Skill Czech

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2009-07-11T19:05:00.002+02:00

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High/lowlights of the Trip Home

2009-06-23T23:42:00.000+02:00

-- The little (3yo?) German girl who flew on the transatlantic flight with us and kept returning to our seats to gawk at our cat without a smile or a frown, simply bobbing with a blank wondering stare to keep eye-contact with Hobbes as he sniffed the airplane cabin's air through the cracked grating of his pet carrier.
... --Also when I put my head behind his carrier and meowed in a transparent stab at feline mimicry, the little girl shrieked with terrific glee and sent Hobbes into a curl in the darkest corner of the cage.

-- When the people behind us on the plane paid for some beer and then an hour later we got some for free with our mid-day dinner.

-- Listening to the new Fiery Furnaces album over and over again while I napped on the plane.

-- Hobbes didn't make a peep until our landing-in-NYC turbulence sent the contents of his stomach lurching up and out through the front of his cage. Then I cleaned him up in the men's room, but not on the baby changing table, although I did consider it.

-- When we realized we had to lug all of our baggage out through customs and to an entirely distant terminal at JFK, necessitating a re-check and re-security process, which took forever, and after which we high-tailed it to the gate (gate 11), except when we came down the escalator we realized we were in baggage claim, which meant we'd overshot and had to go back through security, with our cat. He was not having fun.

-- A guy in the security line in front of us the first time who turns out goes to ECU and we talked to him about North Carolina. His dad works for the airline and he gets free flights!

-- Wolf Blitzer, on CNN in the gate lobby once we'd reached it, told us a metro had leaped onto the back of another metro in Washington, D.C., basically two hours before we were supposed to land there. Luckily we had someone to pick up us but still damn.

-- I read about 100 pages of The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H.P. Lovecraft. The title story is fantastic. I want the plush.

-- Eating a bag and a half of Totino's Pizza Rolls at Megan's sister's for dinner. Then getting drunk and falling asleep.

-- Talking to my mom on a real phone for the first time in nine months.

Leaving Köln tomorrow.

2009-06-21T16:33:00.001+02:00

AMERICA!

Here's what I look like right now:

Megan almost got stranded in Dresden.

2009-06-17T15:56:00.000+02:00

We were taking the train from Prague to Cologne and enjoying the relaxing sway of the train and Megan decided to look for the dining car down to the end of the train. So I stayed leaning against the window in the tight hall right outside our compartment while Megan went traveling car-by-car to the end.

So then it was taking awhile, and then I started pacing back and forth in our car wondering where she was. I walked to one end, looked through into the next car, and walked back. I walked to the other end -- the end Megan had gone -- and stared curiously at the red metal bar strapped across the door. I looked out the window. The next day down's outer door was open. I didn't see Megan. I pulled my head back in.

I looked back out the end-window which was crossed by the red bar, realizing for the first time that there was no platform for crossing from one car to the other. Instead, I was looking straight down through between the cars onto the bare tracks. The moment I realized this, the cars began to pull apart from each other. They were completely decoupled and our car was the last car in the line continuing on. All the rest were still.

I freaked out because I thought Megan was still on that car. Turns out she had stepped off of the car behind ours about two minutes earlier and passed our car and gotten on the next one up without us seeing each other. So there were about eight minutes where I thought I was inexorably heading away from Megan toward Berlin with all our stuff.

When she called me and came bursting in from the other end of the car, my hands were shaking, and so were hers. Now we're here safe and sound in Cologne and going out to a beer garden in a bit. Hobbes loves it here. Germany is cool.

I am leaving, in two hours, to get on a train that will take me from Prague to Cologne over the course of eleven hours + BARCELONA REFLECTIONS

2009-06-16T16:47:00.000+02:00

Then I will stay in Cologne for five days and then I will drive to Dusseldorf and then I will fly to Washington D.C. and then I will stay for three or four days and then I will drive to Winston-Salem, and then I will stay for two or three days and then I will drive to Chapel Hill and then I will live there.

Here's what it was like in Barcelona:
_____________________________

A story without disaster is probably not worth reading.

I moved to Prague in September of 2008. The eleventh day of September, to be exact, but that's not thedisaster. I came with my girlfriend, who is, among many things, an amateur photographer (and expert footnoter), and then we got a cat. I'm a writer, also amateur, who can't stand the only job that pays in this town (teaching English) and so I am perennially strapped for cash and looking for loopholes that will get me what I want. I'm also always looking for excuses to see more of the Old World, or any part of the world, really, outside of my little squat of Czech Home, so it made sense for the two of us to jump on a pair of free press passes to Barcelona for the Primavera Sound festival, and that's where the disaster starts.

My girlfriend, M., arrived by air from a five week trip to the States exactly one day before our flight out of Prague. The stress of this much flying is immediately obvious. Plus she's a finicky sleeper to begin with. Plus I pulled a total boner when buying tickets and paid through before I realized that both our out-going and in-coming flights included sizable (nine and six hours, respectively) layovers in Germany. So it was always going to kind of suck, from the beginning. This is all up-front kind of knowledge, like grit-your-teeth misery you subconsciously prepare for during the days leading up to flying, because you know it will feel like hell but that you can't do anything about it besides maybe not going at all, which actually seems like it would have been a pretty good idea when you're sleepless and thirsty and just generally like dried out at hour two out of seven in the middle of an airport. So the thinking was that the time spent in Barcelona had better be really super great to justify the bookending gauntlets of fatigue I was putting M. and myself through, and also the price of the plane ticket, which when you make the Czech equivalent of less than $4/hour is nothing to laugh at.

Luckily, we have friends in Cologne, which is either a 40 or 25 minute drive from Dusseldorf (our first layover, 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.) depending on how drunk the German driving your car is. Upon our arrival in Cologne, M. and I were able to commit neither to an immediate nap nor to caving to the pressure our friends were exerting on us to stay up all night, so we all (two Americans and two Germans, the friends) reached a compromise of a few* drinks out and then an hour or two of rest. We'd get enough sleep, probably.

*[read: seven or eight]

This bad of a plan is obvious to everyone but its planners. We didn't get home until late, like, late, especially for people getting in the car to leave at 5 a.m. the next day, and then it was longer until anyone could actually get to sleep. I caught the lion's share of Zs, while M. tossed and turned, experiencing a terrible night's sleeplessness compressed into just an hour. Then we were up and off and arriving back at Dusseldorf airport and boarding and sitting in our squinched seats and trying to calm our palpitating hearts. I slept a little on the plane, neck stiffening airplane restraint sleep, and then we arrived in Barcelona, Thursday morning, about ten hours before Primavera's opening shot proper.

I don't speak Spanish, and neither does M., and though Catalan looks a little like French (which she does speak), it sure isn't. Upon exiting the terminal, our only plan was to meet at their hostel some Austrian couchsurfers I'd communicated with beforehand, at which hostel we would leave our one piece of luggage and then walk around the city, to breathe it in, dust and spice and all. We found their hostel on La Rambla, a sort of oozing strip of tourist manipulation.

La Rambla is basically a wide central pedestrian aisle between two opposite facing one-way lanes, which central aisle sports open air pet shops, florists, knick-knack hawkers and the most efficient potential-pick-pocket-victim-herding system I have ever seen, wherein flamboyantly costumed mimes pose as GWAR-esque gargoyles, tin-man cowboys, golden painted fairies, absolutely motionless brown plastic-skinned life-size Army Men and grotesque fake-babies-with-real-life-adult-sized-heads, all trying to solicit as many charitable tips as possible in their dirty, sawed-in-half plastic milk carton tip buckets. A kind of friendly competition has evolved where the non-motionless (i.e. not Army Man or Silver Paint Don Quixote) mimes click and chirp like very convincing birds for the hordes' attention, who semi-circle around the actors to take pictures and expose their wallet-plump back pockets to the jaws of the lawless streets. Trained on the mean streets and trams of Prague, I keep my wallet in my front pocket at all times, but I was nevertheless exposed to a degree to the seas of potential pick-pocketers as well, as I was carrying not one but two bags, my giant red clothes-packed backpack and my handy green canvas shoulderbag, plus M. had a bag with her too, holding her incredibly expensive camera.

I probably sound a little suspicious (or bitter) about this public array of distraction. If I do, it's because I became a victim of it very quickly. While waiting for the Austrians to return to their hostel so we could drop off our luggage (since we hadn't actually secured a place to stay or sleep that night, holding on to a vague plan of "sleeping on the beach*," an idea that had been introduced to me by a friend I have otherwise almost no trust in, which speaks to my own ideaslistically frugal lapse of judgment for seizing on it (the plan) rather than his lapse of judgment for suggesting it. This whole not-having-a-hostel thing exhibits a cavernous lack of foresight that my current hindsight just shakes its head at in pity), which was just my big red travel backpack, we decided to wander down La Rambla toward the ocean. I still had both my bags (the backpack and a smaller bag containing two books), and it was hot, so we took a rest on a low wall spoking out bicycle wheel-like from a central, statue-filled plaza facing the Mediterranean Sea.

*[It really speaks to Alex's personality that he so glibly dismisses his grand Money-Saving-Scheme for this trip -- we would save what money we'd spent on plane tickets by finding free accommodation, be it through the good graces of people from Couchsurfing.com or just crashing on the beach (which was our plan for Thursday night, having been unsuccessful in finding a CS host for that night). "Finicky sleeper" doesn't begin to describe the torturous insomnia, inherited from my dad, I suffer if every factor is not perfectly aligned toward aiding my sleep, including but not limited to total darkness, white noise (silence will absolutely not do), a pillow for under my head and one for between my knees and a room temperature within a 2-degree range of 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Naturally I was concerned that these gratis accommodations would be less, well, accommodating of these absurd requirements, but I felt an uncharacteristic wave of adventurousness when faced with this possibility. Spending a night (or day, as the late-night festival schedule would dictate) on a white beach, a Mediterranean breeze caressing me? I found it very easy to romanticize the possibilities inherent in this plan and was actually kind of looking forward to it, even being as woefully behind on sleep as I already was.]

A guy walked up. Kind of scraggly. Olive-toned, pitted cheeks. Thinning, salt'n'petpper hair. I imagine he looked a lot like the outside walls of the building he lives in. He started speaking to us in Spanish, or Catalan. We said we didn't speak it. He tried French, but M. said she still couldn't understand him. He got my attention (I had been busy transferring the contents from my small bag to my backpack and vice versa) -- "Amigo, amigo" -- and I looked up only to find him still unable to communicate anything to me. This finally seemed to dawn on him, and he smiled, nodded and took his leave. Two minutes later I realized my small bag -- the bag that had been holding my books until moments ago -- was gone, and with it my camera and memory card, a blanket, chargers for both my cell phone and my iPod (where all my maps were stored) and some medicine (I have asthma), all just transferred into it.

Up front, I admit: I know it's just a little bag, and a cheap camera, and not much else of import. It wasn't even our blanket that got stolen. But that was the moment that set the tone for the entire rest of the trip. A certain faint but tangible golden bubble of tourist zeal had been roundly popped, and now all we could feel was omnidirectional suspicion constantly blowing across the back of our necks. Everyone, literally every single person we passed on our way back down the avenue, seemed shifty-eyed and out to get us. Right then, M. decided we had to get a hostel.

So we humped back up to the Austrians' place and booked ourselves a room for one night. Forty euro. Michael, the dark-skinned and swarthy middle-aged receptionist and apparent supervisor of the hostel who was on duty, spoke in a highly correct English filtered through both the Indian subcontinent and the Iberian peninsula. It would turn out that all of the hostels we encountered in Barcelona were run by Indians, which fact I haven't had the leisure time or cultural acumen to try to parse or place. Michael, though a bit stiff and guarded himself, was instrumental in helping ease our nerves after the shock of theft, and I count his uncomplicated helpfulness here as one of the few boons we received on the trip.

We got our room keys, dumped our stuff, changed our socks and then met the Austrians. We had lunch, went back to our newly paid-for room and took a nap, which was the first real sleep that M. had gotten in like 24 hours. And I had to cut it short so we could make it to the festival, which made me feel like a prize asshole in M.'s eyes (even though we still wouldn't get there in time to see Lightning Bolt, who are one of my favorite bands ever). With only about four hours of sleep under our belts, we were both feeling a bit touchy.

We reached the festival grounds by metro, which grounds are called the Fòrum, and drifted atop a steady stream of ostentatious look-at-me/don't-look-at-me purple tights and Kanye sunglasses until we got to the entrance. We received our press, photo, and backstage VIP passes, bracelets, cards and stickers without incident from the very kind and winsome press attendant, and then tumbled through into the festival grounds themselves, which looked like a big parking lot with half-built (or maybe half-collapsed) parking decks all around. Oh, and stages. Lots of stages.

I was excited. So many bands! Yo La Tengo first, of course, Yo La Tengo deserves to be first, they came first, somehow they came before even the bands that came before them, it's the beauty of their total rock approach, perfecting every style that's already been perfected. You always need to be seeing Yo La Tengo live, even if you've seen them a hundered times before, and so I was totally ready to sink into their set, which began just as I was rounding the corner of the Estrella Damm stage, the behemoth main stage of the festival.

The name 'Yo La Tengo' is possibly the only thing about the band that fit in at the big Spanish festival. In my experience, YLT is best up close and un-distracted-from. The combined effect of the light show, huge low-contrast screens, monster crowd and competing performances just over the fence all reinforced this belief. Fortunately, Ira and crew retained an isolated yet permeable focus that allowed their energy and charisma to get out without any interference leaking in.

[Click here for my write-up of a Yo La Tengo acoustic show] ]

They opened their set with an, as far as I know, untitled rock instrumental that lasted for I'd say eight to twelve minutes. Maybe because it's hard for individual songs to seem epic when they're suspended from a massive festival structure, but the opening piece lacked the expansive feeling of "Spec Bebop" or "The Story of Yo La Tango." It felt like a tight spring slowly stretching out to full length. They know how to flex once they've had their warm-up stretch, though, and the crowd loved it. "Mr. Tough" and classic "Stockholm Syndrome" were instant pleasers, while "Watch Out For Me Ronnie" caught quite a few, including M., off guard with its paint-peeling teen energy. They played a new song from their upcoming album, Popular Songs, but I don't remember how it sounded, but I remember liking it. The night was falling fast and my feet were getting tired already, so M. and I sat down to share some cheese and a banana, and Yo La Tengo finished their set with charm.

We wandered over to the press tent to try out the free Internet, but my iPod touch was almost out of battery (bad news, since all of my saved maps and directions were stored on it, and with the charger stolen we would have to mete out its remaining juice judiciously) so I didn't abuse the opportunity. It was getting chilly. Andrew Bird started to play but we despaired of parting the crowd to get to him in time, given that My Bloody Valentine would set up in about an hour on the main stage in front of us just vacated by Yo La Tengo.

We took stock. Everyone around us looked the same. And seemed to act the same, too. The behavioral/visual aesthetic that I've come to associate with hip, literate youth in America seems truly international, or thoroughly embraced in Western Europe, at least, but that ubiquity was little comfort. It's an oppressive feeling, being surrounded by 30,000 people who share this look. Or maybe not oppressive, but alienating, like that these are the people that are supposed to comprise my extended global cultural family and make me feel at home even in the middle of a huge city I've never been to before where I don't speak the language, but instead of feeling at home and rooted and inter-connected and able to strike up an edifying, or even at least enjoyable, conversation with any one random person, there was the feeling that we were alone on an island. In the middle of the city by the ocean without a beach. Why was there this feeling of lost-ness suddenly so salient?

I didn't know, and it was cold, and My Bloody Valentine's crowd was forming in front of the empty stage. Photographers get to slide into a small space between the stage and crowd to take up-close pictures, but they only get fifteen minutes or the first three songs to do it. I convinced a grumpy and disconsolate M. to let me borrow her camera and I left her in front of the press tent so I could try to get some shots of the band right as they came on stage. I was hoping it would be a magical moment -- they're My Bloody Valentine, for Pete's sake, is one way of looking at it. (For readers not familiar, MBV embody one of the most tantalizing rock sagas: after releasing an incredibly human and terrifyingly beautiful, genre-catalyzing album in 1991, the band split up and its creative core, Kevin Shields, disappeared into the mists of magazine rumor and urban legend. Their reunion in recent years was a "when pigs fly" hypothetical on the same level as the Pixies' was before they too ran out of money.)

