From my suburban Brisbane bedroom,
I dive behind a Street View camera and into a Prague New Town alley. Retracing
the path I trod in those early days is an uncanny experience, like discovering
my memory preserved in a digital archive. The record isn’t perfect—checkerboard
cobblestones have lost their icy skin and the sky holds a sun I never saw that
February. But Google has kept countless details I have all but lost.
Next to my
hostel door, the brown Antikvariát still displays its dusty
stock of quiet brown books. Clicking forward, I pass a Triple-A Taxi, its
more-trustworthy-than-average driver staring straight at me. On my right, the
gate I never saw opened stands as impenetrable as ever, strewn with the same
scrunched graffiti that unsteadied my newcomer’s confidence. The gate’s high
wall decays back through its history, scraps of white paint hovering over
plasters and concretes in assorted greys and browns, layers exposed like
geological strata right down to the crumbly brick of who-knows-when. I remember
running my fingers over those layers before I found gloves, and I’m starting to
remember a lot more. As I pass the blurry images of some not quite anonymous
Central Europeans, I can feel again what it’s like to be a teenager shivering
in the middle of a continent of strangers. After two years and across thousands
of kilometres, I am that hungry boy again, looking for a meal on his first real
winter night.
At the end of the
narrow street, I emerge from concrete and graffiti into postcard Europe. The
Gothic loom of Jindřišská věž still
hovers to my right, and I take the glance I took that night before turning left
towards the centre. Two trams are frozen on their tracks, one heading towards
me, one away. I can hear their bells trill. Despite
the photographed sun, I see everything lit by the dense orange of Prague’s
sodium street lamps. The Google images fade into my own accelerating memory as
everything comes rushing back. Across the street, the chain bakery
I’d thought charmingly local looks no less welcoming than it did. But I want
something heartier, something more Czech. I click past a mobile phone shop,
another bakery, and a dozen parked Škodas,
until I come to the restaurant. Set in a plain yellow building, its green
wooden front, stripy awnings and selection of window menus and signs leave it
looking somewhere between imitation French bistro and Irish pub. But it must
have looked Czech enough for me that night. One piece of advice I wish I could
send back to myself, staring in that restaurant window: keep walking.
1 comments:
Love it. Makes me miss Prague.
(Loved the other 800 words too)
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