After living in a city a long time you get used to the touristy stuff, all the amazing old buildings are nothing new, and you start to relax into a routine as if it were a favorite armchair.
So, I hang out mostly at home in my Prague 8 Panalaček, venturing out to Vinohrady twice a day, to drop Sam off at school and then to pick him up, and occasionally out to someplace where he’s playing football (yesterday was kind of cool. The field was actually at the edge of town, you looked out and you saw hills and fields), but for the most there are huge regions of Prague that I go long periods of time without seeing.
I almost never cross the river, for instance, and there’s an amazing array of cool places on the other side of the river: Letna and Stromovka, the Castle, Malostrana and Kampa Island, Petřin Hill and more. It’s just that nothing in my daily routine pulls me in that direction.
(the path you are on is the way your feet are pointing
The level is the face of the earth
The point you are at is a moment in time
The goal is whatever you choose – Kalehuru)
So, this morning I had to go to Nusle, near Bratři Synku, to pick up some Duplo toys my wife ordered online. I lived in that neighborhood for a couple of months, right at the turn of the millennium, but I hadn’t been there for a long time.
It’s a typical Prague neighborhood. Prague 4 town hall would be a major tourist site, an outstanding monument of beauty in a lesser city. And, after having completed my mission and gotten on a bus, we drove past quite a lovely floral display on a green lawn in an ordinary park, and I thought “well, it’s nice to pass this way, because I wouldn’t have seen that.”
Then I got off the bus at Pankrac and there’s a huge mall there, which has been there for a few years I think but I’ve never been there.
By that point, though, I was running late and headed down into the Metro and back to the known routine. Doesn’t matter. Malls are pretty much all the same.
www.gurukalehuru.com 