M. wanted to go home, one reason being that M. doesn't like indie rock* and the other reason being that it was getting colder and colder and another reason being that we still hadn't gotten much sleep that afternoon and I think the shaky, heart-palpitatey feeling of being woken up too soon never really left her veins, or mine either for that matter, but I wanted to see My Bloody Valentine, for Pete's sake. Despite her objections, I chose to take some pictures up front, because it was My Bloody Valentine for Pete's sake, but some petty security contrivance kept all but a few photo pass'd photographers from getting up front and past a woman with a clipboard and a "This is my list and you ain't on it" attitude. So I circled around to the fringe of the bulge of the crowd right next to the amplifiers right as Kevin and Belinda Butcher and company took the stage and wordlessly began blasting away at our eardrums.

*[To be fair, "doesn't like indie rock" isn't quite accurate -- really I was just mostly unenthusiastic about Primavera's particular lineup (except, as it happened, a few non-rock acts). I was doing my best to be game, though I had agreed to the whole misadventure mostly at Alex's behest, despite the fact that I also hate big crowds and therefore really have no business being at a huge festival (on top of my general fatigue and paranoia after the theft of our bag).]

My Bloody Valentine has the reputation of being the loudest live band in the world. Their music is, on record, noisy but pinkly soft, like the inside of a conch shell broken apart. That is to say that it is not inherently loud, but does sound good that way. So their reputation as a loud live band is purely intentional and artificial -- they just turn their speakers up way way all the way and never stop hitting guitar strings. That's not a bad thing, but by the 2009 Primavera Sound Festival, their reputation seems to have overlapped them and enchanted Kevin Shields with the notion, erroneous, that all we came for was to hear them play their instruments with the speakers turned up bad-assedly loud.

The same hazy, gauzy blur of sound that makes Loveless such a fantastic album turned into a low-end riptide live. I was not able to immediately identify the songs, and when recognition did materialize it was more nostalgic than anything else -- the songs reminded me of why Loveless is so great without being so great themselves. It wasn't the volume itself that was the problem, it was the mixing, but since I believe the mixing was done specifically to Kevin Shields' taste, which same taste motivated the "just play loud" approach, they're part and parcel of the same fundamental problem and I can complain about them as if they were the same thing.

But I did enjoy the show. It's My Bloody Valentine, for Pete's sake. Who'd have thought I'd ever get to see them live? The non-Loveless tracks were a little cleaner and thus more recognizable, more absorbable and, ultimately and ironically, more enjoyable than the Loveless tracks I hold so dear to my heart, which more clean and recognizable sound just proves that Kevin is Kevin's own worst enemy here. Flip-sidedly, though, Belinda Butcher looked like she was having a ball, the light show wasn't bad, and a lot of people seemed to be really loving it. I was dismayed when I realized, however, while circling around the back edge of the crowd toward the press tent, that my favorite MBV song, "Only Shallow", had been playing for about a minute without my ears even registering its (theoretically) instantly recognizable opening moments, which a quick YouTube search reveals did not seem to be a problem of live versions of the song around 1991 and which same search and attendant realization makes me curse the twenty years that have passed between then and now, evolution-of-Kevin's-performance-style-wise.

I returned to the press tent, ears ringing. Aphex Twin would play soon. I found M. She was cold. I was cold. We were tired. Aphex Twin would play soon and I didn't want to miss it. But we were cold and tired.

If I never thought I would see My Bloody Valentine play live because they'd split up, then I similarly never though I would see Richard D. James play under the name Aphex Twin because he is an eccentric hermit (by reputation). He would play soon, and we were in the press tent. The festival seemed to swim around us, sunglasses and yellow high-tops and bags and people wearing strong deodorant and people wearing no deodorant and so many different hairstyles. So many different hairstyles that floated in front of my field of vision like Sneetches, with and without stars, so totally confused as to which were cool and which were a joke. A moment of dizziness came and passed, and with immense fatigue we made our way to the Rockdelux stage, Aphex-ward.

MBV were still playing. They'd gotten to The Holocaust. The Holocaust is a section of "You Made Me Realise" that goes on for fifteen minutes. It is pure noise, but I skipped it in favor of Aphex Twin's set, which started right at the same time. The Holocaust poured down over the rim of the deep bowl-like amphitheater we were nestled into, clashing with the cheers of the smaller crowd that waited for Aphex Twin to start, though not diminishing the excitement in the air in the least. A screen in back, an interstitial DJ-ing table, and another, smaller screen in front -- that was the set-up. Sandwiched between two screens. Projecting behind and in front visually what was pumping out aurally. I was excited. So many bands! Aphex Twin! Ahhh...

Aphex Twin's set sounded little like any of his albums, which is not that surprising given that none of his albums sound like any of his other albums. I had been crossing my fingers for some really insane breaks but instead he gave us a relatively straightforward and fluid continuum of beats and warbles and little Aphex-y flourishes. The music was spacey, glitchy in parts, and definitely not without a sense of humor (at one point James dropped a hip-hop vocal sample -- "Wait a minute!" -- completely out of nowhere, never to be repeated). The visual show was incredible, with syncopated strobes, UPC-like vertical arrays of colored lights, infinite-loop optical effects, freaky real-time (it seemed) image manipulation matched to the beat and, most memorably, distorted office-place printer/scanner images of Richard D. James himself superimposed fadingly one over the other making terrifying faces, Geiger-esque. I loved it, and exhausted as my entire body was, I danced for the first time that night. M. did as well. We even smiled at each other and the people around us. Our mood had been lightened somewhat by the unexpectedly affirming tunes coming from the Aphex Twin stage.

We went home. We wanted to see Squarepusher, but he wasn't on until 4:00 a.m. and M. was almost dying from fatigue. It was 2 o'clock in the morning when we walked past the Pitchfork stage and heard Wavves during what I would only find out later was an epic on-stage meltdown. A night bus took us to a square nearby our hostel called Placa de Catalunya, and a friendly and drunk Barcelonian gave us directions after inviting us back to his city next April 23, which he assured us was number one Barcelona day. When we got up and into our hostel room -- the hostel was perched atop a Borgesian, physics-defying stairwell the circumference of a drinking straw -- we collapsed, but couldn't sleep. The stress from the day was still buzzing under my skin, and the looming 11:30 a.m. mandatory check-out time filled M. with distracting dread. The time was about 3:30 a.m. Plus we still had to find some way to deal with our dying phones and our heavy bags the next day between hostel check-out time and the 7:00 p.m. date arranged for meeting our couchsurfing host the next evening.

Eventually I fell asleep, and M. fell asleep an hour later.

Six hours later, we woke up. Six hours is not a lot of sleep for us, though many people I think function on this much or less every day.* I'm aware that maybe some other people would have been able to get through the whole weekend that we got through without a scratch on them. Maybe we are, or maybe it's just me, from a weaker stock that isn't cut out for festivals in big cities. Either way, my body was appalled that I was trying to pull such shit over on it. It would punish me for the rest of the day with jitteriness, drowsing eyelids, shortness of breath and an overall feeling of internal uncleanness that only a seriously uninterrupted night's worth of sleep would fix.

*[Not usually after an an all-nighter followed by a night of four hours' sleep!]

11:30 a.m. Check-out time. We shuffled out, left our bag with the Austrians, who were sleeping just down the hall and had the room for the entire festival weekend, and re-entered the bustle of La Rambla. From there we walked to a park with our blanket (the one that didn't get stolen) and laid down to try to get some more sleep. It was a little too cold in the shade and a little too hot in the sun, but somewhere in between M. was able to drift close to sleep, and I was able to stretch out and relax, which our skeletal bed at the hostel had prevented me from doing. It was possibly the calmest and most pleasant moment of the trip, but we didn't have long to enjoy it. With what little juice remained in my iPod, I realized that the festival forum grounds were not far from the couchsurfer's flat where we were going to sleep that night -- about an hour's walk down the arrow-straight Avinguda Diagonal. So M. and I went back to get our bag, and Michael the hostel manager took the opportunity of my reappearance to enlist my aid in troubleshooting his laptop's disc drive -- for some reason it wouldn't read the CD of his family's videos. The Austrians and M. chatted hospitably while I flipped from nomad to nerd mode, but my knowledge of Windows Vista was unfortunately scant and I had to bid the good natured Michael adieu and good luck with his CD.

Then M. and I rode the underground to the festival grounds, not because we were ready to head in, but because we didn't know how else to get to our next sleeping place but from there. Once at the forum, we set out toward the Couch that we would Surf. We needed a real nap.

So we walked. It took an hour, and it wasn't fun, but we didn't know any other way to get there easily. That's our fault for being underprepared, but then again our whole misadventure could be characterized similarly. When we got to the end of Avinguda Diagonal, which terminates in a circle of seemingly perpetual construction work and all the attendant dust you'd think such a description would entail, I blitz-scanned my iPod's cached map of the area to find our way to 609 Calle del Consejo de Ciento, the apartment of a couchsurfer named Ricardo.

There is a lot that's wrong with Ricardo. How to say it. That's my challenge: how to put it into words.

Ricardo is about 34 or 33 and is completely shaved bald with thick, Mediterranean eyebrows and an apartment at the top of an infinite staircase with an even tighter spiral than I'd gotten used to ascending in Barcelona. When he finally led us up this staircase, after having walked past us without seeing us or even making the connection that we were who he'd told to wait for him (us: two clueless kids with brightly colored luggage lingering in front of his ground level door) on his way up to his flat, we thought we were finally, finally going to get the chance to recover all of the energy and sleep that we had been chasing since the beginning of the festival and before. Ricardo spilled into his small flat with us, tired us, he jittery and manic and with white paint smudges up and down his forearms and his halfway-unbuttoned work shirt blowing freely in the wind breathing through the open windows and terrace. From the moment he opened the door for us, he began speaking to us, mostly to me but some directed at M., in a rapid and frequently unintelligible cadence that tended toward eliding any words (or phrases) that proved unsuitable for his elastic machine gun dialogue. A sentence from Ricardo's mouth usually sounded like this: "--nd then I was, like, [shakes head in disbelief] what is tha, man, I just, just just [blows air through pursed lips in disbelief] just dun get whaddis goin*." I didn't have much idea what he was trying to communicate to us, obviously, but I took his letting us into his apartment to be a kindness worth glossing over trivial eccentricities for.

*[Ricardo's most notable feature, to my mind, was his mania, which was even more striking in comparison to the crushing fatigue weighing me down. Generally I try to maintain an energetic level of engagement with people I'm meeting in non-intimate social situations; however, I couldn't dredge up the energy to do this with Ricardo, particularly when faced with the vibrating frenzy he exuded. There also dawned in me a dreadful realization that this unaware, unrelenting energy meant I would not be allowed the quiet solitude I so desperately needed. A quiet hatred for this complete stranger began to well up in me, and I closed my eyes, determined not to interact with him if I could avoid it, which I most certainly would.]

He told us he needed to take a shower, or a quick shower, or quickly he needed to wash, or something. We sat down on his couch, the couch in the small kitchen, onto which M. melted into as horizontal a position as the small piece of furniture would allow, and I went about emotionally preparing for a quick nap, taking deep breaths and peeling off my grotesque socks. My steaming feet left moisture footprints on the white tile kitchen floor, and I walked back and forth between there and the front of the tiny apartment, trying to figure out where we would be able to lay down.

We sipped on warm water while Ricardo finished his shower. He came out, crisp and dripping and still as talkative, telling us that some girl who he'd agreed could also stay in the flat that night (a notion that struck me as naive at best -- four people in an apartment this small?) but that a text message she'd sent him had changed his attitude quite a bit toward her, and he didn't understand what she wanted, and some more stuff. I barely understood him, and M. wasn't even paying attention. I jumped into the bathroom for a quick shower of my own, which I realized pretty much instantly was not going to happen as both taps spit out equally freezing cold water, and came back out to a horrible sight.

Ricardo, fully dressed, stood expectantly at the end of the short hallway with his arms above his head and raised eyebrows.

"What's up, Ricardo?" I said, squeegeeing water off the back of my neck with a towel-wrapped hand.

"Let's-well-I'm-here-just-waiting-you-know-rlllllllllllafter-your-shower-and-see-let's-go," he said, without a trace of malice or self-awareness. In print, this seems just, like, spacey, or stoned-speak, but in reality the entire sentence rushed out of his mouth in under one second. It took me a beat or two to catch up to him, and when I did, I was confused.

"Go where?"

"What are you -- 'chu mean? -- we're going to Primavera -- I'm coming with you, it's time to go, man, I mean, c'mon!" Breathless.

M. lolled on the couch*, seeming crushed by the dawning weight of our host's expectations without being able -- or even needing -- to fully register the details of them. I, on the other hand, mentally retreated from the facts like a teenager in a horror film: incredulous, drooling, helpless. We couldn't rest. Not only could we not rest, but we had to leave, right then, right when our bodies were just beginning to believe that maybe they'd not made a mistake in agreeing to wake up that morning, we were being herded down the hall and out the door and down the steps and onto the street and back into the fray we had just managed to escape.

[Actually at this point I was mentally jumping back and forth between my vaguely lingering desire enjoy the festival and my overwhelming need to sleep -- I seriously considered claiming illness and asking to stay behind to recover, but I didn't want to face a whole evening alone in a stranger's apartment, possibly unable to sleep, without food or companionship or even a book to read, and besides, I was uncertain whether this request would even be acceptable to him.]

I'd left my heavy backpack up in the kitchen, at least, which was the only improvement in my physically reality. While M. shamelessly skulked behind, not even trying to mask her contempt, I made an effort to show gratitude that Ricardo was letting us stay with him for the night by walking up front and conversing. Mostly I wanted to make every attempt to incline Ricardo toward lending us his key and letting us come home to rest, or something. I wasn't sure what I was gunning for. Exhaustion sapped my imaginative powers. Maybe I was hoping he would carry me piggy-backed to the festival so I could nap en route. He wouldn't have known how to carry me anyway. Ricardo was a moron.

Ricardo didn't know how to do anything. He's lived in the same flat my backpack was currently locked away in for eight years, and in all that time as a Barcelona resident he's never figured out how to use the electric trams. I asked him if we needed to buy a paper ticket from some standalone station ahead of time, and he assured us that you could just pay with cash on the tram itself. We stood chatting (one-sidedly) at the nearest tram station for about twelve minutes before a good Samaritan noticed us jangling change and leaned forward to address Ricardo in Spanish (or Catalan -- I cannot tell the difference between the languages when spoken). Apparently you can't just buy tickets on the tram, he told us, with cash or with change, which, though M. and I had suspected as much, was certainly news to Ricardo. So with just two or three minutes until the tram arrived, while M. and I were pooling our coins to buy tickets at the coins-only ticket dispenser, Ricardo bolted off and around the corner to find change somewhere, he yelled back over his shoulder, then he was gone.

I shared a pained look with the good Samaritan and leaned back against the frosted glass tram stop facade, hoping Ricardo would never come back.

He did, of course, and just in time for the tram*, which was stuffed to the windows with the same cooler versions of myself that had engulfed me the night before. Our en route conversation (mine, Ricardo and M.'s) was inane at best. Ricardo at one point responded to a question ("What kind of music do you like?") with, "You know, scenester music, I love it." A picture of a distinctly un-American approach to underground culture was beginning to emerge, and I lacked the strength to defend myself from it.

*[While waiting for the tram I began to breach with Alex the subject I was singlemindedly clinging to: when would we, or would we even, be allowed back into the apartment? This guy's mania brought to mind visions of returning home well after dawn, forcing me into yet another unwelcome all-nighter. "So, I'd like to get back probably no later than 1:00 a.m. or 2," I ventured. Alex quickly backed me up on this: "Yeah, M.'s really jetlagged and we haven't had a full night's sleep yet really. We should try to get back before the trams stop at 1:00 a.m." Ricardo didn't really seem to register anything except the broadest strokes of what we were saying. "Oh come on man, don't be a pussy, man, I am gonna party tonight, what, can't you take it?" He seemed to tie a good deal of a person's worth (masculinity?) to the hour until which they were willing to stay out -- or at least his own swaggering claims about how hard he partied invited impressed responses from us. I loathed him fully.]

