fairly comforting. The rain is something to rely on, in a way.

Later:
On the now sunny steps outside Charlottenborg, I play with ladybug and am thrilled by the absurd truth that this is not just any aphid, but a Danish one. This detail alone doesn’t cause it to differ from its North American ladybug brethren, but something about it still seems novel. Charlottenborg is among my favorite museums on this earth. The ‘Culture Camping: spend the night in a museum’ event occurs every Friday, and beds with white linen have been pushed together in the center of the room for this activity. Visitors are encouraged to sleep there during opening hours as well, and I was pleased to oblige. From the ceiling hang hundreds of long white ropes, evenly spaced out to form a vast expanse of unconventional stars at 90-degree angles. They do not touch you upon sitting up, but lightly brush the top of your head. Lying on my back, looking up at them, I was reminded of that old Windows screensaver in which you were constantly zooming through a pixilated, planetless galaxy. Today is all about finding Zen, I suppose.


Eventually:
I purchased lovely new pens and am now very pleased with the world. Other activities included forgoing the design museum due to a distraction caused by the charming but outrageously pricey Urban Outfitters. Oh capitalism, how you lure me with your make-believe harmless talons. My excuse, though none should be permitted, is that the chain does not exist in Munich, and I never saw a store on my previous travels. I am on a never-ending quest to find a second pair of these perfect jeans I bought there two years ago. If you had these pants, you’d understand. I actually needed a moment to process all the art I consumed recently as well, and was not so much in the mood to rush through the design museum.

Ha. The World Out Games are going on and several clips from related films or performances are being broadcast in the square below my coffee shop vantage point. Two female performers were just doing things onstage that would make Madonna blush crimson and Britney or Christina cover their eyes and giggle. To dwell further on my failure to make it to the third museum, however, I’ll also argue that I bought the pens out of inspiration to produce my own work, so there. This microscopic shopping spree of six felt-tip pens and a blouse has reduced me to a five-year-old, it seems. At least I’m a five-year-old drinking a cappuccino. Oh lord, could there be anything worse?

The Danes who work in the service industry are insanely fluent in English, and no matter how much I strain to say hej and tak, the moment I order an Italian-sounding coffee, they’re on to me and my English-speaking ways. I find it fairly relieving, honestly. “Ok, you can continue to say hi and thank you, but when we require real sentences, cut the charade,” they smirk. Clever multilingual Danes.

At a plaza there were musicians playing traditional Incan music with wooden flutes, wearing Navaho headdresses and moccasins. My geography bone hurt.


That night:
My last evening in Copenhagen left me drowsy during the early morning flight to Stockholm, but the marvel of it all was worth it. All the collective housemates, plus three friends and three couchsurfers (myself among them), dined and drank together late into the night. I really connected with the newest couchsurfer from Melbourne and we had simultaneous and spastic bouts of glee upon hearing of all the films, music, people and places the other had no knowledge of but would surely love. We switched notebooks and furiously wrote down everything we could think of for one another that seemed somehow relevant. R., the couchsurfer, studies photography and just finished a semester in New York. Now she’s come to Copenhagen for another semester abroad before returning to Australia. I was at once envious of and glad not to be in her position – at the beginning of the abroad experience.


We smoked Parliaments and I thought of all the hyper-stressed debaters I knew; we occasionally remembered to socialize with the others at the table, who enjoyed their own parallel worlds, and we exchanged contact information. A friend of O.’s, who told of how she got lucky through a start-up company with her former professor involved in promoting arts and culture in Scandinavia, began playing the violin and making skat noises. Soon after, O. found the King Louie Jungle Book song online and we all sang along, transported back to our childhoods in the process. I wanna be like you-oooh-oooh, do everything that you do-oooh-oooh. I wanna walk like you, talk like you, oh yeaah! Come now, don’t say the song is not magical.

Oh, I am so tired and content.

Whimsical Copenhagen (1)

Upon my return to Bavaria yesterday, a friend asked how my ‘fantastic voyage’ had been. I replied that my bones were weary but I felt so full mentally. My ‘dream gallery,’ which is something that will make little sense here, even when explained, but has to do with lucid dreaming and the REM cycle, was especially wonderful during those nights of travel or when I fell asleep on the metro. This was largely influenced by the plethora of images I was exposed to in the past few days. My head, I went on, is crammed to the point of extremity, but it’s a good kind of chaos and overload.


In addition this madness and delight, I read and finished the best book of my [relatively young] life, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. While I am already susceptible to empathizing with fictional characters too strongly, never before have I identified with or adored any figure more than Oskar Schell. Read this book immediately if you have not already done so.

