Saying Goodbye

I wasn't there in 1970 when Vaclav Havel was banned as a writer for his circulation of a petition of 10 points against Soviet politics.

I wasn't there in 1977 when Havel was jailed for nearly five years for his leadership in the Charter 77 organization that called for human rights guaranteed under the Helsinki Accords.

I wasn't there in 1989 when Havel helped orchestrate the Velvet Revolution with hundreds of thousands of Czechs taking to the streets to overturn Communist rule.

And I wasn't there in 1992 when he became the first president of the independent Czech Republic.

But on December 23, 2011, my last day of my European vacation, I was here in Prague. And even though, I missed all the critical events that made up the life of this influential man, I knew I couldn't sit out of his historic farewell.

So like thousands of Czechs, I headed to the Prague Castle at noon to stand outside of the gates to bear witness to his state funeral. The funeral mass was held inside the St. Vitus Cathedral, where the audience was limited to family, members of the ministry, and international political dignitaries, such as French president Nicolas Sarkozy, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, and the Clintons. However, organizers hung huge screens outside the castle walls to project for the people the entire service.

In some ways my experience of the funeral may have been more limited than my American friends who watched from home. They too had access to the same projections, and their versions probably came with subtitles. But standing there in the frigid morning air with all of those people offered an emotional perspective that TV can't capture.

I'm talking about the way the crowd remained silent and un-clapped after the speech given by Havel's political rival, and current president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus. It was the tears that streamed down people's faces as Karel Schwarzenberg spoke of Havel's belief that truth and love would always prevail. It was the spontaneous ringing of keys that erupted out of the crowd at the end of the funeral, re-enacting a 1989 revolution tradition.

Now there are those who say that Havel was a revolutionary and artist before a politician. There are those close to him who believed an exclusive state funeral was the exact opposite of what he would have wanted. And those people organized a different memorial event that night, to which my friend managed to get us tickets.

Held at the Lucerna Palace, a movie theater built by Havel's own grandfather, young people and old gathered to listen to bands on three stages from 8pm to midnight, in an ebullient celebration of a life. Artists who performed included dissident bands from the 1980s whose freedom to perform Havel fought for as well as famous artists from around the world (there was a particularly moving singalong to Suzanne Vega's a-cappella version of Tom's Diner).

We sang. We danced. We said goodbye.

A Tale of Two Museums

At the risk of becoming wildly unpopular, I have to admit that I kind of hate museums (with a few small exceptions). I've tried to like them. I swear, I have. Almost every person I have admired who is smart, interesting, and well-rounded has put "going to museums" on the list of their likes. I'm not sure if there is anyone out there who wants to love museums as much as I do. But I've coming to terms with the fact that I find them disconnected, sterile, and a bit boring, really.

But in Berlin, visiting museums is almost a non-negotiable. The city has been at the center of two horrifically oppressive times, and for those who live there, and for all of us on the outside, there is a need to make sense of those atrocities. There is need to understand the reason for the loss of so many lives.

So in one day, I visited two museums: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Mauer Museum at Checkpoint Charlie.



The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the first of the two I visited, is less of museum than a experience. To find the entrance, I had to work my way through the Field of Stelae, which is made up of 2711 concrete blocks that were erected to commemorate the Jewish lives lost in the Holocaust. Once inside, the museum ushers you through eight different rooms - revealing eight different ways of making the horrors that were inflicted on the Jews real, tangible and present for the visitor. It starts with a timeline that offers a big picture view of the main events that made up the national socialist terror policy between 1933 and 1945, but then all of the rooms that followed gave meaning to those facts.

I read the personal diaries and letters from victims,unable to know the future, navigating through changing laws, forced migration to the ghettos, rumors of concentration campus. I looked at genealogies of full, healthy families, ripped apart by the Holocaust. I heard the names of murdered and missing Jews from all over Europe. And I listened to the stories of survivors as they recounted each brutality they had to suffer.

It was intimate, and personal, and devastatingly emotional - an absolutely exceptional museum.

And then I went to the second museum...


I believe that the intent of the Mauer Museum was to document the cruelty of the Berlin Wall, memorialize those who died trying to escape East Berlin for West Berlin via Checkpoint Charlie, and highlight the successful attempts made to escape Communism.