We got to the festival grounds again and went through security, walking with Ricardo up the wide slab of asphalt that formed the entrance to the festival. A huge line of people hooked around from the side of the indoor auditorium obscured by its jutting corner down the asphalt and in our faces. This was the line to see My Bloody Valentine's second show, which was held in the auditorium and which required a separate seat reservation to get in -- for regular festival goers and VIP pass holders alike. I wanted to see My Bloody Valentine again, of course, but in the exhaustion of the night before and the morning that day, I hadn't secured a seat reservation and was too tired to be upset about it. Ricardo, on the other hand, was coming to the festival pretty much specifically just to see My Bloody Valentine, which means he'd spent about 70 euro just to come and stand in line to get into the auditorium.

So why, then, was he so surprised at the huge line? Well, it turns out he had no idea when the show started, and was completely unprepared to get there in time to see the band actually play. In fact, he waited in the line that he was still confused by until he was told at the front door that he had the wrong ticket. He had only spent 70 euro for a single day pass to Primavera, not the special, in-Auditori MBV show, so he ended up arriving too late to see the band that he hadn't even bought a ticket for. God damn.

This is where M. and I left him so we could get our photo and press stickers for the day. Emotional strain was accordioning into M., so quickly and so much that between the time we left Ricardo and the time we stepped away from the press booth with our colored passes affixed to our shirts, the plan for the night had devolved into essentially Survival Mode. I wanted to see Dan Deacon, Sunn O))), Fucked Up and The Mae Shi, primarily, while she had only really cared about Art Brut and Jarvis Cocker, but we knew after only a cursory emotional inventory that we didn't have it in us to follow through on that plan. I needed to get Ricardo's key and take us back home.

[Click here for my interview with Dan Deacon in Chapel Hill, N.C.]

He was easy to find. His bald pate reflected the sinking sun, for one thing, but even if it hadn't, he was animatedly conversing with the stranger in line ahead of him. It's a belief of mine that genuine people develop genuine friendships over a (relatively) substantial period of time. Or, looking at it another way, to transition from strangers to buds on shoulder-punch terms in just the amount of time that we'd left Ricardo standing in line assumes an almost completely absent core of personality, which absent core of personality goes hand-in-hand with an equally absent level of self-awareness, which self-awareness is required to function as an empathetic member of society, which Ricardo certainly does not.

Ricardo, lacking such self-awareness, stared at me blankly when I suggested we leave the festival at 2:00 a.m. for a nice night of rest back home. He stared at me blankly when I suggested that, in lieu of his leaving with us at 2:00 a.m., he instead let us only borrow the keys and go home without him, letting him into the flat when he got home. He stared at me even more blankly, if that's possible, when I suggested he only lend me the keys, so I could take M. home and tuck her into the air mattress, and then bring them back to him within a reasonable amount of time. The very idea that he should have to go home, or even facilitate anyone else doing the same, before 5:00 a.m. was literally ungraspable to him. As I snaked down the line with him, step by furtive step, I tried every tack I could think of to convince him to help us get some sleep. I tried to enlist him in a camaraderly conspiracy to shake off that pesky girl* so we guys could have a real night out of fun, and all he needed to do was let me borrow his keys for just like an hour, and I would give him my wallet, my cell phone, my iPod, the shirt off my back as collateral, just for an hour while I took her home and then came back to rock out with him, which rocking out he clearly clung to as the only possible worthwhile act in which to spend the night engaged, about which I tried desperately to convey that I wholeheartedly agreed with him, the rocking out that is. I assuaged his ego at every opportunity, and appealed to his ineffable human reason, which wouldn't possible fail to see the sense of my suggestion, or at least the patheticness of our condition.

*[Here Alex has elided some details. Through this whole insane experience, Ricardo had been so uncommunicative that it was unclear whether he had a meet-up plan that he just hadn't mentioned, or whether he was so stupid and self-focused that it didn't occur to him that we would like to know when and how we could get back into his apartment. (I was later vindicated in this fear when I discovered that the other couchsurfer he was supposed to have simply didn't get a place to sleep that night because she had texted him after he was already too drunk to function, and he simply hadn't ever bothered to get back to her.) It was quickly becoming clear to me that he probably didn't have a plan, that I would be kidding myself by allowing for the possibility that he did, and this realization was making me anxious. It seemed very possible that he would wander into the festival grounds and end up in a stupor for the next four days and that we'd not only have nowhere to sleep, but we'd never see any of our stuff again (I was starting to feel pretty naive about having left it in his apartment). Not even knowing what would happen to us or to our things was making my anxiety even worse: I insisted that we find out when Ricardo planned to leave, and if it wasn't til late, whether he would let us into his apartment or come to some sort of compromise. Even if he wouldn't, at least then we could figure out what to do next.]

He just stared at me blankly. When he did say something, it was just a flat refutation of all my logical argument.

"No, man, that's not normal, I think no," he said, for the first time slowly and intelligibly. His head pointed downward and his brows furrowed, as if he were wrestling for literally the first time in his life with the concepts I had just introduced. Go home before 5:00 a.m.? It seemed beyond his comprehension. That's a stock phrase in a lot of writing -- beyond his comprehension, beyond my comprehension, it was beyond all comprehension -- but here it is absolutely accurate. All etymologies of the word include ties to the concept of grasping something, as in physically holding onto, and that is the sense I got standing there next to him in line. My suggestions to Ricardo slipped through his mental framework like runny yolk on a warm day. As we neared seat reservation check point, I realized it was hopeless.

M. met me halfway up the lawn from where I popped out of line. She could tell I didn't have the key, didn't have a plan for what to do. Neither of us had the energy. To do anything. Maybe my blood was too thin, or I didn't eat the right balance of nutrients before the festival. I was just so tired. We both needed to sleep. We decided to try to squeeze out some more info from my almost dead iPod at the press tent. She powered her phone on to use the last bit of battery and we started dialing hostels with the coordination of a well-oiled call center.

There were no available hostels. Well, there was one. The same one we'd stayed at the night before. But now it was three times as expensive. We kept calling, but the picture resolved before us pretty quickly. If we wanted to get the sleep we needed to finally enjoy our trip to Primavera, we were going to have to drop some change.

M. led the way to the ATM. The closest one to the forum was wrapped in cracked plastic and sun-beaten glass. A huge cigarette-butt-filled puddle flooded the sidewalk in front of the terminal. M. had to lean way forward to stick her card in.

This operation cannot be completed. The machine spit her card back out. She tried again. This operation cannot be completed. She tried again. Same result. Her bank account was frozen. She couldn't get any of her money.

The thing was, she had several thousand dollars saved up, while I only had three hundred. Which meant the impending 160 euro hostel fee would have to come from my meager savings, leaving my bank account skinny as a slatribbed hound. Plus the obvious suddenly overhanging fear that something more than trivially wrong had occurred somewhere in the banking system and that maybe these 160 euros would be the last we had to spend between the two of us, as unlikely as that actually was. Not fun thoughts.

So I got the cash and we took a metro back to La Rambla, grabbing a falafel for M. as soon as we exited and then returning once more to the hostel in which we'd spent the previous night tossing and turning.

However, due to our never having actually said we wanted the room, it had been rented out to other tenants between the time we left the festival and the time we arrived at La Rambla. The cold shock of roomlessness splashed us both in the face, which must have showed because the guy at the counter took pity on us and offered to call one of their sister hostels down the street to see if they had room. We got an escort down the stairs and about half a block down La Rambla in the direction of the sea, having been told that we could get a room at this new place for the same price as quoted us earlier.

Our moment had finally come -- everything finally turned around. The room was wonderful, less like a hostel than a hotel proper, or at least maybe a motel, with a bed with sheets and lamps and fake hardwood headboards (insead of wrought iron grating) and a real bathroom and no improperly caged window that just about anybody could slip through and steal our stuff in the middle of the night, and, best of all, because we'd paid for two nights in a row, time. We didn't have to be out by 11:00 a.m. the next day. We could sleep.

And we did. Even though my bag was still at Ricardo's, and I was stressed about maybe not being able to retrieve it very easily the next day,* I had no problem passing out immediately and staying that way for about eleven hours. M. slept for longer, and didn't wake even when I did, showered, and went to get my bag back from Ricardo's.

*[Actually at this point I started to feel a lot better, or at least calmer. We knew for certain our stuff was stuck in Ricardo's apartment overnight, but he had at least told Alex we could get it the next morning. I had had the paranoid foresight to put my toothbrush in my purse, and we could get a hostel and actually sleep tomorrow, and I would never have to see Ricardo again. Things were finally starting to look up!]

Because my phone had completely run out of money and almost battery, I had no way of contacting Ricardo once I got to his street. I didn't realize this until I had gotten to his street, either. So the only reason I ever got my stuff back was the broken glass of the ground floor door that allowed me to stick my hand in and let myself in from the inside. I huffed up the tower of stairs and started banging away at his door, hoping he and not some angry and monolingually Spanish person would open the door. It finally swung open, and Ricardo's bleary and clearly unhappy person stood in front of me in a wrinkly pajama t-shirt. I zipped past him with a perfunctory greeting and was relieved to find my junk spread out as we had left it. I stuffed it back into my bag as quickly as I could. He came back into the kitchen, wobbly and grinding the heel of his hand into his eye socket.

"Oooh, man," he drawled. "Ohhh..."

I wasn't interested in any sort of conversation, but somehow I always get drawn into them anyway. I found myself listening to Ricardo's complaints about the night before while we both sat out on the terrace drinking orange Fanta, which is so much huger in Europe than America that I feel like I've missed an entire cultural epoch forming and solidifying. Ricardo complained about not being able to get into My Bloody Valentine for reasons for which he expressed a total lack of understanding, despite their utterly simplicity. He complained about getting so drunk last night. He complained about the girl who never texted him about surfing his couch, except when she did text him it was too late so he ignored her. I felt simultaneously buoyant at having regained my belongings and weighed down at having to fake a stimulated expression of engagement for the duration of the conversation. I drank two glasses of orange Fanta and then finally stood up and stretched and said I had to go. (The last thing I did, however, was to accidentally stumble and sit back down hard on the three-wooden-board bench seat, cracking the center board in half with my ass weight. Inexplicably, Ricardo wasn't fazed. I realized why when he reached over and replaced the broken bench cover with an identical but unbroken three-wooden-board bench top. What the hell kind of person keeps multiple copies of his bench components lying around the apartment? I couldn't wait to get out of there.)

I finally got out of there, returned to our new hostel to greet M. with toiletries and toothpaste and we changed into clean clothes. Our flight out the next morning back to Prague (via Munich) left at 6:00 a.m., so our plan was to go to Primavera until about 2:00 a.m. and then go straight to the airport, which meant the sleep we'd accrued over the previous night would have to last us through the upcoming final festival night and the six hour layover in Germany the next day. Having no other better option, we secured our kipple and set out one last time for the festival grounds.

This day, Saturday, was the day of the big Three-Way Collision. Three acts -- Sonic Youth, Gang Gang Dance and Ghostface Killah -- all scheduled to play at 1:00 a.m. A total ballbuster. How are you supposed to deal with that? But that wasn't until later. The thing going on right when we got there was Neil.

About as big a legend as you can get, obviously, but unfortunately I haven't listened to a lot of Neil Young. Harvest is all I know with passion, and besides "After the Gold Rush," "Southern Man" and "Rockin' In the Free World" (lol), the only Neil Young songs I can recognize come from that album. I don't really know how to appraise a performer of such repute and longevity -- I guess he gets points for still getting up on stage, but I didn't know how hard I should expect him to rock. The Harvest tracks of the night -- "Heart of Gold", "The Needle and the Damage Done", "Old Man" -- were phenomenal and brought me up onto my feet for maximum receptivity. In between these tracks -- and excepting "Rockin' In the Free World" -- I found it hard to pay attention. Maybe that's a result of growing up in the mp3 age, but I doubt it. I've just rarely enjoyed watching an artist perform songs I had never heard before. Moral of the story: I should probably listen to more Neil Young.

Liars came up next for me, and M. followed me to the ATP stage hinterlands. Liars are one of my favorite bands, all around. I've seen them three or four times already, each show utterly unique and enjoyable, and when I was lucky enough to interview antipodean frontman Angus Andrew for this august publication [Click here for my interview with Angus Andrew] in the past, I found him to be a really great guy. I wanted a setlist of nothing but Drum's Not Dead and "Plaster Casts of Everything," but I was of course prepared to love whatever they gave us.

The stage was sparely set, which makes sense for a festival as tightly scheduled as this one. The band members carried themselves consummately -- no flashy all-white tuxedos this time, just black shirts and microphone stands. M., not a fan of this type of music, nevertheless entered the press pit with me, and started snapping away as soon as the show started. Angus I think knows very much what makes for good rock photography -- as soon as he appears he turns into all elbows, gaping jaws and wild dance moves. Plus he's like eight feet tall, so even if his antics weren't larger than life, he sure is.

I found it hard to let myself be drawn in at the beginning of the set. Some new pieces were played, some pieces unfamiliar to me, and some general fucking around was on display. Not unrewarded fucking around, but not immediately gripping like live Liars can be. After about the point when the Catalan security team flushed us from the front trough, though, the show really picked up. The band ripped through a song (or maybe two?) from their debut to great applause, and Angus personally thanked "Neil Young for opening for us, and Sonic Youth for closing for us." They ended the too-brief stint with some fantastic tracks from They Were Wrong, So We Drowned and Drum's Not Dead, the only songs M. said she "even came close to liking," and the crowd began to fracture in expectation of the big 1:00 a.m. Decision Crisis.

It was about half past midnight at this point. We'd already been backstage once, where we got some free drinks and a chance to chat with Angus (he remembered me!) and also where we witnessed the Spanish emergency medical staff bundle up a way-too-drunk guy for site removal. We wondered what to do to kill time before the next round. M. couldn't care less about Sonic Youth or Gang Gang Dance*, so we agreed to hang around the Pitchfork stage and wait for the Wu Tanger to start, then I'd check out the other two shows.

*[Beyond not being excited about Sonic Youth or Gang Gang Dance, I was actually as excited about Ghostface as I was about any of the artists showing at Primavera. Though the festival's roster was heavily indie-rock-inclined, their selection of rap and electronic artists, though painfully limited, was of exceedingly high quality. And the Ghostface show didn't disappoint -- his stage presence was charismatic and playful, with a lot of nuggets thrown in for true old-school hip-hop fans ("Rap these days is kinda bullshit," he proclaimed at one point, opting, as Alex mentioned, to cover/sample a number of old classics in his set).]

Ghostface Killah's speakers were turned up really loud. I think I enjoyed the beginning of his set, but I can't really be sure -- I couldn't make out but one out of every three or four lines, and the overloaded boom of the speakers turned every beat into a giant androngynous thumping. Nevertheless, his swagger won me over immediately, as he seemed to be having fun playing in front of basically a bunch of white people. I found out later that, after I left, he covered Wu-Tang's "Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthin' Ta Fuck Wit'" and GZA's "Liquid Swords" -- my two favorite Wu-products of all time. ARGH! Well, hardly my worst judgment of the weekend.

And I don't regret leaving. I kind of back-hopped in the direction of the Sonic Youth stage, hoping to catch a bit before heading over to Gang Gang Dance. Whatever they were playing wasn't as interesting to me as the fact of their playing at all, that I was finally, in the midst of all this chaos and breakdown, for the first time seeing Sonic Youth play live. I was still for a moment, taking it in. This band represented for me the essence of indie rock legend. From the first time I realized, in college, who they were and what other people thought about them, I'd been fascinated, more by my reaction to them than by their music itself. Did I like it, or did I only want to like it? Was the fact that I couldn't even tell, the fact that I had to ask myself, proof that it was obviously one (or the other) answer, and my own inability to see this obvious answer just testament to my own unfitness to be among my peers, talking about music with any sort of genuineness? Or perhaps the fact that I even cared enough to ask the question evidence enough that I'm the kind of person who isn't so easily told what to like, and that if I think I like it then I should just not doubt myself so much and fucking like it for God's sake? These thoughts thunderclapped in my head, reverberating like epic rubberbands between the present and the past, between the moment of standing and watching Thurston and Kim and Lee and company playing just then and the moment of first realizing the import of this band among the world of indie rock. I felt just on the edge of some historical prophecy fulfillment, but then I realized I really didn't have time for that right then.