I documented the Copenhagen trip in tall, skinny notebook with interwoven designs of deep purple and green. This book was, for all purposes, my travel companion during the journey, and quite a good one at that. Who else would receive my observations, witty and banal alike, in such a welcoming manner? For your benefit, I’ll only reproduce the mildly or more interesting segments here and leave the more mind-numbing or personal aspects on the pages bound together by string.

On July 28th, the date of my departure, my good friend S. and I discussed potential travel plans for next summer while drinking tea and eating plums in my room in Munich. Included among these fantastical what-ifs was a road trip into the Deep South with J. and then on to Chicago to see friends at Northwestern. I have been harboring this desire to see Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia, as well as St. Paul, plus New Orleans and some of the Midwest, namely Minneapolis, Minnesota and Topeka, Kansas. The urge and momentum behind all this is the necessity of seeing more of my home country than just my West Coast and Southwestern corner. I want to become educated about the US in the way that I have during this past year, in more than just a surface level fashion, about Europe. Visual and exploratory learning is what I mean by this. Perhaps this is why we travel – or why I do, at least – to collect these powerful images and memories out of which we can form a personal gallery. No, not perhaps. This is a definite reason for travel or merely living more fully and intensely. I am an avid collector of memories, it seems.

During the wait period before the flight, I sat in the airport, watching men in stiff business suits and a little boy playing with dinosaurs while his sister dressed her dolls and his mother yawned in a chair, flipping through a magazine.

Later that day, at 4:05pm (June 28th):
Shortly we’ll land in Berlin. Hello, lovely city. I adore you. Don’t believe for an instant that you’ll never see the likes of me again.

I then proceeded to draw for some time. Among said doodles was a computer as a dementor, as it is quite a life-sucking box of diversion and fun. The metaphor isn’t too accurate in terms of adjectives, but I’ll ignore this if you will. More drawings included a mandala, a beer bottle used as a flower vase and the oddly futuristic paper towel dispenser in the airport restroom.

The security and staff at Berlin’s Tegel Airport are amusing and adorable. The man at the check-in counter started speaking to me in Spanish. ¿A Dónde va? I think the bangs are what cause me to be taken for a Spaniard, but I like this mistake a rather lot and shall refrain from complaint. Another man at the security and bag check area allowed someone to first go through the metal detector and then down his Apfelschorle, which was far above the standard liquid allowance. “Auf X!” the employee bellowed encouragingly, as if the man were drinking a beer. He congratulated him at the end and promptly gave directions to the next bathroom. Ah! Such hilarity and perfect delivery. Rampant overgeneralization: modern Berliners are a light-hearted bunch.

Arrival
Copenhagen proves to be a stunningly beautiful city populated with absurdly fashionable young hipsters, none of which even border on overweight. So this is where the fashionista robots are made! I am by the river in Nørrebro, a marvelous location full of cafés, bars and vintage shops. There is more than a sufficient amount of high quality street art, and I am beside myself with pleasure.


I don’t know if I will really do anything this evening, as I got in later (though thankfully it’s still light out), aside from take a few photos of my surroundings and socialize with the co-op people. Just earlier, a friend of the group and I talked briefly of India and Nepal, where she had spent some months traveling and teaching. My knowledge of the countries is entirely textbook-based, but extensive enough to permit informed discussion. I bought a bottle of inexpensive red wine at a grocery store in hopes of bonding with the housemates through alcohol and as a token of appreciation for their hospitality. I love how these people live amidst the chaos of parallel creative projects but with some semblance of structure and tidiness.

Tangent – some observations:
Surrounding me are strollers and small animals. There are fledgling ducks, whose head feathers are all ruffled, as if they used a styling product to get the intended messy look. They are not such babies, I realize upon closer inspection, and are more like preteen ducks in actuality. Still uncontrollably cute, though. The woman to my left has a small dog that Em would throw fits of joy over. Scottish terrier? He bounds across the grass in that way little legless dogs do. The ducks seem to litter the water and there are hoards of them. Does their quantity subtract from their fluffy adorableness? Not in the slightest, but this saccharine topic is making me feel a little crazy. At least seven of the girls who just passed on the dirt pathway in front of me have been wearing those damn gladiator shoes, which are everywhere, really. Ok, I should plan tomorrow, but all I want to do is read more of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I already pummeled through 70 pages today. Must. Enjoy. Slowly. Do not devour! It is a dark chocolate. Genieß es langsam, bitte.