In actuality, it was a jumbled, disjointed, incoherent, haphazard collection of stuff from the time period (and other time periods) translated into four different languages. Sure, there were parts that I enjoyed. Mostly, it was learning about escape techniques - the triumph of human ingenuity over oppression: cars with secret hiding spots in the trunk, tunnels that were dug, hot air balloons that went into flight, persons hidden between surf boards.

But finding those stories was like digging through my grandmother's attic, passing over objects unable to speak their memories for the tidbits that somehow already made sense to me.

BERLIN

I woke up this morning and took a five hour train ride to Berlin. The whole ride, I felt a little bit like I was in the first scene of Cabaret, sitting in my compartment with the ticket agents periodically coming in and asking me for my tickets in non-nonsense German. Of course, instead of sharing my space with a gregarious German who wanted to show me all around town, I was across from a sullen backpacker who typed away on his Apple computer the whole time.

But none of that mattered when I actually got to Berlin. Berlin! From the moment, I stepped in the train station, I knew that this is the type of city that can only be spoken about with exclamation points. Outside of New York, I have not been in a place before that pulsated like this. It is a kaleidoscope of cultures and languages and just plain stuff happening.

A walk down Oranienstrasse presented a bevy of stimulating things to see from quirky shops, hip bars & clubs, dynamic modern building, and cozy little coffee shops.

Now I would be completely shallow to not mention that a lot of what is thrilling about Berlin is due to its complicated and devastating history. Multiculturalism stemmed out of years of occupation by various countries. The sleek, jaw-dropping architecture grew out of a need to rebuild post-war.

But Berlin is not a city that hides from its past. It looks it square in the face and keeps on moving on.

Architecture

It's no secret that I am no architecture whiz.

In a city like Prague, that offers a dazzling array of architectural delights, this lack of skill is a major handicap. Sure, I can easily suss out the difference between Soviet architecture and everything else, but other than that I'm a bit at a loss.

This is what I do know.

The old town of Prague is like a sketch stolen out of a fairy tale. I can't tell you what century the cute shops and homes were built in, what era the Prague Castle or the Charles Bridge hail from, but when I think of "once upon of time," this is the setting that I imagine.

I also know that films like Amadeus and others that depict early days in Vienna or Berlin are often filmed in Prague as the city has managed to preserve its most historic creations through years of war and modernization.



I know that the new town of Prague has breathtaking examples of art nouveau and art deco architecture. As well as some post-modern buildings, like the Dancing House by starchitect Frank Gehry.

And when I went to the symphony this evening to hear the Czech Christmas Mass, even though I didn't have the vocabulary to talk about it, I was swept away by the grand staircases, the high arched ceilings, the matted drawings on the wall, and the general Old World glamour of it all.

Slices of Life

Today was my first exploration into the city of Prague. Here are a few impressions that stood out to me.

*Prague is an incredibly homogenous society. And yet, not a single person stared at me.

*Czechs, on average, are larger than me. Thus, door knobs were often too high; doors too heavy.

*Christmas markets are lovely outdoor activities. Yes, they sell cheesy gifts that I would never buy but they also have festive decorations and serve hot wine and roasted chestnuts (actual roasted chestnuts!)

*People of Prague believe that beer helps with digestion. I have no scientific evidence to prove or disprove this, so in the interim I had my fair share of samplings over the week.

*Public transport system is somewhat baffling to me. From what I can tell, it is mainly based on the honor system.

*Pickled camembert cheese is considered pub grub. Seriously.

End of an Era

Sitting in a restaurant in a small South Bohemian town, my friend looks down at the phone. A text message has come through: Vaclav Havel died.

Fragmented memories flood my mind, but I can't piece together a coherent image of the man. I read this New York Times article to help connect the dots.

A dissident. A playwright. A movie-maker. The first president of the Czech Republic. The moral leader of a people coming out of occupation.

I look up at my friend, and while I realize what for me is an impressive biography of a fully lived life, for all those around me, it was bigger than that. It was the death of their Kennedy. It was an end of an era.

We jumped back in the car and drove the two hours to Prague. Back in the capital, we went to the places that made sense: the places where the people of Prague gather in times of trouble and joy; the places that are the soul of the country.