I scooted out of the crowd and began to sprint full-flung down the pavement toward Gang Gang Dance. A guy, some European kid, fell in behind me, matching my speed, and yelled, "Gang Gang! Gang Gang Dance!", with every syllable rhyming with "pan," which I really liked. We ran wordless for the rest of the way, coming around and down a slow bend of sidewalk and into the sunken bowl of the ATP stage. In this fleeting rush, the particulate crowd blended into one mass, one whose uniformity nevertheless alienated me less than the groups of twos and threes that had swarmed around me since walking through the gate on the first day. It was the first time this feeling manifested in me, this sort of communal, agreed-upon glee. My troubles seemed to sink into this communal positivity, my residual fatigue and feelings of violation and rigid out-of-placeness becoming gelatinous and mutable and reforming into basically a big smiley face. Though this occurred pretty much indisputably independently of Gang Gang Dance's playing on the stage in front of me, there's no other band I would have chosen to soundtrack the moment. Liz Bougatsos swayed like a conjured viper in the center of the stage while the rest of the band fiddled fabulously with their toys all around her, generating a sound that was, yes, terribly booming but also sensuous, in the sense of an overpowering smell or red velvet emotion and less like, say, the avalanche of sound created by My Bloody Valentine. Even though I got kicked out of the press ditch for not having a camera (yelling, "I had one but it got stolen!" doesn't really earn any points with Catalan security guards, it turns out), it was still a fantastic show by one of the best bands in indie rock today. Cheesy sounding, but true.

Calculating it just right, I split from GGD and ran back up to Sonic Youth for the first real pleasant timing of the night. Just as I came within range, I heard Kim's gut-familiar moan/croon from "The Sprawl" and I knew things were going to keep getting better. They followed "The Sprawl" with "Cross the Breeze," just as it is on the album, and followed that with new track "Anti-Orgasm," which I didn't pay much attention to. The hour was closing in on 2:00 a.m., our self-appointed check-out deadline, and so I peeled off to find M., which was surprisingly easy. The Ghostface show had ended earlier than either of the others, and we literally almost ran into each other. She gave me the bad news about missing my favorite GZA song, and then we linked hands and walked to baggage claim to get what's mine. My crotch-girding passport-pouch was digging into my flesh in a really undescribable way. I think another second not spent heading toward home would have been a mistake. Barcelona's metro system runs all night on Saturdays, which gave us our straight shot to Placa de Catalunya, where we got onto an airport shuttle and finally exhaled. Forty minutes later we were at Barcelona Airport, checked-in and seemingly out of the forest of disaster. (We were hungry, but we got muffins for that.)

But of course that forest's roots spread out far. When we got back to our flat at 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, our cat had urinated* all over the clean clothes M. had brought from the U.S. while they were still in the suitcase. Disastrous! The next time I go to Barcelona, I'm putting him in the bag.

*[Three times. Fucking cat.]

Can't find any tiny little bottles of travel shampoo

2009-05-27T17:46:00.000+02:00

I am getting ready to pack to fly to Cologne, hang out for 9 hours, then fly to Barcelona for Primavera Sound, which will be cool.

I'll be back on Sunday, but I'll probably post between now and then.

I am hungry now rawr!

I hurt my ankle making the train.

2009-05-24T10:53:00.000+02:00

Two days ago Julia and Simon left on a train for Germany, for good. I helped them.

They brought all their stuff down and we waited out in the street between their apartment's ground floor door and the Globe. The taxi they'd ordered was late. Their train was scheduled to leave at 2:30 p.m. and the taxi arrived at 2:16 or 2:17 p.m. Julia and Simon were both very stressed out. We threw their stuff in the car and jumped in.

The cab driver was cool about it -- he was Czech of course but could speak a little English, enough to know we were in a huge rush and to tell us what he was doing to deal with the traffic. The problem was the tickets they'd ordered were a special deal only available to German mailing addresses, so they'd ordered them by proxy and had them mailed to Prague. The tickets were non-transferable, so missing the train would have been a dramatic issue.

Then it started to rain. The traffic and rain were hellishly frustrating, as was our inability to know exactly how far we were from the station. When asked, the driver continued to gesture with his hand and complain about the traffic.

So it got to be exactly 2:40, and then 2:41 and then 2:42 and finally we turned into the parking lot of the train station. The rain was as hard as I've ever seen it in Prague. Simon jumped out and ran down the open hallway while Julia and I carried some of their huge pieces of luggage into the doorway and the driver dumped the rest on the ground. Then Simon appeared at the far end of the hallway and yelled, "Come on!" while we wrestled the last bag through the door, all of us soaked. Julia took off down the hallway with a small bag, yelling back over her shoulder, "I am just going now, will you bring [unintelligible]," and then she disappeared around the corner.

The total weight of all the bags was probably 300 or 400 pounds. I started dragging some of them to the far end, nervous about leaving the rest unattended. When I had just dragged the last bad to the far end of the hall where the opening to the train station interior was, Simon materialized in a fluster and said, "Let's go!"

So we both carried all the bags as fast as we could, trying to roll the ones that could roll. That's how I got a big barbarian-vampire bite on my ankle. My sock got all bloody (not really, but some), and the water dripping down my leg didn't help.

Then we wheezed up the steps and onto the platform and past a cop chaperoning three miserable-looking leftist detainees with a dog and finally to the door of the train. It was still there. All their bags disappeared inside with surprising speed given their bulk, and suddenly I was standing on the platform alone while the two Germans checked around to make sure nothing was missing.

It turns out the train -- specifically the first-class car, which was their car -- was under repairs, so they didn't leave for at least thirty minutes. But if there hadn't been repairs, I think we would have just made it anyway.

I left before the train did, so I didn't get to take my cliche farewell video as planned, but I still took several pictures and videos that I will upload when I get home from work this afternoon. It's 10:29 a.m. and I will get off work at 4:40 p.m. or so.

Megan comes back in two days.

Megan comes back in two days!

I finished Don Quixote and it was worth it and now I am reading a book called The Shadow of the Wind by a Spanish author named Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and it was published in 2001 and takes place from the '30s to '50s in Barcelona which is where I am going at the end of the week, and it's the most pitch-perfect novel I have read in like two years. It's -- really really compulsively readable in the best way.

All I do is listen to electronic music and ignore my bosses at work (the Globe).

I have a little piece of paper -- actually one of the business cards I designed for the Globe -- on which in pencil I've written a list of the things I need to do today/soon. The list is:
"Jobs
Rent
vet
CS
ticket"
What that means is: I need to send emails to the huge(-ish) list of potential employers I found on craigslist and saved in my Gmail drafts folder; I need to cruise craigslist for more potential places to live in Chapel Hill, and then email the most promising ones; I need to call or otherwise contact an English-speaking veterinarian to find out how to get Hobbes castrated and also certified for plane travel; I need to cruise CouchSurfing and try to find a place to sleep in Barcelona on the night of the 28th; I need to find out whether the plane ticket from Prague to Cologne is still as cheap as it was last week.

I also just remembered I need to get Julia to call Airberlin for me to find out how easy/hard it will be to take Hobbes on board with us. Sigh.

I've made a five page flier for the Globe. It has taken so many more weeks than it needed to. Everyone wants changes all the time. Here's the most up-to-date version:

The text for most of the flier was written by people other than me and is terrible. Terrible terrible. I do not endorse this flier in the slightest, except for the map, which I am proud of and think looks great. The original was a straight screen grab of Google Maps.

I should get paid so much more for this.

I love to sleep.

MY portfolia

2009-05-17T20:02:00.000+02:00

of goofy shit for the Globe:

That represents like 4 months of photoshop experience. give me job now?

I just got another raise o_O

2009-05-17T17:04:00.000+02:00

At least I think I did. I was told before -- "You'll get a 5 crown raise."

Then on this last pay check I got a 5 crown raise.

Now I was just told -- "You'll get a 10 crown raise."

So it remains to be seen, two weeks from now -- will I be making base-rate-75-plus-10-equals-85 crowns? Or will I be making base-rate-75-plus-5-equals-80-plus-10-more-equals-90 crowns?

ONLY THE NEXT TWO WEEKS WILL TELL>

Oh

2009-05-13T02:27:00.001+02:00

Oh cause by the way me and Megan are coming home this summer.

Just applied

2009-05-13T01:07:00.000+02:00

I just applied for a half dozen jobs in the Triangle, including:

--two video-game related jobs, including:
------video game testing
------video game level design

--organic farm assistant

--creative director of the ArtsCenter

--proofreading from home

Maybe I'll get one.

New story

2009-05-11T18:47:00.004+02:00

I promoted a new story to my writing blog.

It's called "Ice Floes"

most of you've probably already read it. this is the definitive (so far) version.

tell me what you think?

thanks^^

Here is what I look like right now:

Radiohead Live Charlotte, NC (5/09/2008)

2009-05-10T22:08:00.000+02:00

Hey all

Here's an embedded playlist of all the videos I took, in order, of the Radiohead concert last May. I finally put them into a single YouTube playlist so you can experience the show as I did! Except for the songs I didn't feel like recording -- there aren't many of those. It's a really, really cool series of recordings. The colors are my favorite part. Enjoy it:

(p.s. you can bring up the list of videos by clicking the little button next to the play button.)

PRG <--> BRC

2009-05-09T12:07:00.000+02:00

Wed 27-May-09
Prague (PRG)
Depart 8:25 pm to Dusseldorf (DUS)
Arrive 9:40 pm
339 mi
(546 km)
Duration: 1hr 15mn

Flight: 3287
Operated by: EUROWINGS
Economy/Coach Class ( Seat assignments upon check-in More Information ), Snack, CANADAIR REGIONAL JET 200
Please check in with Eurowings. If checking in at a kiosk, use your name rather than confirmation number.
Total distance: 339 mi (546 km)
Total duration: 1hr 15mn
Thu 28-May-09
Dusseldorf (DUS)
Depart 6:40 am to Barcelona (BCN)
Arrive 8:55 am
725 mi
(1,167 km)
Duration: 2hr 15mn

Flight: 4466
Economy/Coach Class ( Seat assignments upon check-in More Information ), Snack, Boeing 737-500
Total distance: 725 mi (1,167 km)
Total duration: 2hr 15mn
Sun 31-May-09
Barcelona (BCN)
Depart 6:10 am to Munich (MUC)
Arrive 8:15 am
681 mi
(1,096 km)
Duration: 2hr 5mn

Flight: 4483
Operated by: LUFTH CITYLINE
Economy/Coach Class ( Seat assignments upon check-in More Information ), Snack, Canadian Regional Jet 700
Please check in with Lufthansa Cityline. If checking in at a kiosk, use your name rather than confirmation number.
Munich (MUC)
Depart 2:35 pm to Prague (PRG)
Arrive 3:40 pm
165 mi
(266 km)
Duration: 1hr 5mn

Flight: 3272
Operated by: AIR DOLOMITI
Economy/Coach Class ( Seat assignments upon check-in More Information ), Snack, ATR 42-500
Total distance: 846 mi (1,362 km)
Total duration: 3hr 10mn (9hr 30mn with connections)

Hobbes plops.

2009-05-08T16:50:00.000+02:00

I kick ass.

2009-05-07T23:19:00.002+02:00

i was told i earned myself an impromptu raise at work tonight

due to my kicking ass

Staying up all night

2009-05-05T07:18:00.001+02:00

7:17 a.m.

not sleepy!

finished "up and down" tonight

just at 90 pages

how did i celebrate?

two glasses of kahlua and skim milk.

oh yeah

I did

2009-05-01T05:23:00.000+02:00

Subj: To Mr. Starling Lawrence

Hello, how are you?

I writing out of curiosity and a bit of ambition. Your son Josh gave me your address and told me I should contact you about my interest in publishing. That interest is mostly in the form of questions and longing at this point, but I'd like to know what steps will take me closer to realizing it and you can probably tell me better than most.

I'm living in Prague right now and have been for about seven months -- this is my first time out of the U.S. and so far it's been a good experience, although I'm certain Prague isn't a home for me. I'm working some odd jobs to pay rent, which is how I met Mike Corkery, who gave me Josh's email address. I work in an English-language bookstore here and started a bi-monthly reading club, so Mike and I have had plenty of opportunity to talk about the subject of books, which naturally explains how this letter was born. I love the two sides of literature, as a reader and a writer, and would love to do something that taps into the great potential of both. Part of why I moved to Prague immediately after graduating was so I could finally have the chance and the time to write, which has been a great pleasure that I would love to continue to nourish in some form or another. (I graduated last spring from UNC - Chapel Hill with a Journalism degree which I haven't put to much use yet, but hopefully there are some skill overlaps between the copy-editing and proof-reading areas of the book and journalism world.)

I don't know how far in the door I can get my foot just through unsolicited emails, but I'm willing to see. If you have some words of advice, I would love to hear them, and if you can recommend me a promising course of action I'll be more than grateful. I'll end the email by saying thanks very much for reading, and I hope you're enjoying the start of Spring where you are as much as I am here. Nothing makes you appreciate the sun like five months of unrelenting Slavic winter...

All the best,

Alex Henderson

I am

2009-05-01T04:35:00.000+02:00

I just took a shower; I am sitting with a cat on my belly, I have no clothes on, it is 4:34 a.m. and I am debating whether to send an email to Starling Lawrence or not.

Czech Republic

2009-04-30T17:11:00.000+02:00

In this country, it is okay for a mother to pull her young daughter's pants down on a busy street corner, hold her bare bottom over a storm drain and let her daughter urinate through the grating.

However, it is not okay to smile at, make eye-contact with or in any way acknowledge the shared humanity of your grocery store cashier.

/end transmission

Wilco (The Album)

2009-04-29T14:09:00.000+02:00

That's what they're calling #7. I like it.

I am standing in the kitchen in some ratty shorts and my Nintendo hooded sweatshirt cooking an egg inside of a piece of bread with a hole torn out of the middle. The butter is what makes it really taste good. Hobbes wants into the kitchen but I am not letting him -- in fact I chased him under the bed as a lesson.

It's 1:48 p.m.

I just cracked the egg beautifully. Yolk: intact. I am probably getting salmonella all over my keyboard. Sorry, mom.

Out through the living room/kitchen window, I can see a weird tubular train progressing slowly from left to right. It goes out of view of one window and comes back into view in the other. It's a neat effect.

I wrote today, as soon as I woke up, which was a little after noon. I am on page 76 of one chapter/section of this story. It's called "Up and Down", the chapter/section, but I abbreviate it "U + D" at the top of every page. I think I've written, longhand, about 130-150 pages, maybe? Probably a little less. I'm slightly over, or under, halfway finished. That means the finished rough product should be about 280 pages? And if the (rough) average of 377 words per handwritten page holds out, that puts the final story around 100,000 words. Probably not worth it.

One thing I've noticed about Prague is the variety of containers you have at your pleasure in which to bring your milk home. Plastic bottles, plastic bags, cardboard boxes, metal cans, and I believe mini-cow are all common grocery store items. Believe it when you see it!

I cooked this egg too long -- the yolk is more solid than I'd like it to be. Hobbes crept into the kitchen, and when I turned and clapped my hands in his face to scare him away, his paws and claws literally treadmill'ed on the hardwood floor like a cartoon character running in mid-air. Would you believe me if I told you it made the same sound, as well?

I just discovered an onion that Megan had left here which was hidden behind a box of chocolates she also left here. The box of chocolates is the same as it was, but the onion has grown a dozen thick green fingers from its top and looks creepily like some sort of alien sporebomb slowly taking over the kitchen/world.

I am anxious about tomorrow's Trivia Night at the Globe being a complete failure in terms of attendance and me having to basically cancel further nights. Sigh. The book club is a stunning success, though. Hooray! I am going to make my next egg now.

Turns out I'd left the next piece of bread in the skillet on a low temperature, and now it looks like some sort of dried out, skeletal version of itself on one side, and on the other side it is exactly the right amount of crisped. This may work out for the best after all.

I still haven't recovered my harddrive. I will probably try today to do it. There are about one million problems associated with running disc recovery software, but I'll prevail, I'm mildly sure of it.

Last night I created a new Dungeons & Dragons character that looks something like this, and my German friend Simon made one that looks something like this. My name is Kafkaesque, and I'm a morally unaligned paladin, and his name is Eneit, which is the Germanization of the name "Aeneid." He is a wizard. I created my own deity to follow for this character, named The Rook. This is circuitous reference to Franz Kafka's The Castle by way of chess piece imagery. I still need to work on the actual theology.

Today we'll actually play, I think.

If anyone ever tells you that Sky Blue Sky is not a good album, you punch them right in the face.