July 29th:
Last night was splendid, to use my grandmother’s favored adjective. The housemates, their friends and I sat in the kitchen/dining/living room and exchanged stories over wine and beer. It got late and all but two other souls and I headed to bed. We continued discussing film, linguistics ad the obscene cost of education. Earlier one had mentioned some screenings going on as part of a larger festival, and it was then suggested that we casually make our way over. I was lent a bike far too high for me but in wonderful condition, and we pedaled off across the bridge, first to the park, which seemed to be dead aside for some undesirable activity, and then to a bar and club area downtown.

We went to two different locals, chatted at the first and danced for hours at the second. Shortly after two, I was interested in heading home so that I could see museums, galleries and the alternative village community the next day. Meanwhile, the guys considered further bar options. The biked suddenly seemed to have grown tremendously in height and I swear it was like having to mount a horse, but with a small push, I was off and successfully navigated my way back along the elegant bike paths. Once back, I happily washed up and lay down on the couch made up with the softest comforter of my life. Ahh… sweet dreams.


I’m now sitting in a café with yellow tables, bottles filled with long-stemmed daisies, quickly burning candles, rust-colored chairs and rugs my parents would surely admire. Ok, hygge. I get it. It is Gemütlichkeit, but more sophisticated. Also, candles at 10am? That’s lovely. This cappuccino may be the best of my entire existence, which sounds hyperbolic and over-the-top, but it has the strong flavor of Barcelona espresso and the perfect amount of foam. Nebenbemerkung: I’d like to reiterate that people here are unbelievably stylish. I can hardly deal cope with it and want to photograph them so badly.

Hmm… it’s fairly unwise to skip breakfast, but I feasted on some bread slices in the apartment. To further exaggerate food and drink quality, it must be stated that Denmark has better bread than any other place in the world where I have dined. Better bread that Switzerland, even! As far as my own rations go, I’ve some raisins and walnuts with me and will probably buy some fruit before having a large lunch. This illustrates how similar I am to my father when he travels, forgoing physical hunger for the mental kind, craving more sights, more stimuli, more moments in which I laugh subtly to myself.


Yes, I love being a solitary traveler when it is framed within something as marvelous as a young people’s collective, replete with quirky types and a silver mannequin. Quite obviously, the reason I save money when traveling is that I don’t eat out as much – case in point being breakfast today – on my own as when I’m with others. Naturally it’s more fun to share a meal with a friend, but I won’t ever be ashamed to be the woman reading while eating. For god’s sake, I am that woman right now, writing in a journal while glancing over at an emptied, ground-stained cappuccino and its saucer.

Part Two still to come.

Puppetry Performance!!

Here's the final product of my puppetry course! I am the one controlling the main character, on the right.

The Grey Man from Sarah O'Brien on Vimeo.

So, I have been told by a big shot in the Munich puppetry scene (how weird is this concept?) that I am not allowed to return to America, as they need me here, to be in more shows. I am glowing a little.

Required Items (Part II)

Of course I could not leave the last post regarding desired items so incomplete, so here are some objects or locales that I forgot to mention previously.

Cheap postage!

Real avocados that do not taste like paste! I also miss our oversized bananas, surely genetically modified or full of radioactive properties, but oh so delicious.

Tillamook cheese!! I consume so much cheese in life, and the modest deli slices (7 per pack or so) do not suffice.

My Netflix account and the habit of watching good movies once or twice a week. I keep receiving emails from the company begging and trying to entice me into coming back to them. "We were good to you," they moan, like a needy ex-lover.


The inexpensive and delicous House Wine brand, which cannot be found here, though lack of wine is not something I can earnestly complain about.

In terms of reading material, I bemoan the absence of the Portland Mercury, at least in a tangible form (a great deal is also published online) and the surge of joy that comes every Thursday, when a new (free) copy can be found downtown or in most close-in areas of the city.

Now for places in which I will sit myself and refuse to budge until I have absorbed their spirit and satisfied my malnourished diet consisting of Munich locales.

Naturally, the first appearance on this list is made by Stumptown. Hello, brick walls, aromatic and flavorful wonder and hipster baristas!

Mmm Laughing Planet! Oh burritos and dinosaur toy decorations.

Buffalo Exchange and thrift stores in general. I don't understand the need to always buy new when others have used something just a few times. I cheated with this image, as this store is in East Village and not PDX, but it is too pretty for me to care.

My library!! All of its little branches, too. Munich libraries are unecessarily complicated and some charge fees! I maintain that to be against the spirit of libraries. (Image credit: misterbisson, Flickr).