At both Wenceslas Square and the Prague Castle, images of Havel were on display. Flags were at half mast or swapped out with black cloth. Air was cold but thick with grief. I stood at the fringes of the monuments, an outsider to this collective mourning. And I watched as person after person came up to light up a candle for the man who gave light to so many others.

La Vie Boheme

Taking advantage of the weekend (and my friend's car) we decided to spend my second day outside of the city. We headed to an area of the Czech Republic called Bohemia, which is dotted with small, quaint towns, built around a town square.

I had first imagined that all of the towns in Bohemia would be artistic and hippie-ish, like tons of mini-versions of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. In my mind, this was the only plausible explanation of why we refer to hippies as "bohemians" and that the big dance number in Rent was "La Vie Boheme."

So I was a little more than surprised when we arrived in the first town of Tabor and its main attractions were a church, a castle and an analog clock that displayed the full 24 hours. Certainly interesting, but not the mecca of creativity I expected.

As it turns out,the real deal behind Bohemia's rep is much more complicated. Tabor and some of its neighboring cities in the 15th Century were strongholds for a radical religious movement that was a departure from Catholicism that pre-dated even Lutherism. This put Bohemia at odds with the Catholic monarchy that was ruling in Prague. The king, realizing his weakness in being able to rule the areas outside of Prague, decided to disempower Bohemia by playing what amounts to a massive practical joke.

You see, the Romas (commonly known as gypsies in the States), are a nomadic group of people who have strong connections to dance and song. Knowing that Romas were a disliked group within Europe (who have historically suffered discrimination), the king used his legislative power to issue Romas travel papers indicating that they were from Bohemia.

In this way, he created a PR nightmare for the people of Bohemia. From then, and apparently for centuries afterward, everyone came to associate the people of Bohemia with gypsies.

The Tourist Paradox

As an avid tourist, I always struggle with the same goal whenever I step out of the U.S.: what can I do here that doesn't make me feel like a tourist?

We all understand that there are two types of things to do in any given place. The things that tourists do and the things that locals do. Tourist activities include, going to museums, eating at over-priced and underwhelming restaurants, bartering for kitsch that you don't need, and of course, hanging out with other tourists.

Now figuring out what locals do is a little more elusive. You can thumb through the fine print of the latest edition of the Lonely Planet or grab a local nightlife daily , but generally this is a hopeless endeavor. The real way to get on the inside is to visit a local, and even then that has some major pitfalls.

My first night in Prague was luckily an immediate walk to the inside of local culture. A dear friend picked me up at the airport and we quickly readied ourselves for a Christmas party. I mean, you can't get any more local than a house party. Side-stepping the packed city center and all of its beautiful, breath-taking attractions, we went to the outskirts of town - the suburbs if you will.

Except the suburbs of Prague aren't like the suburbs in the States. They were created when the population of Prague doubled under Communism. So while the city center feels like a romantic European city, the outskirts are a heavy, hulking reminder that this place was once under Soviet control. The soul-less housing project is made up of several high-rise buildings that are identically built with incredibly functional and fully uninteresting cookie-cutter layouts inside. The type of construction where the sound of your heel echoes through the building and the walls are eerily cold and drab.

There was, however, a lot more warmth inside the apartment of this friend of a friends. They had splashed the walls with brilliant colors and decorated with IKEA-ish furniture trying to counteract the very nature of the apartment architecture itself. They filled my glass first with mulled wine (and later with mead), as it was a Christmas party after all. A variety of savoury and sweet snacks littered the table, my favorite being a puff pastry filled with sauerkraut and blue cheese. The apartment was also filled with American blues music - as with this being the second week of December - the guests had already overdosed on traditional Christmas fare.

So there I was, really doing it. First day out and I was in a decidedly non-tourist position. An early success!

But wait, the night had just begun. And the tragedy of the tourist paradox came to light: I don't speak any Czech, nor do I know anything about Czech pop culture. I sat silently for a bit, awkwardly smiling while I had no idea what was going on in the party conversations. Occasionally, someone would take pity on me and ask a few questions about my plans in Prague in halting English. This was usually followed by a generous recommendation - how about I visit so-and-so tourist attraction while I'm here. It can't be missed.