I wish I lived in Oklahoma

2009-04-28T12:19:00.000+02:00

if only because they have the coolest Official State Rock Song of any state in the union.

Megan is in North Carolina

2009-04-21T21:46:00.001+02:00

and I am not.

:[

Radiohead

2009-04-11T14:32:00.000+02:00

is coming to Prague.

Tickets go on sale Tuesday -- I don't know what time. Maybe I won't get any sleep. Crap.

The show is in August in a big expo field area to the north of the city. I am so excited.

----

Also today I took a couple confused videos of a series of domestic abuses that I witnessed in the Globe; a car screeched, a girl jumped out and ran into the store, I jumped out from behind the counter to stop her if she was going to grab and steal books, and then a guy came in and chased her around a book display and then slapped her in the face really hard, and then Jason the manager and I tried to kick him out but he wouldn't leave, then he left and came back and left and came back and I got video of me pushing him out of the store, and then he threatened to get a gun and come back and then we called the cops and a lot of crap happened, including him swinging at Jason and Jason swinging back, but I didn't get that on video.

when I go home I'll play what I got on video.

Phew.

The weather

2009-04-04T13:22:00.000+02:00

is finally nice.

No, not nice. Perfect. It's like Chapel Hill-perfect, Weaver Street lawn-perfect weather right now. Megan and I put Hobbes in his brand new cat harness and leash and took him on a walk to a small park. But Hobbes is an indoor cat, so the harness and leash were unnecessary, as the sheer horror of being out-of-doors put him into an almost catatonic (hah) state of immobility. He just sat there, as did we, and it was lovely. Lovely.

Now I'm at work, where the front of the store has been recently gutted and re-fit with cafe tables and chairs to replace the bulky and ugly wastes of space that used to clog the front. Now it feels like I'm in a sunny European bistro. It's also lovely.

Megan and I are going to host a couchsurfer tonigtht who is coming to Prague to see Obama. He's speaking in front of Prague Castle at 10 a.m. Sunday, which Megan and I want to get there at 6 a.m. because the gates open at 7 a.m. and there will probably be a big crowd. We will have an interesting night, because I am working until 4:30 p.m. and then I am coming back to work at 10 p.m. to close the store for Julia, so she can have a drink with her friends from Germany, which means I'll be getting off work around 1:30 a.m. tonight, and UNC plays at around 3:00 a.m. tonight, which means when the game is over it'll be about 5:00 a.m. which gives us plenty of time to make it to the castle by 6. And I don't think I'll be sleepy, because I slept from 8:00 p.m. last night until 6:00 a.m.

I am also going to buy a bicycle for 2000 crowns, I think. It's time for it.

Also I finished 2666 a few days ago and it is very worth the time it takes to read. Also I just sold a copy of Finnegans Wake to a non-native English speaker. Will they be able to understand it (any worse than everyone else?)?

I submitted my story about Zorion to the Glimmer Train Fiction Open contest, under the title "Ice Floes." I think it's a good title -- I came up with it on the spot, as I was submitting, and I think it matches the story quite well. I am going to post the story to my fiction blog, zerowhitenoises now. If you haven't read it, please do!

Okay time to go bye!

Just to clarify

2009-04-04T10:13:00.000+02:00

my harddrive actually did crash and I actually did lose about 90% of my data

my april fool's post is dated "April 2" which is the day after april fool's which is the point.

my harddrive crashing post is dated "March 30" because that's the day my harddrive crashed.

totally unrelated posts, separated by 3 days

unfortunately :/

Just kidding!

2009-04-02T15:19:00.002+02:00

Hey, this is just a quick explanatory note about yesterday's posting, if I can call it that. Obviously, some of you didn't check your calendars ;-) All I can say is... "Gotcha!"

:-P :-P

Alex

an error wiped out 90% of my harddrive

2009-03-30T03:07:00.000+02:00

there are no more pictures from 2008 or Prague or music from college

my documents are still there but those were backed up

everything downloaded is gone and all my pictures are gone and videos.

p.s. sneak peek at trivia night flier

2009-03-27T14:27:00.002+01:00

heee

Guess the title?

What the Hell?

2009-03-27T11:44:00.002+01:00

Why has it been so long since I updated?!?!

Things are brewing, though. Things are brewing. New job...starting trivia night at the Globe...secrets, secrets. I'll tell you more, soon.

Promise!

(101st)

Just got finished training Julia

2009-03-08T22:00:00.000+01:00

Who is Julia?

Ta-da! It's Julia. Julia König. She's German! And she's my new co-worker at the Globe, which is funny 'cause she just walked in off the street a few weeks ago.

Now she's also my friend. She and her boyfriend, Simon, had dinner at our apartment about a week ago. We saw Slumdog Millionaire together, too, which was excellent. You should see it. You'd love it. When one of the girls at the bookstore had to leave due to schedule non-commitment, Julia stepped right in to replace her. So now I get to work with someone with whom I get along famously. Hurrah!

But she just left. So I'm here by myself. I'm going to write for a bit I think. Bye!

p.s. 100th post.

The Update of My Slow Handwriting

2009-03-06T21:57:00.000+01:00

i'm working on a story in a gray three-ring notebook that's getting pretty long. longest thing i've written so far. i counted 3 pages the other day and found an average of 376.667 words per page, which i multiplied by the number of pages i've written, which is 97.5, and i found out that that's a lot of words. and it's like halfway done. cool.

Nothing but raisins

2009-03-05T14:01:00.000+01:00

are in my cereal today.

In other news:

My connections with 'Sup Magazine are probably going to result in a free backstage press-pass for the ridiculously huge Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona, Spain, this May. My Bloody Valentine. Aphex Twin. Sonic Youth.

O_O

So I am excited. For free!

My apartment

2009-03-04T14:52:00.000+01:00

Here's what it looks like.

And here's what I look like right now:

And here's what I looked like a week ago:

The other day I spent a thousand crowns

2009-02-24T23:20:00.001+01:00

on two books. Both of them are in Russian.

One of them in called Гарии Поттер и Философиский Камень -- that sounds like this when you read it out loud: "Garee Potter ee Filosofisky Kamyen'" and its English-language meaning should be obvious. Here's the cover of the book for those too silly to figure it out.

I also bought an anglo-ruskie/ruskie-anglisky slovar', or English-Russian/Russian-English dictionary. The reason should be clear.

But guess what? My friend Natasha who is from a town near Ekaterinberg heard I was trying to read a book in Russian and she offered to let me borrow her Russian copy of an English-language children's book originally titled Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I'm on the top of the fourth page. My vocabulary needs work :[

Tomorrow is the book club!!! No one reads this blog or cares!!! :[!!!

Fortnightly.

2009-02-20T23:44:00.001+01:00

I haven't really said much about this yet, but guess what?

Wednesday, Feb. 25, I host the first ever meeting of a new book-of-the-month reading club being held/sponsored by the Globe. It's called Fortnightly. Here's the promotional stuff I've made for it:

large banner

table stand

generic square image for Facebook/etc.

The concept is that the owner of the Globe, Mike Sito, likes me and thinks I'm enthusiastic enough (about books, people, life, etc.) to actually helm this thing and make it work. So I am trying to. I've put together a big list of books I think would be good to read, and I've tried to advertised it and bring people in by posting on English-language Prague social Web sites like expats.cz and prague.tv, as well as making a Facebook group. I also made an email sign-up sheet and taped it to the counter of the bookstore, and I've had one sheet fill up already with people interested. I've made a new friend, too, a guy named Grady, because we talked so much once I invited him.

So the new group meets Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. and we'll start by discussing just what the group should be like. Then we'll talk about the first book, Bohumil Hrabal 's Too Loud a Solitude. (Members get 10% off!) It's a very slim novel (98 pages) about a guy who works destroying paper for the government, but who reads all the paper he destroys, and so educates himself while the government tries to censor everyone else...I think. I haven't read it yet. I will begin to read it tonight or tomorrow -- I told myself I would get to the halfway point (well, at least finish Part 1) of Don Quixote before I started the new book, and I just reached that point tonight. I think it's the perfect book to start the club with, because it's so short, it seems really interesting, and Bohumil Hrabal is a famous Prague resident. There's a mural of him painted near my old flat at Palmovka:

Cool, huh? That's his famous cats. There's also a typewriter and a bunch of famous books in a painted bookshelf.

p.s. if you want to get updates about the club as if you're a member, send an email to fortnightly.globe@gmail.com and I'll add you to the mailing list.

So that's what my life has been like, lately. If you're reading this, then you already probably know that I have been writing a whole lot lately. I am (hopefully) near being finished revising a long short story (the longest story I've ever finished) called The Freezing Point of Blood. It may also be called Zorion's Eyes or just simply Zorion. I don't know. It will go up on zerowhitenoises once it's done done. Also I hope to get it published somewhere (cough Katherine Latshaw will you help me get this short story published? cough).

I also came up with a cool idea for a story that weaves the four separate narratives of a young journalist, a jaded politician, the real-world band Deerhoof and a young Thai girl who gets a strange handicap after an explosion, all taking place in a fictional European city-state named Maghrey. I think it will be cool. First I have to finish the other long story I am writing. It's called The Physics of My Slow Decline, although that might just end up being the title of the first part of a longer story that would include some vaguely (or maybe extremely is the word I'm looking for) paranormal/supernatural elements. If that's the case, then the title of the entire work is most likely to be Gradual Ruin.

Hope you guys like the last blog post I made. Pictures and video take a lot longer to structure into an update than text.

Also I think I want to start a bookstore somewhere in Europe. How do you start a bookstore? Thoughts, please. Maybe Uncle Harold can lend me $100,000?

Stories from my life:

2009-02-20T12:56:00.002+01:00

1. The cook at the Globe, one of them, is this American guy named Don who's pretty cool, total ex-hippie, missing teeth and scraggly beard. He's a helluva cook, but he's not always had as settled a life as working in the kitchen at a cafe.

Turns out, 10 years ago, he was in Winston-Salem, N.C. The reason I know this is because Google Maps has unveiled Street View for Winston-Salem -- now you can click and walk around my home town as if you were really there.

Well so and I was exploring parts of W-S on google maps a week or so ago at The Globe and Don walks up, being bored, and we start talking. He tells me that he actually spent a few weeks in NC when he was a big hippie in the '90s, and he stayed in Winston-Salem for part of it. And he had breakfast with Oprah.

What?

Yeah, he says, he had breakfast with Oprah in Winston-Salem, at the IHOP on the corner of Silas Creek and Peters Creek. Here it is on Google Maps:

View Larger Map

The story is that Don and his friend were chilling in IHOP when someone came by and told them that Oprah was in the back of the restaurant. Long story short, there she was, and they went to chat with her for the rest of their meal. She was nice and not done-up or very celebrity-esque, and was in town for a friend's wedding or something. So there you go. Weird.

2. Winston-Salem in on Google Street View. Why??

3. I went with Provokotor to the, uh...the name is something like "Recycle Center" in Czech, but it's specifically for electronics and "e-waste" that can't be disposed of safely in a regular dump or at a regular materials recycle center. Basically it was cool because they had mountains of old computer monitors, TVs and keyboards that they did interesting things with, incl. smash with hammers and turn into giant dinosaur sculptures. Here, check this stuff out (lots of pics/videos follow:):

Homeless man we took a picture of even though he had just told us not to.

"You should write an article called when guys look like chicks, but not in a good way."

Thanks, Peter.

This is the room where Czech men break all the things people send to them to recycle, and put the pieces into the appropriate bins.

Coolest thing ever:

Cool!

5. I met a French girl named Nathalie a few days ago who went to the United States for her senior year of high school, around 2001-2002, the same year I was a sophomore. And guess where she went to study abroad?

West Forsyth Public High School, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

O_O Seriously. We talked about Mr. Rushton.

WEIRD!!!!!!!

Thief and Caught

2009-02-11T17:00:00.005+01:00

Yesterday, a 70-year-old man came in and stole four Milan Kundera books from the bookstore while I was on duty.

Today, he came in again, and the clerk on duty recognized him from the security footage yesterday and caught him.

The police came and took him to jail.

test post for Yusuf

2009-02-06T19:15:00.002+01:00

Top 5 David Černy public artworks in Prague

David Černy is now uniquely (in)famous for his staggeringly controversial art installation 'Entropa,' intended by the Czech government to commemorate their country's inaugural rotation into the EU presidency. The artwork was supposed to be created by a 27-artist commission, one each from the EU member countries, in order to mitigate the strongly euroskeptic stance of Czech President Vaclav Klaus. Unfortunately for everyone involved, they let Černy work unsupervised.

The finished product takes a pot-shot at every country in the EU, including the Czech Republic, but the installation isn't actually in the Czech Republic -- it's in Brussels. Still, for those looking to familiarize themselves with the work of Europe's new most talked about artist, there's no better place than Prague. Several of his most interesting sculptures and public art projects are scattered through the bohemian capital, but you won't find them on the free tourist maps at the airport. Rather, try this guide when making a walking tour of the top Černy spots of Prague:

Stop #1: "Man Hanging Out"
Černy created “Man Hanging Out” in response to the question: “What role will the intellectual play in the new millennium?” The jarring image of a man resembling Sigmund Freud hanging by one hand above a busy intersection while the other hand remains casually in his pocket is not easy to forget. Standing beneath the statue, it's hard not to feel anxious, as if at any moment the man will let go. Of course, he has hung on through tours around Europe as well as Chicago, USA, so it's not likely he'll be dropping anytime soon. Click on the map marker for a picture, as well as further notes.

View Larger Map

Stop #2: "Pissing pool"
One of Černy's more controversial pieces of public art, this sculpture features two animatronic men standing in a pool shaped like the Czech Republic, which is full of water. The water is being constantly...replenished by the men, which rotate and swivel their various parts to "spell out" famous quotes from Czech historical figures. The kicker? You can send an SMS to the number printed on the statue's base to cause the two figures to interrupt their charade in order to spell out your message. Marriage proposal, anyone?

View Larger Map

Stop #3: "Pink Tank"
This tank has a long history, but most recently it has been nearly sunk underground by the artist. The white stripe on the front end -- the only part visible above the ground -- mimics the white invasion stripe of the Soviet tanks at the beginning of the Cold War. You can see the humbled war machine by taking a tram to Švandovo divadlo‎ and snooping around.

View Larger Map

Stop #4: MeetFactory
More than just a venue for Černy's uniquely unsettling dropping car sculptures, the MeetFactory also hosts a huge chunk of Prague's best underground/indie music concerts. It's worth a trip in the daytime, though, even if it is somewhat off the beaten path as far as Prague sightseeing goes. Of course, maybe that's only fitting...

View Larger Map

Stop #5: TV Tower Babies
Finally, the big momma of Černy art in Prague. The TV Tower's babies have become an iconic part of Prague's contemporary self-image. Check prague.tv's logo for proof. The babies were installed by the artist on the TV Tower installed by the Soviets during the Cold War, which was used to jam electronic broadcasts between East and West. More than any other installation, the tower babies represent the radical shift in Czech culture from pre- and post-Soviet eras. And the best part is, you can see it from anywhere in the city, so there's no need to travel. Take that, Prague Castle!

View Larger Map

Of course, that's not the full extent of Černy's public artwork. But if I told you where to find everything, that would be taking the fun of discovery away from you. And don't limit your Černy search to Prague -- Liberec, for example, is home to one of the most interesting bus stops outside of Salvador Dali's imagination...

Megan hates our cat

2009-02-04T15:34:00.017+01:00

and you would too!

Never get one!

The little orange bastard thinks he deserves to be in the kitchen whenever he wants, now, so he whines all night, which keeps Megan up, which is bad. So now the plan is to keep the kitchen/living room door shut all the time.

On an unrelated note: here's a sideways video of fat snow flakes falling outside our window. You can see the red drapes we bought for our bedroom window -- they make the yellow walls look like strawberry-banana when the morning sun shines through them. I love this apartment so much more than our last one, and splitting the rent for one room means it's only like $225 o_O

<3

and here's what I look right now, after having cleaned the bedroom something mighty:

DFW:Online:In Memoriam

2009-02-03T20:11:00.000+01:00

Go read everything DFW wrote for Harper's.

Why, yes I do!

2009-02-03T19:47:00.014+01:00

Want mind-blowing penis size?

These ads are EVERYWHERE online in the Czech Republic. I don't know how, but any Web site you go to in the course of your daily business in America will be full of ads just like this here. Here are a couple more:

These two are a looping animated gif:

and finally:

God bless Viamax.