The list is complete for the moment, but there is always more. Later, I shall definitely write out things I will miss in Germany, which is just as long and in-depth in nature.

August 28th shall be spent flitting all over my city in pursuit of these articles or places. I can hardly wait. First, however, I must conquer my finals and then the Nordic lands.

In Excess

On a related note to the previous post, another perturbing line of thought I've been indulging in lately is the place of excess in our lives. When something interests me, I tend to feel compelled to dive deeply into it and stay there for a while, living and breathing the new art form, book, song, theory or person. I seem to believe that the best way to gain a comprehensive understanding of how it works and how I can apply it to other areas. In that way - seeing connections - it is not so much a developed obsession, but something that can overlap with the curiosites and interests of years past.

With puppetry, for example, I allowed this to happen. I had nothing more than a vague notion of the creative and performance process before this semester and yet somehow it has developed into a full-fledged aspect of importance in my life. The idea behind the performance was recycled from unused animation brainstorming that I produced one summer after taking a related course in high school. The sketches of puppets made in one of Munich's museums, an assisgnment for the puppetry course, made their way into my zine. See? Overlap.

Ah speaking of the zine, it was finished a week ago and at somepoint I will photograph all the pages and post them. Over twenty in all, though. Hmm... perhaps in segments so that it is not extremely image-heavy. For now, however, here is just the cover page:

Fitting that I ended up titling it idee fixe, non?

My friend S. and I were once eating at Saf here in Munich, and she said something that feels applicable to this current rambling. She had a smoothie and managed to drink the entirety in a matter of minutes. Afterwards she remarked, as she poured water into the glass to somehow get at the essence of whatever smoothie-like liquid remained, that her guzzling of the drink served as a perfect metaphor for how she enjoys her men as well: never taking the time to enjoy the initial stages, absorbing all the pleasure almost instantly and then being somewhat surprised by the abrupt end.

For a person to then serve as an idee fixe is problematic and mildly dangerous. But I shall continue assume that when leisurely pursuits are balanced and there is room for overlap, they can then be [almost] equally enjoyed.

Plums in the Icebox

I first came across this poem by William Carlos Williams while listening to an episode of This American Life. The short, simple form and the way it immediately creates a plausible situation struck me, as well as the fact (pointed out in the episode) that the plum thief doesn't actually apologize and instead only says "forgive me."

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.

The reason I post it here is because of a witty little cartoon response I stumbled upon online:

Praha!

If cities could be lovers, my romantic life would be as follows:

I would have my first puppy love crush on San Francisco, the boy next door, an ever-lasting infatuation and mutual attraction with Zürich, brief fling with Phoenix due to his impeccable knowledge of indie music, believe my soulmate to be Portland though I'd be tempted to stray with Seattle, have an intense romance with Munich but eventually leave for someone with more similar interests, consider moving in with Berlin and eternally wish that I could have Amsterdam. I would admire Barcelona and and fool myself into thinking that we could be something serious, go weak in the knees for London but be turned off by his hoity-toity sense of class status and wealth, have a fleeting thing for Venice and a two-month adventure with Vienna, and be highly intrigued by the mysterious Prague and realize that our taste in food and art (the most crucial elements) matched perfectly. I would also have an unhealthy obsession with both Copenhagen and Stockholm...

Gendering the cities was a bit odd and proved heteronormative, I must say. But it was a fun exercise nonetheless.

Oh yes, so Prague. Kundera and Kafka's city, Prague Spring, Velvet Revolution, Cubist interior design... It was glorious, of course, and I am so very glad to have been there. Prepare yourself for an overly-detailed commentary.

My favorite aspect was the Kampa Museum, a gorgeous art museum that proudly displays this quote from its creator Jan Mládek on the entrance wall: "If a culture survives, then so too does the nation." I will attempt to describe the atmosphere created within this building so as to give you a slight hint to the sensation it aroused. Imagine a large white cubic structure next to the river, appearing to levitate above the water. To the right, on a pier on the water, is a diagonal row of life-size plastic yellow penguins. Behind them is an enormous stone chair with one apparently broken leg. On land, giant iron babies with stamped barcode faces remain in a frozen crawl position and are occasionally photographed or climbed on by visitors. In the courtyard just before the museum there are three long, waist-height tetrahedrons with mirror surfaces.


