Flood Update

We are refugees, sort of.

I didn’t think we would have to leave, although Helena was quite concerned, and seemed a bit pissed off at me that I took off for my  poetry reading at 7.  “I’ve got my phone with me.  If you have to leave, put the kids in the car and head over to Bill’s.  But, I don’t think anything’s going to happen.”

Some Prague residents aren’t bothered at all

The poetry reading was small, about half the number that usually turn up, probably even less, and the featured poet wasn’t there, I suppose all that was weather related, and we had it in the back room of the bar because the basement was, in fact, flooded.  Anyway, since the featured reader didn’t show, we had a really short program and it actually was pretty good.  A couple of Ken Nash songs, a new guy with a short story about some Polynesian succubus type mythological creature called a kovea, I’m not at all sure I’m spelling that right, Siegfried Mortkowitz with a series of poems all starting with the line “When I woke up today…,” and a couple of others.

A short program, but a good one.  Nobody was terrible.

So, I was out of there at 9 and looking forward to getting home and saying “See, I told you there was nothing to worry  about.”

I called from the tram stop at Malostranske Namesti to say I was on my way and she answered the phone with a cheerful “I’ve got the kids in the car and we’re going to Bill’s, so meet us there I can’t talk now I’m driving,” and that was the end of that conversation.  I put the phone back in my  pocket and then realized I had no idea how to get to Bill’s place from where I was.

I’d been there a couple of times before but never paid too much attention to where we were relative to anything else.  So, after a couple of moments of disorientation, I  called him.  “Good luck,” he said.  With the Metro down, he didn’t actually know how to get there, either.  But we talked for a couple of minutes, I sort of got my bearings, and I actually arrived almost exactly at the same time as my wife.

The trams and the extra buses and most people not going anywhere are compensating for the Metro being mostly down, and the city  is functioning very well.  Sometime tomorrow, we’ll head back over and see if the neighborhood is actually flooded or if we can get back into  our house, but it wouldn’t be entirely disastrous if we couldn’t.

She packed for about a month.