So this is the funniest thing I have ever seen

2009-01-29T13:34:00.009+01:00

I'm not joking:

(context: it's a YouTube user comment on a video of a little Australian, I think, or British kid playing guitar and singing a song to a Johnny Cash melody with new lyrics about having a fetish for YouTube. The video is irrelevant; what matters is what this user, ewan, says. Read it over and over. Read it over and over and over.)

[edit: the image won't upload very big on my blog, but if you click it and open it in a new window/tab, you can read it easily. please do.]

LOST

2009-01-28T11:45:00.002+01:00

Here is the disastrous re-cap of last night's attempt at a DnD game. Why did it fail? Well, because I can't tell right from left, apparently:

View Larger Map

oh, also, it's pretty addictive once you start watching it.

Stop and See the Babies

2009-01-27T00:48:00.000+01:00

Everything in Prague is very close to you, all the time.

That's what I've had trouble remembering since it first smacked me in the face one day, when I was "wandering," "lost," through a new part of town and suddenly I was standing at the rear entrance of a very familiar grocery store. That's what it's like here. Megan and I went in search of some David Cerny public art, and it turned out to be hanging from the roof right above our heads, just a few yards from the first restaurant we ever patronized, no less.

So things in Prague are close. I've known about the TV Tower babies for months, of course. And I've known about the view of TV Tower through my living room window.

But you can actually see the babies from my living room. Really -- just standing by the window, on a clear day (of which there are hearteningly more and more as we tiptoe out of winter), you can see a good snatch of gunmetal tykes frozen in their eternal climb up that futuristic shaft. It's really, really cool. I don't want to become jaded to it.

My final roommate arrived today -- Leonor, from France. She speaks English very well, and also Spanish, which -- and try to follow this -- is what she was speaking with her two Czech friends when she showed up at the flat today. It seems that their conversational language of choice is Spanish, but Jana, the other roommate, and Megan both speak French, and French seems to be the main language spoken between Jana and Leonor, so far, but Jana also speaks Czech with Leonor's friends, so that the breakdown is something like this: Frenchie Leonor speaks Spanish to Czech friends and French and English to Czech Jana, who speaks French and English back to Frenchie Leonor and English and Czech to Leonor's friends (who just adore Hobbes, by the way), while (theoretically) speaking both French and English to Megan, who can speak French and English back, while everyone speaks English to me.

Huh!

Starting a group?

2009-01-27T00:38:00.000+01:00

Welllllllll I think this would be cool:

To find a good space to invite people who might hear about it through expats.cz, prague.tv, Facebook or word-of-(my)-mouth via The Globe to come read/listen to prose and poetry and view visual art and listen to musical compositions and engage in interactive cleverness. Sound familiar?

'Cause, you know?

The new Animal Collective album

2009-01-23T15:48:00.000+01:00

Merriweather Post Pavilion, is excellent. I got a .rar of it from a megaupload not too long ago. Now I listen to it on my Apple iPod Touch while I have a Smile on my face.

Also I got paid yesterday from the Bead School for December, which was 14 days, but they took 1,000 Kč off for my having given them "late notice." Urgh. That's like $50. At least now I can pay rent and buy groceries.

Fever Ray!

Moneys

2009-01-23T10:27:00.000+01:00

I added a Google AdSense banner down the left-hand side of the screen, and a YouTube AdSense video players along the bottom -- every time you click either of these links -- including watching videos at the bottom -- I make money.

Just so you know.

Security footage of my robbery, with annotations

2009-01-21T17:46:00.003+01:00

This is the security camera footage of me getting robbed at The Globe -- fast-forward to 1:45 if you don't want to see the part where he labors to trick me into leaving the register.

Here's a key:

00:03 -- thief comes onto screen in baseball cap, bottom right

00:19 -- he leans back to find a book that is out-of-sight for someone sitting at the register

00:30 - 00:50 -- he stalls by browsing books by the counter

00:51 -- he addresses me in Czech. I tell him, in Czech, "I don't speak Czech."

00:54 -- he looks again to see which book he should ask me for

00:58 -- I stand up to talk to him. He is asking for a book, but I can't understand him (I'm pretty sure he used this tactic to help create confusion).

1:00 - 1:45 -- I go back and forth between the thief and the computer several times to look up different books he seems to be asking for. He spells "P" "E" "U" "R", so I look up if we have any books by "Puer," which we don't.

1:50 -- Finally he says something I can understand. He seemed particularly excited, and his face becomes more animated, when he strikes upon the three words: modra knihy Peru. In Czech, the first two words mean "blue" and "book," so I have no trouble figuring out that he is indicating his interest in this book.

1:51 -- I begin to move around the central display of books to the far wall to find the book he's asking for. You can already see him moving in by this point.

1:52 - 1:53 -- He leans around the counter and reaches for the cash box. It's an open metal green box that we have instead of a cash register proper. The irony is that only a few days before, the main manager of the store in Prague ordered a brand new working cash register drawer. It isn't here yet.

1:54 -- He's grabbed the cash and is walking toward me.

2:01 -- The video jumps a bit backward in time, now. This is the close angle camera in the corner, where you can see me walking to investigate the book he's asking for.

2:03 -- This is when I realize he hasn't followed me, and I look back to witness him reaching into the cash box.

2:07 -- I yell out, "Hey! Stop that! I see you!" or something similar, and he walks quickly toward me with an expression of beguiling innocence on his face. He says something like, "I just, I just" in heavily accented English, but I'm not listening to him much. He has both hands very obviously behind his back, like he's a cartoon of a thief. I demand the money back.

2:08 -- You can see him stuffing bills into his back pockets.

2:09 -- At the first sign of my aggression, he reaches his right hand around and gives me two crumpled up bills that value about $25.

2:10 - 2:14 -- I start pushing him and stepping in his way when he tries to walk around me. He continually points to the cash in my hand, saying that that's all there was, and coming close to claiming that he just found it on the ground. I know that he has more, and I'm trying to pressure him to give it to me.

2:16 -- He points to the spot on the floor where he supposedly found the cash.

2:18 -- With one hand gripping his jacket collar, I tell him that he is going to stay with me while we count the money to make sure he has given it all back.

2:20 -- He gives me another bill, value about $5, and makes gestures as if to say, "OK, we're square now, right?"

2:22 -- I tell him the equivalent of "Oh, no,buddy," and grab him by the collar again. We start walking back to the front of the store.

2:27 -- The camera switches back to the overhead view.

2:28 -- I yell the name of the manager on duty once or twice, very loudly.

2:29 -- He makes a break for it, dashing out of my grip and toward the front entrance, which, you can see in the video, leads into the hallway that extends past the bottom of the frame and into the cafe where the manager is.

2:30 -- I lunge after him.

2:30 -- I grab the arm of his jacket.

2:31 -- He pulls open the front door, and steps back to let it open. I get a firmer grip on his arm.

2:32 - 2:33 -- He darts out, dragging my arm across a sharp part of the door in the process.

2:34 -- I come back in, then go back out to see if I can still see him, all the time yelling the name of the manager.

2:39 -- I walk back toward the cafe and manager, counting the money I've been able to recover.

2:40 - 2:50 -- The manager comes around toward the front asking in a really indignant voice, "Dude, are you yelling?"

2:50 - 3:00 -- I give him a quick and jittery account of what happened. End of video.

Hooray!

2009-01-20T18:39:00.001+01:00

Awesome!

6:01 p.m. Czech time

2009-01-20T18:02:00.000+01:00

Is when he became president, even without oath.

Barack Obama will be sworn in with the same Bible used to swear in Abraham Lincoln

2009-01-20T17:09:00.000+01:00

That's pretty cool.

watching CNN at The Globe -- inauguration coverage from the back of the room

2009-01-20T16:46:00.000+01:00

Cheney is now more machine than man -- they literally had to wheel him out.

The Story of How I Went to Paris and Came Back

2009-01-19T14:56:00.001+01:00

The story begins when Callam, a cool British guy, comes to pick me and Megan up from our new flat at like 11 a.m.

We start driving, but get almost immediately lost (in Plzen). We stopped and asked directions from gas station attendant who was sitting on a picnic table outside on break. He immediately offered us marijuana. We declined. He shrugged, finished his break and went to get directions for us.

Then we got to Germany:

Then we were pulled over by German police immediately upon crossing border, forced to produce (expired) passports and sit nervously in car while they deliberated (they were very nice, though):

But that didn't stop us from being mean to them after they let us go:

Then we stayed up all night in hotel lobby in Saarbrücken eating homemade pizza and talking to kindly, stout and French-only night shift clerk. Before we ate the pizza, we went to a bar, and on the way the room key fell out of Megan's pocket. We realized this, but the group was unfazed. Still, we were overjoyed when we found it again on the way back home:

Then we went to sleep and woke up in this room in this German hotel in Saarbrucken:

(that's Callam)

and I watched this on TV:

Then we drove out of town -- Sarrbrucken, that is -- and tried to make our way to Paris. Soon, I turned on the radio because I wanted to hear the song "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" by Beyonce, and then we listened to it because it was the first song on the radio. Also we drove by this:

and it was pretty apocalyptic. Then we got to Frane!

We drove into Paris, though I was napping in the warm back seat when we actually made it into the city. This was the first thing we saw:

Which was pretty cool. Then Callam took us to his friends' apartment, which fortunately was very close to the apartment of the CouchSurfer we were going to sleep with that night. So after a bit, we parted ways, and Megan and I went to Romain's for the night. It was fantastic.

He took us to eat at a restaurant called La Tambour. It was the best restaurant I've ever been to. Here's a few pictures:

That alst picture is of Megan and our waiter, who was so cool. He brought Megan a creme brulee that she bought for me because I had never had good creme brulee before, and when I reached for a bite before she did, he whacked me on the knuckles with a spoon and chastised me for taking her dessert. The proprieter of the restaurant was a huge guy with a huge beard who apparently had lived one of the most interesting lives in Paris. I don't have a good picture of him, and I'm too lazy to go through and rotate all my vertically oriented pictures correctly, so just imagine a guy you'd love. That's him.

This is a shot of the living room of Romain's flat, where we slept. Lots of neat books.

The next day we went to the Centre Pompidou, which you can see from the window of this apartment. It's a modern art museum, and here are several pictures I took of it:

wall of gas masks

cool multicolored room -- very boundary-pushing

view from the top

Then we walked to the Eiffel Tower by way of the Seine. It was nice -- we walked the length of the Seine from the Centre Pompidou down to tower. Here's a video and some pictures:

Then we walked around and found this:

sorry they're sideways -- just turn your head

Then we went to the next CouchSurfing host -- Joseph's friend Clothilde. Joseph was in Lyon, but his friend was using his flat to surf, so we did too. Here's a picture of the room, the guest book we signed (with Asian writing!) and of the Catholic shrine set up in the wall (???):

Then we walked around and wanted to visit the catacombs but the line was too long so we walked to the cemetery instead and saw this stuff there and along the way:

That's Samuel Beckett's grave -- I left a note that you can read if you click the picture and zoom in on it. Megan wrote, on a metro ticket, "I'm waiting..."

Then we got to the final "couch" of the trip -- Frederique's! She was awesome, and she gave us a whole separate room with a bed and an attached bathroom with shower. It was a bounty of domestic treasures. We made very many crepes while living here.

The room:

Then it was New Year's Eve, and we went out to the Champs-Elysees and here's how our night went:

(please make sure to watch the above video all the way through -- just turn your head to the right if it really bothers you that much)

So that was very fun! Happy New Year's!

The next morning we woke up and went to Le Marais -- the historical Jewish and current gay district of Paris. There was a Jewish bookstore that we went into, and found these:

...seriously.

This next section will be the longest -- it's the section where we visited the Parisian Catacombs. This experience was amazing, amazing, really absolutely unprecedented in my life. Seriously -- these videos barely do it justice:

Please do yourself a favor and click each video, load it in a new window or tab, and then toggled HD on

(the line waiting -- it was like a 90 minute wait, and we were MISERABLE but as soon as we got inside we realized it was worth it. There are like 20 minutes of plain stone tunnels you have to walk down until you get to several wider sections where old explorers had carved miniature castles and towns in the rock itself, and then you walk a little bit more and see this:)

Then we went to the Lourve:

That was the end of that day. We came home, and realized that we were in a pickle. Megan had to be back in Prague for work a day earlier than we thought. So her boss agreed to pay for her plane ticket home for the next night. Then we went to sleep. When we woke up, we went to Notre Dame and I took these videos and pictures:

Oh, before I forget -- we also saw a bunch of people pretending to ice skate on fake plastic not-ice:

HAH!

Entropa

2009-01-18T16:30:00.000+01:00

by David Černý is the best thing in the world. Or at least the EU.

This is what it is:

and this is what it means (from Wikipedia):

Nations shown

With no clear indication made by the artist nor by the official presentation, various interpretations of a single country can be drawn, and this list is by no means definite.

Austria, a known opponent of atomic energy, is a green field dominated by nuclear power plant cooling towers^[6]; vapor is coming out of them at intervals
Belgium is presented as a half-full box of half-eaten Praline chocolates
Bulgaria is depicted by a series of connected "Turkish" squat toilets^[7]; neon-like lights connect and illuminate them
Cyprus is jigsawed (cut) in half
The Czech Republic's own piece is an LED display, which flashes controversial quotations by Czech President Václav Klaus
Denmark is built of Lego bricks, and some claim to see in the depiction a face reminiscent of the cartoon controversy^[8], though any resemblance has been denied by the artist^[9]
Estonia is presented with a hammer and sickle-styled power tools, the country has considered a ban on Communist symbols^[10]
Finland is depicted as a wooden floor and an [apparently drunk] male with a rifle, imagining various animals ^[11]
France is draped in a "GRÈVE!" ("STRIKE!") banner^[7]
Germany is a series of interlocking autobahns, described as "somewhat resembling a swastika",^[7]^[12]^[13] though that is not universally accepted.^[14] The cars move along the roads.
Greece is depicted as a forest that is entirely burned, possibly representing the 2007 Greek forest fires and the 2008 civil unrest in Greece.^[15]
Hungary features an Atomium made of its common agricultural products melons and Hungarian sausages, based on a floor of peppers
Ireland is depicted as a brown bog with bagpipes protruding from Northern Ireland; the bagpipes play music every five minutes^{[citation needed]}
Italy is depicted as a football pitch^[7] with several players who appear to be masturbating^[13] with the footballs they each hold.
Latvia is shown as covered with mountains, in contrast to its actual flat landscape
Lithuania a series of dressed Manneken Pis-style^{[citation needed]} figures urinating on its eastern neighbours; the streams of urine are presented by a yellow lighting glass fibers
Luxembourg is displayed as a gold nugget with "For Sale" tag^[7]
Malta is a tiny island with its prehistoric dwarf elephant as its only decoration; there's a magnifying glass in front of the elephant
The Netherlands has disappeared under the sea with only several minarets still visible;^[7] the piece is supposed to emit the singing of muezzins
Poland has a piece with priests erecting the rainbow flag of the Gay rights movement, in the style of the U.S. soldiers raising the Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima.^[16]
Portugal is shown as a wooden cutting board with three pieces of meat in the shape of its former colonies of Brazil, Angola, and Mozambique
Romania is a Dracula-style theme park^[7], blinking and emitting ghostly sounds at intervals
Slovakia is depicted as a Hungarian sausage (or a human body tightened by Hungarian tricolour)
Slovenia is shown as a rock engraved with the words first tourists came here 1213
Spain is covered entirely in concrete,^[17] with a concrete mixer situated near the Rioja region
Sweden does not have an outline, but is represented as a large Ikea-style self-assembly furniture box, containing Gripen fighter planes^{[citation needed]} (as supplied to the Czech Air Force)
The United Kingdom, known for its Euroscepticism and relative isolation from the Continent, is "included" as missing piece (an empty space) at the top-left of the work^[7]

I am so proud to be (not) Czech right now.

Thank you

2009-01-15T14:44:00.000+01:00

A lot of people have said some nice stuff to me because a guy took money from me at the bookstore.