When you finally make it past the ecclectic collection of public art and into the museum, you are immediately confronted by the first works. There is no foyer or unecessary extra space dividing you from the art. As you take it all in, you realize that you still must purchase a ticket (student price = 140 Czech crowns, 5,20 Euro, ~ $7.20) and buy one from the remarkably friendly - and rather adorable - young museum employee. The first room takes a fair amount of time to get through, small though it is, because of the amount of artwork in the space. In no way does it feel cramped, though, and the various styles are not in conflict with one another. A helpful factor may be the tall rectangular windows looking out to the river and the clean white walls. There is so much light in the room but it still feels intimate enough for you to have a quiet dialogue with the art.

In the adjacent room, two highly minimalist pieces lay on the floor. One was a large flat basin of nearly black water which reflected the innovative, interesting ceiling. Every once in a while, when someone upstairs walked a tad more vigorously than usualy, a small ripple would form in the basin. The second piece consisted of two opaque slates of glass sandwiching tubes of light. As I circled it, the light appeared to follow my warmth and movement, although this was surely just an illusion. After two minutes, the light disappeared, leaving me somewhat empty and unfulfilled. On an interesting side note, the curator's chair seemed to have equal significance in this room.


The stairwell was impressive in its own right, the walls covered, but not in an overwhelming way, with assorted two- and three-dimensional paintings. Hanging from the ceiling, in the middle of the spiraling stairs, was a sculpture that looked like a white DNA chandelier or those toy sticks that you connect together to make weird contraptions. I really liked the cubist works upstairs, namely one made up of miniscule wooden blocks, varying in height and resembling a blank crossword puzzle or scrabble board. Also interesting were four panels exploring shape development which to me looked unmistakably like a man devouring a sword and turning into a goat. I suppose with that comment I discredited the artist's original intent. It's what the viewer sees/reader reads that matters, right? Uff postmodernism. I apologize.


I fell head-over-heels for František Kupka's small abstract watercolors. Study for Animated Lines, Studies for Around a Point, Four Studies for a Tale of Pistils and Stamens, and Study for Lines, Planes, Depth were my favorites and reminded me of Frank Stella, but with a pointilist/impressionist twist. Otto Gutfreund's Cellist sculpture embodied all that is powerful, sensual and bold in a single sculpture... not to hype it up, but seriously.

Though I could go on longer about the artwork, I think this is sufficient and perhaps over-the-top already. One quick note though, is that I got to see the Cobra exhibit that I had wanted to check out in Amsterdam. It was a bit unimpressive, honestly, and the most I got out of it was this quote from one of the founding members on the wall: "We must turn everyone into artists! Because that is what they are. They just don't know it."

I suppose that a description of Prague is also in order, though, seeing as I also explored the city and not just a single museum there. While there, the friend I was traveling with, Andee, and I frequented Globe Café not once, but thrice. This English-language bookstore and café was, no joke, right across from our hostel (P.S. I recommend Chili Hostel, though I have heard good things about Sir Toby's as well). Aside from the Kampa Museum, we also visited the Franz Kafka Museum, which is remarkably cheap for students and can be very interesting if you speak German as well as English (or Czech) and are a fan of Kafka's works. For me, it wasn't terribly thrilling and naturally a bit of a downer after Kampa, but it was still worth the visit. The infamous and controversial Piss sculpture in front is required viewing, too.

Globe Café

We went to Havelská Market, where I bought wooden earrings and a delicate handmade wooden magnet for my aunt, saw the Hanging Out sculpture, napped, sunbathed and read in Vojan Park, saw the Spanish Synagogue, the Old Jewish Cemetary, trekked up to Prague Castle and saw numerous buildings, churches and boutiques. Astronomical Clock, the Dancing House, etc. You get the gist of it. Hey did you know Tycho Brahe, the astronomer who lost the tip of his nose in a duel (one of the few facts I remember from astronomy) had a pet moose? Apparently the poor creature died from drinking too much beer and falling down the stairs. Whaaaat?


Recommended eateries are definitely Bar Bar, Lemon Leaf, any of the vegetarian restaurants around and of course, Globe Café. Just as satisfying, however, is grabbing a sandwhich or bread, fruit and cheese and picnicking in a park or along the river. Prague has a great selection of cafés and bars and a satisfactory amount of street art. The focus seemed to be more on graffiti, however, which I was interested in but not as thrilled by. OH! So another most beloved Prague sight of mine was the Lennon Wall. I experienced surges of glee at seeing such a grand-scale and ever in flux wall open to public art. I left a contribution, naturally.

This post is absurdly long yet was still hugely satisfying to write. Hope you get something out of it (e.g. an extreme desire to see Prague).