Thank you. Thanks :]

Man, what the hell, man

2009-01-15T02:29:00.001+01:00

In addition to my unfortunate altercation with that jerk who robbed me tonight, these are the things that are happening in my life right now that make just nogoddamnedsense to me:

1. frank2169, a.k.a. "Collector of Postcards"

Two days ago, I got this email:

Dear knigt, my name is Francesco, and I live in Italy. My hobby is to collect postcards of places, monuments and city best in the world. In my collection, however, lacks one of the most beautiful postcards, “Praga CITY BY NIGHT ”. I ask the pleasure of sending a postcards from Repubblica Ceca through the normal post .If all this is possible for you, I do realize this dream. Thank you in advance for a positive outcome to offer my most cordial greetings. FRANCESCO
HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM ITALY
Contact: E-mail Frank2169@libero.it Address: PELLEGRINO Francesco Via R.BASILE NR.02 code 81038 TRENTOLA-DUCENTA (CASERTA) ITALY

which I, obviously, took to be some sort of very poorly written scam. So I wrote back:

This email seems like a scam to me. Are you a real person? Prove it, and then we'll see!

Where did you get my email address?

Which, surprisingly, elicited this response:

Dear knigt
thanks primarily for having responded to my e-mail.
If you can and is not a nuisance, and I am BE VERY HAPPY RECEIVE THE POSTCARD THAT I ASKED YOU
I am sorry for disturbing
this is absolutely not a scam
My hobby is to collect postcards of city end monuments best in the world and I live in Italy near CASERTA.
I found your e-mail on a blog on the Internet.
if you not believe in me leave to stay, not to send the postcard.
which fraud may be sending a postcard.
THANKS FROM THE HEART
Let me know.
E-Mail: Frank2169@libero.it
Address: PELLEGRINO Francesco Via R. BASILE Nr. 02 CAP 81038 TRENTOLA-DUCENTA (CASERTA) ITALY

I can only assume that he found this blogspot account, which as we all know I run under the name knigt (as with everything I do on the intertoobs). I figure, what the hell -- I'll email this guy a postcard. After all, he will am be very happy receive the postcard that he asked me. And if you, gentle reader, want to send him a postcard as well -- feel free! We might just make this guy explode from happiness, working together.

2. Yet more people thanking me for responding to them

So also there is this video I posted not too long ago, called Down Prague's tram tracks, in which we go exactly where the titled suggests we go. The ridiculous part is when I get this comment on the video:

What were you doing there? I live very close from this place where was video filmed. I´m from czech republic and I´m really into public transport. Do you like finding something special? Tram track isn´t very typical tourist destination. Are you interested in trams? I want to know what are tourist doing near place I live. I´m very interested in your answer.

The comment was made by this precocious 16 year old. Yeah -- 16! So I responded with this:

Palmovka tram tracks

Hey! I'm surprised by your enthusiasm! Not many people I know care a lot about public transportation, in any country. But anyway,

I used to live right at the intersection of those tram tracks with Sokolovska, above the Erotic City, but I moved in December. I am not really a tourist, so you're right, the tram tracks aren't where tourists usually go =P I moved to Prague in September, from the United States of America, and have been working here since -- at a preschool for three months, and now at The Globe Bookstore & Cafe at Narodni Trida.

Do you still live in Prague? What has made you so interested in the tramways? I took that video because I like discovering the back alleys and unknown places in the city, and I figured that walking down the tram tracks would be interesting -- and it was! I found a bridge and some cool graffiti and a neat run down old train station. It was fantastic.

--Alex

Which paved the way for this gem of a message:

Věc:Palmovka tram tracks - (more then it - our converstion about trasport and practising english)

I´m glad you answered me. I live in Prague also near Palmovka. I live near tram intersection but not intersection with Sokolovska but down near subway. I like public transport from my early childhood. I like even love it. I like trams trains subway systems. I even want to work in public transportation.

People don´t care about public transportation. I can´t stand it. There is very bad situation in US. I want to get things better in my lifetime. I agree it is interesting to find and discover lost places in city and there is full of them near Palmovka. I know lot of information about history of prague public transportation.

I started on youtube to coment. Then I uploaded some videos and now I see that it is very good way to have a chat about shared interests and practise english too. So if you want we can write together about our interests. I want to know much things about you, who moved from US to Prague. Why? Because of better public transportation? :-) When did you move to Prague exactly?You wrote september and
december.
You worked in preschool. Were you learning children english? What about your czech language? Do you learn it? Are you going to stay in Prague and work here? Or are you just studing here and you are going back to US? I live here since I was born. I´m 16.

You are first who wrote me personal message on youtube and I´m very interested about it. It is exciting.
I´m looking forward your answer. Vašek

Who knew I could cause so many people such excitement just by filming some tram tracks. The expectation is daunting, because I don't think I can possibly deliver on this kid's enthusiasm for public transportation. Any suggestions?

3. I got robbed.

Did I say that yet?

4. Stories

I'm writing them. Lots of them! More than I've ever written before. Two so far are up at the top here, zerowhitenoises.blogspot.com, one more is being passed around and edited up (hopefully) and one more is being written by me, right now, starting last night and ending...soon? It feels really good. I am happy.

5. I am mad.

They canceled Frisky Dingo! They canceled Frisky Dingo! AAAAAUUUUGGGGHHHHHH.

That's all.

I just got robbed

2009-01-14T21:24:00.000+01:00

I fought with the guy and got some money back but he got away from me and stole about $100 in Czech crowns from the register.

I feel jittery and shakey and there's a scratch on my right arm where it grazed a sharp part of the front door when he tried to run out of it while I still had a hold of him.

I've never fought anyone in my life, and I know that barely counts as a fight but still. What a douchebag. I feel like crying almost. Am I a pussy?

My mouth is really dry.

Two new stories

2009-01-11T15:37:00.002+01:00

Hey guys -- I just posted two new stories to my writing blog, Zero White Noises, so if you want to, please feel free to read them! They are ''Kilometers Per Hour'' and ''The Mysterious Case of the Blood in the Snow,'' both more-or-less inspired by true events.

I would really appreciate feedback, including harsh criticism and grammatical error-spotting, because I typed both of these stories on a Czech keyboard with cold hands while sort of distracted at the bookstore, so typos likely abound.

Ok thanks! Bye.

O_O

Deerhoof videos -- Hi-Def -- in Prague -- by me:

2009-01-09T15:06:00.002+01:00

"Chatterboxes" -> "Dummy Discards a Heart"

"+81"

"Rainbow Silhouette of the Milky Rain"

"Spirit Ditties of No Tone" -> "Twin Killers"

"The Perfect Me"

"The Tears and Music of Love"

"The Big Orange Sun Run Over Speed Light" -> "Milk Man"

"Wrong Time Capsule"

"Basket Ball Get Your Groove Back" (encore)

and two non-songs:

Greg expressing surprise at the size of the crowd:
<

Greg thanks people who helped them play through Central Europe:

*NOTE*
All the videos are available in HD by clicking that thing in the bottom right corner -- do it, because it makes them much more enjoyable. The reduced quality compression is, like, awful, so watch the HD.

Speaking of cool book-related stuff

2009-01-09T01:01:00.001+01:00

Whoa.

Holy Crap Almighty -- Erica's book is on Amazon!

2009-01-08T15:18:00.001+01:00

Look look look look loooooooooooook at it.

It has proper cover art and everything! It even has a blurb by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the pretty-damn-famous Eat, Pray, Love. To think!

Ooooooo I am so jealous right now, I'm burning with it! I want to write a book featuring an endorsement by the author of a book whose film adaptation is going to star Julia Roberts too!

But still, everyone and their mother should pre-order this book right bleeping now or I'm gonna bust some heads.

Just kidding!

Selection of videos from The Past best experienced without strict ''context''

2009-01-07T23:38:00.003+01:00

Note: For each video, there is a High Definition version available via the little ''Watch in HD'' link at the bottom right corner of the video when you watch it on the main YouTube page. You can access the main page either by clicking your mouse anywhere within the video frame after you have started playing the video, or by following this link to my YouTube user channel. I recommend you watch the HD version, because it looks way better and I spent a long time uploading these versions for that reason. Enjoy!
-----

Down Prague's tram tracks:

Further down the tracks, near Palmovka:

Hidden paths in Prague:

(turn your head to the right)

She loves Hobbes:

Hobbes explores:

First time outside -- Hobbes is scared!:

I got back from Paris last night

2009-01-05T00:00:00.000+01:00

and now I am poor. Tonight or tomorrow I will upload all the videos and pictures I've been promising to for the last month, with the addition of the Paris batch, and you'll be like oh wow that's cool stuff.

Paris

2008-12-29T00:24:00.000+01:00

kicks Prague's ass. If this place didn't cost four hundred dollars just to breath the air, I would relocate instantly. People actually smile. Like, as in this --> :)

Seriously.

Awesome pictures soon.

In France

2008-12-28T20:36:00.000+01:00

is what I am -- Hey!

I am in Germany ßß

2008-12-28T01:52:00.001+01:00

ßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßß

the keyboard here wtf

new apartment

2008-12-23T00:46:00.001+01:00

is amazing

As I was saying...

2008-12-21T19:51:00.005+01:00

Hello. I've missed you.

How have you been? Well, I hope. What have you been doing? Refreshing my blog, you say? Anticipating the next update feverishly? Forgoing food or even liquid sustenance in the dim hope that some god, who you believe may be very angry with you, will take your fasting as sacrifice and finally let loose the torrent of updates that you've been standing, open mouthed and facing the sky, waiting for?

Excellent!

And myself? Well, now that you've asked...

I've been having the last two weeks of my life happen to me. In fact, they're not even over yet, so it's good that you caught me. I was just about to start the next two weeks of my life, actually, which would have just been rubbish timing on my part. Seeing as I've got a moment or two, though, while the last two weeks of my life are packing their things away and getting ready to make room for the next two weeks, we might as well catch up!

Hmm, well, first it's important to paint the background of the last two weeks. The Saturday before last, I responded to a job listing on expats.cz for a bookstore clerk at The Globe, of course. From there, things accelerated beyond my predictions, so that on Monday I was treated to orientation, on Tuesday I was training and Thursday I was working. Thursday's the day that's most important right now, because I worked until 1:00 a.m. while still needing to be at my pre-school job at 8:00 a.m. You see the problem, of course.

Well also guess what on top of that is that the Wednesday of the week we're talking about, which would be the 11th, my good friend and erstwhile ward Matt was scheduled to fly home via aeroplane. Without going into painful details, his flight left without him (without even a backward glance, the hussy) and so he was forced to stay for an extra week. His indefatiguable mother secured him another ticket for exactly a week hence for just $100 more out of pocket, so we got a chance to try again.

So -- I expected to see Matt off on Wednesday, then go home, go to bed, wake up at 6:30 a.m., go to work at 8:00 a.m., get off work at 1:00 p.m., get home at 1:40 p.m., sleep until 4:00p.m., go to other work at 4:30 p.m., get off other work at 1:00 a.m., get home at 1:40 a.m., sleep until 6:30 a.m., go to work at 8:00 a.m., get off work at 1:00 p.m., (find and) meet a British woman and a Slovakian woman at 2 p.m. to interview for a new pre-school job, then (find and) meet a Czech woman at 5 p.m. to interview for another new pre-school job, go home and then go to sleep. Instead, I didn't see Matt off, but I did do the rest of it, except it was worse. Instead of getting off work at 1:00 a.m. from The Globe, I got off work at nearly 2:00 a.m., and the night trams take fooooorever so I didn't get home and get to sleep until around 3:30 a.m. by which time I was so tired I wasn't sleepy, so I had problems. I only got three hours of sleep, which I had to make last through a full morning with kids plus two interviews. Huff.

So then I slept almost all of Saturday (the 13th [I was actually supposed to work from 4:00 p.m. until 1:00 a.m. on Saturday (the 13th) as well but I ignored my cell phone's ringing all that day in favor of sleeping to protect my innocence]) and also Sunday (the 14th), then woke up at 6:30 a.m. Monday (the 15th), went to work at 8:00 a.m., got off work at 1:00 p.m., went home, overslept on a nap, got to my other work late, got off at a better time (closer to 1:00 a.m.), got home, went to sleep at 2:30 a.m., woke up at 6:30 a.m., got to work at 8:00 a.m. on the day of our Christmas Play! and then had to stay at work doing the play (which I will upload the 2gb HD video recording I took of soon [I hope]) and cleaning up after the play and receiving gifts from kisd and saying how good they did until close to 5:00 p.m. Of course I was tired, of course of course. But also it was the last day that my school supervisor Marketa and her husband Ryan (who has a shaved head and tattoos and wide white pierced ears and a frosted white tint to his skin that looks almost medicinal) were at school before leaving for their big Christmas vacation so I finally talked to Marketa about my quitting the school:

Her: [emerging from busy small room into less busy big room] Oh hey, Alex yeah I wanted to talk to you.
Me: Oh hey, Marketa Ani-- ok yeah you want to talk?
Her: I wanted to tell you that it will be in a month when we get paid before you get paid because that's when we get the money.
Me: Ok that's fine, I'll still be in Prague.
Her: Next time though maybe you shouldn't write an email if you are wanting to quit a job?
Me: Oh yeah I know, I'm -- I guess -- I mean it probably comes across as a little impersonal yeah?
Her: Yeah it's just you know a little impersonal --
Me: I know I didn't mean for it to be so you know impersonal and even I meant to tell you on Friday when you weren't here so --
Her: Well you probably figured out this job wasn't right for you yeah? I will send you a message when I get back.
Me: [big smile] Ok! Yeah that's fine, I'll still be in Prague [big smile and walking away]

So then I got home from that conversation and worked the next day at the school, where I had to answer questions from people about why I was quitting, and then I took Matt to the airport and we sat in the big hallway after you first walk in the sliding glass doors eating really expensive McDonald's food (the McDonald's' here are incredibly well furnished and strike me as being designed by someone Swedish or at least with a Sweidish eye for fast food furniture design) and then we sat near the check-in island for a while and Matt -- in the brief time it took me to find a bathroom and pee in it -- made friends with another girl flying to Dublin at the same time named Jess Biron but I didn't find our conversation to be very enjoyable. Then I said bye to Matt after a while and I took pictures and video but haven't had the time to upload them to the Internet but when I do I will post them here for his friends and family and mine to see.

Then I came home and went to sleep and then Thursday I had to go to work again at both jobs so I went to the pre-school at 8:00 a.m. and then to The Globe at 4:15 p.m. and worked until very late as usual, about 1:10 a.m. and then I went home and went to sleep and then I went to my last day at my pre-school, where I took a great several pictures of me with every kid that was there that day (Friday [the 19th]) and then Otto's mom came and picked up Otto but I had been playing very rough and having a lot of fun with him that day so he didn't want to leave. Even when his mom and I were chatting and she hefted him up to our height, he reached for and grabbed my thumb and clamped it without letting go and said in Czech ''I want to go to Alex!'' which I think is awesome, but it made his older brother who comes with their mom to pick up Otto jealous, said his mom, who also told me that they had left me a present on my shoes out in the changing room (which is not that surprising given that lots of the kids[' parents] got gifts for the teachers, incl. chocolates of various calibers and a candle shaped like a small star and a candle shaped like a huge twist) and that she wanted me to give them updates at the email address accompanying the present (which turned out to be Lindt chocolate truffled and a bottle of wine [not yet drunk -- saving it for the new apartment warming] and a bracelet provided for by Otto's older brother Henek who likes me a lot too apparently) and that she wanted me to know that if I ever had any trouble in the city to just contact her and she and her husband would try to help me out as best they could, going to far as to make available to me a room in their house that her husband wants to use as an office but which she said would be no problem turning into a bedroom if I needed it. So I haven't emailed her yet but I will soon and I feel so flattered and don't know how best to phrase my (deep, deep) appreciation of her generosity without sounding goofy? or repugnantly innocent? Hummm.

I love Otto so much.

So then after (my last day of) work Friday I went to Megan's pre-school (which is called ABC Academcy which I think stands for ''A Better Czech [Didactic Experience?]'' because it's so much nicer and cooler than my school) because Friday, which was also her last day of work before the Christmas break, is also the day of her kids' winter play which was a rendition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I wasn't able to watch it, because I was upstairs the entire time.

Guess why?

I was upstairs the entire time, dressed up.

Dressed up as what?

I was upstairs the entire time, dressed up as SANTA CLAUS. Yup!

Because! After the play was over, I stomped down the stairs and surprised the kids and gave out toys and big hearty bellylaughs and it was fantastic and I got paid the Monopoly money equivalent of $75. Merry Christmas to me!

Then after I got back from the play with Megan we were both very tired so we took a nap until my phone woke me up with a text message from my friend Kate Pinto reminding me that we were going to see DEERHOOF TONIGHT!!!! (Friday not now)

So I went with Kate and we got into the show free courtesy of Provokator and it was in this really interesting venue called the MeetFactory which I believe is owned or was founded by David Černý, which is super excellent. The venue was a giant old factory warehouse with big painted monochrome car bodies hanging vertically pointed down on the exterior and from the ceiling of the interior. The acoustics are horrible because it's a huge echo-ey square room but the band was of course excellent despite all mitigating factors.

Deerhoof are really really one of the best bands that make music right now. A year or two ago I interviewed Greg Saunier, their founder and drummer, for WXYC, where the interview was recorded and aired, but also for 'Sup Magazine, where the print version ran. It was a really engaging experience, talking to him, and I felt like he enjoyed my conversation as well. When I saw him at the venue later (the interview was telephoned) we chatted more. Then, a few days later, they played in Winston-Salem (if you can believe that) and I approached him again and we chatted more, this time with me giving him a free copy of 'Sup and him giving me a free book recommendation -- The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker. The book has since become one of my favorites, and I recommend everyone pick it up and read it. It won't take you more than two days, and it's sure to surprise you over and over with its wondrous, almost miraculous attention to detail. Really, please do read it.

So anyway that was in 2007, early, Spring? and now it's Winter 2008, but Greg remembered me when I approached him, which was a pleasing thrill. He's so cool. He's so tall. His hair is so long now, and curly, and his wife is SO SHORT AND JAPANESE. When she performs, she reminds me of Sara a lot, in the face. I took 20 minutes (and 4gb) of video which I will upload and link to. The show was fantastic.

After the show, Kate and I managed to find Greg and get him to come with us up to an empty and very Soviet room where we interviewed him. Largely just a casual conversation, we also talked about the issue of waste, which is the main theme of the next Provokator. I tried not to spill out my entire fanboy guts to him, but it was hard. Deerhoof are so good. You'll see when you watch the videos.

(Side note: Greg is a lot weirder this time around. He had, in addition to a much curlier shag, some sort of red splotches around his mouth and a tendency to smell his fingers very quickly mid-sentence. I think he was on drugs or just stressed out because it was the end of their tour. It was the first time in Prague, ever, so that might explain it too.)

So that was this past Friday, and then yesterday was Saturday and I worked from 9:00 a.m. until 3 p.m. at The Globe; I was scheduled to work until 4 p.m. but I got off an hour early from a sore throat.

Today, Megan and I went to our nwe apartment and dropped off some clothes, signed a lease and gave our new flatmate Jana the deposite for the room -- 10,000 CZK in all. We also played with the satellite TV. You can switch between languages, here, depending on the channel. It's fascinating. Our room has so much room, hah. Balcony, big window, clean bathroom. It's perfect. I sigh of pleasure when I think about it.

I had to come into work, here, where I am, at 4:30 p.m., but Megan and I were starving so we started walking down the sidewalk in front of our new apartment thinking of places to eat. We got about 20 feet when Megan stopped me and said, hey, why don't we eat in here? We were stopped in front of a place called Pivovarsky Klub which I can best describe with a punctuation mark: !

This place is AMAZING. It's like stepping into Carrboro, beer-wise. There's suddenly arrayed before you three full walls of bottled beer from around the Czech Republic and world. There are three coolers with more bottles. There are six beers on tap. And it's all so good. It's the first place I've been to since I came to Prague where I've found Newcastle, Samichlaus (strongest lager in the world), Chimay, Trappist, Scaldis (Megan's favorite beer of all time) and oh so many more. It's the beer nerd's haven in Prague, I've decided. I had been looking for it since I got here, I just didn't realize it entirely. Or, I had given up on looking consciously. And it's literally a ten second walk from my front door. Unbelievable.

I ate food there as well, delicious food: fried, breaded broccoli with potato wedges reminiscent of the USA's best french fries. That was at about 3:30 p.m., and it's 9:36 p.m. right now, and I still feel uncomfortably full.

Which is kind of how the last two weeks have left me. With Christmas break upon me, you'd think I'd want to just relax and read (I'm reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, finally, after having finished The Savage Detectives a few days ago [both are excellent!]), but I'm not. I found a guy who is driving to Paris on the 28th of December, so Megan and I are catching a ride with him and a friend of his, which should be fun. I'm going to see Paris for the first time! Hah! My dad tells me it's very expensive, so I plan not to eat while there. Arc de Tri-oomphe!

They're playing A Beautiful Mind right now in the cafe portion of the store, but I've never seen or cared about seeing it, so I'm not paying attention. They were going to play -- started playing, even -- Blue Velvet, but it was a copy purchased by the owner of the store, who lives in Moscow, so it was a cheap DVD that turned out to be exclusively in Polish, so they switched. All the English-speaking hipsters in Prague came out of their studios to bask in the Lynchian waves, only to be forced to stare at Russel Crowe's mug for the next two hours. Hah! Some of them opted to come up to the bookstore area, so I've been listening without paying attention to the conversation between a curly haired girl and a black dude with a mohawk and this totally avant-garde scarf. I'd be jealous, if I had any fashion sense.

Also, Album of the Year 2008 -- Third by Portishead!

That's it.

This week was so stressful and sleep deprived that I almost had a:

2008-12-20T22:35:00.001+01:00

a) nervous breakdown
b) ham sandwich
c) '80s reunion

.

2008-12-15T06:51:00.001+01:00

Still no time

2008-12-14T18:45:00.000+01:00

Chris left today for a two week return to home, the United States, that will see him returning on Dec. 29.

By then, I will be living in a new flat, I think, although I agreed to pay half rent for the next month given that I told him on such notice, etc.

I am working tomorrow, Thursday and Sunday evenings at The Globe, and also Saturday morning.

I emailed my boss at the preschool telling her that I was quitting after Friday; I've heard nothing back yet.

Friday afternoon, after I take my leave of my preschool for the last (until I return to pick up payment) time, I will head over to Megan's school to play Santa Claus for her kids. I will even get paid for it! It should be awesome. I'llhaveasuit!

I may get hired to teach at a preschool starting in February that would pay me 22,000 crowns a month, compared to the 14,000 I am paid now. Also it would be closer. Also it would be brand new. Also I would get a bonus for each child enrolled after my hire. Also the owners are really nice.

I stole a ream of lined notebook paper from Tesco today because they didn't have the kind I wanted on sale and I found a thing of paper free-floating with no price tag so I put it in my notebook and now I have it.

Matt leaves for real on Wednesday. Unless we miss the flight again. Last Wednesday we missed his flight. His mom had to wrestle with American Airlines to get another flight for $100 scheduled a week hence.

I can use my iPod Touch to control the mouse on my laptop and also control the iTunes libraries of any computer within WiFi range. It is insidiously fun.

I still haven't been to Kutná Hora yet.

I just drank a half liter bottle of Kozel dark lager, to go along with my tortellini. Mmmmmm.

Ouch

2008-12-12T01:38:00.000+01:00

It's 1:38 a.m. and I am still at work! I want to go home! I have to wait until the cafe is clear and everything is done before I can leave, which means I am still here even though I have to be at the pre-school at 7:50 a.m.!!!

PLUS I just hit my head on a door so hard it made me send these IMs to my friends:

me: it's huurrrrrting

still and so bad

my mouth tastes like metal

suddenly

and

me: i just hit my head so hard that my mouth went dry and i thought i had died

I am going to be very sleepy tomorrow, but I have two job interviews to go to AFTER work! OH NO!

illegal

2008-12-11T23:11:00.000+01:00

I forgot to mention today is the 11th of December, three months after I entered the country.

Sooooooooo...

time thingy

2008-12-11T18:26:00.003+01:00

if you see the clocks just above this post, but also see an ugly Google ad, then you can hit refresh and if you're using Firefox it will re-size to display only the times.

and duh the first time is EST.

p.s. I am at The globe and every one in this city is freaking czech

"This isn't London!" the lady screamed at me.

2008-12-10T14:40:00.003+01:00

I was working my first real shift at The Globe yesterday when a rotund woman with big tight curly hair the color of a random dog came in and approached the counter. I went up to her smiling, and she began to speak to me in Czech, which I do not speak. So I waited until I had a chance to interject without seeming rude to tell her "Nemluvim Český."

Well, we certainly couldn't have that. The woman threw up her pokey little arms and wheeled around in the little entryway of the bookstore, ranting (she really was ranting) about what an injustice it was to have an English speaker man the register at an English-language bookstore. Now, I understand the expectation that native residents of cities have that others will speak their language. Americans are certainly familiar with the periodic frustration that an influx of foreigners can bring to general social interactions.

But still -- how many Americans literally throw their arms in the air when it turns out the waiter at Mi Pueblo doesn't speak English? No one who isn't an idiot, at least. So it did make me feel a little better to see other Czech customers laughing at the woman under their breath or into their books. I sensed a bit of sympathy, but I still felt diminutized. Then, later, I fumbled protocol when I left the front, bookstore area unattended to try to find a manager for a phone call, which act of near career suicide earned me a swift and brusque berating from Jason, the Chicago-born American guy who looks like a really fat Jason Schwartzman (reaaally fat). His name is actually Jason as well, I just realized. Huh.

So that's an update I needed to write because I thought it would make a good story. Hopefully you enjoyed reading it. I have been super busy with adding this new job, trying to find another apartment and generally just surviving in Prague. I will get paid soon, and since I still have 2,000 Kč left over from last paycheck (somewhat mitigated by a few credit card purchases -- don't be alarmed!) I will have effectively made money in Prague. Hooray!

Let's all say hooray! When I get the time, a shitton of pictures and videos for you.

<3

I'm going to my first training shift at The Globe in an hour, and Matt leaves for home Wednesday and I am about to eat my last bag of curly noodles courtesy of my mom -- thanks Mom!

2008-12-08T14:13:00.000+01:00

Hey I meant to post a big thing with videos and photos this weekend

2008-12-07T19:07:00.001+01:00

but I spent most of the weekend configuring Mac OS cause I decided to switch finally 'cause Windows overheated too much. My fingernails are way long, now, and healthy for the first time since I went to Calvary.

I got hired by The Globe bookstore but the pay is laughably low so if I have to work anything more than a few shifts a week I'm going to bite my thumb at them, since I really only want to do something interesting.

Megan and I found a new better apartment for cheaper than this one, closer to the center of town, brand newly renovated, with a balcony and -- ta-da! - no slovenly poop-factory to clog it up for us. The landlord is actually a group of two families, the daughter of one being the girl who showed us the room and ultimately decided to let us move in. Her name is Jana and she seems cool.

I am writing a short story called "The Physics of My Slow Decline" right now. It's taking kind of awhile. When I am done I will post it to my other blog so you can read it. Now I am going to write some.

Goodbye friends. Here is what I look like right now:

Čau

Things done:

2008-12-07T02:12:00.000+01:00

--grill a peanut butter and banana sandwich

--burn a chair

--protect children from the Devil

--clean entire(?) apartment

--drink beer from 1 liter mug

--eat brie with garlic bagel chips

--see potential apartment

--interview for job at bookstore

--post to blog

Toilet // The Globe

2008-12-03T20:01:00.000+01:00

Czech plumber just got done charging Chris 4500 Kč to de-crap our bathroom. Now I can take a shower without getting yelled at.

//

Alex,
Thank you for your interest in working for the Globe.
I can meet with you tomorrow, Thursday at 3pm, here at Globe (Pstrossova 6)
Please let me know if that's OK with you.

Sincerely
Mats

Lightning Bolt @ Klub 007

2008-12-02T16:19:00.000+01:00

On Nov. 14 I went to see Lightning Bolt play at the above venue in Prague, courtesy of Provokator.

Here's one video of the concert taken from across the venue from me, so that you can see me:

Look for the person obviously putting his hands on the ceiling -- he is directly in the middle and he was standing to my right, so that if you look a bit to the right, you can see me. Most of the time, a bright light is glaring behind me so that you can't see my head, but you can some times. I have on a red hat.

Lightning Bolt, for the record, play their concerts on the ground of the venue, out in the crowd, so that people can gather around on all sides (even on the stage), to watch. I was standing on a monitor. I was deafened for a day. It was intensely loud, in a medically unhealthy way.

Toilet

2008-12-01T03:13:00.001+01:00

water is all over the bathroom floor and I don't know where it's coming from because the toilet is not over-flowing nor is there any sort of visible leak, just water that keeps making the bathroom floor more wet. Matt used his bathtowels to try to sop up what water there was at first but there is now much more water than that. It's 3:14 a.m.

"May have to pick up the fine Czech art of public urination for awhile," says Matt.

Almost my birthday

2008-11-30T22:16:00.003+01:00

I went to try to find a book (two books actually) today, but I found neither. The Savage Detectives and 2666 were not to be found at either Shakespeare & Sons or The Globe.

Tomorrow I will look for them in two more bookstores.

Tomorrow I will turn 23 years old.

I Only Wanna Be With YouTube

2008-11-28T07:08:00.000+01:00

Advent: phone

2008-11-27T14:35:00.000+01:00

Didn't tell you 'cause I thought you'd be mad but I dropped my phone and broke it a couple (six) days ago and now when I try to turn it on all I see is the word "Failed," blinking, over and over, until it shuts back off. Now've got Matt's phone 'cause he doesn't use it except for an alarm clock (his words: "It's little more than a glorified alarm clock") so I put my SIM card in it and now I can use it.

In about 14 seconds I am going to put my outdoor shoes on and go on a metro to I. P. Pavlova which is where a package for me from my parents, a package from Megan from her mom and a letter for Matt from his parents are waiting for Matt and myself to pick them up.

GONE

I have the "Chip 'n Dale's Rescue Rangers" theme song stuck in my head

2008-11-26T14:51:00.001+01:00

But anyway.

So last night we fought and killed our first "boss" of the campaign -- it turns out Quasprunia the unassuming head librarian was really some sort of undead-like (or at least undead-associatin') boneclaw'd hoverin' harpy bitch. We found her in the bowels of the library where we have been quartering, though Plink the halfling rogue was elsewhere on clandestine, thief-y business for the fight. Joining Quasprunia was none other than Drodgir, Captain of the City Guard! Also, the five unexplained disappearances of citizens around town over the last several weeks finally found an explanation in the form of five repulsive howling fiends whose stomachs were ripped vertically open up to their chins. Bleech!

Of course my monk, Waites of the Horizon, handily dispatched not only two of these bothersome shrieker beasts but also landed the killing blow to Quasprunia herself, crumpling the metamorphosizin' bibliotechnician (or perhaps I should say, bibliomancer) to the cold hewn floor.

So now we have to search through the newly revealed shelves of forbidden books for histories of the region specializing in the ancient wars against the trolls in the hopes of some clue (which is likely given the ferocity of the defense of the books' secrets) that will guide us toward the location of our quarry: the book of curse reversal.

Then we have to wait for Plink to get back with news of her meeting with Mouse, the head of the city's underground, to find out if we've got a shot at gaining an audience with the wizard Ilda, who other than that drunk Borothor is the only remaining high-profile magic user in the city ever since Augorius and his arcanophobes gained influence over the consul. We don't even know whether Ilda can help us, or even if she'll be on our side, for that matter, but seeing as no one else has gotten access to her in who knows how long, there's probably something to be gained from an audience, if only maybe in terms of petty politics or bartering power.

Well, that's it for now. If you happen to see an old man on the road between now and next time, give him a tip of your hat, or maybe a bit of conversation. I'm sure he'd love to chat. He's been walking for quite awhile.

Picture log: 2008

2008-11-24T14:43:00.005+01:00

Basically: Matt had just gotten in and we'd barely relaxed. Then: dinner. We celebrated the upcoming election, togetherness, great beer and Prague. Pay careful attention to each picture -- they're the story. Only scene changes are notated.

[Dinner at Národní třída:]

[Election coverage at The Globe:]

[The Globe too crowded, my friends from Provokator Peter (British) and Kate (Portuguese) and Megan and Matt and I went to an expat-friendly bar called Golden Star that also had coverage:]

[Megan came home, then Matt, Peter, Kate, Peter's friend Siobhan and our Provokator co-worker Alex Jordan (the girl) also went to my apartment to finish watching the election on our TV:]

An unmitigated victory for socialism. THE END.