May 10th, 2010

I just went for an amazing walk.  It began because someone told my wife there was a way to walk from our house up into Vitkov Park, without walking through the tunnel and going up the other side.

So, this morning after she left for work, I went exploring.  We’ve lived here 8 years, so I was a bit skeptical, but there it was.  You have to walk down a narrow lane with mesh fences topped with barbed wire on either side, squeeze around a concrete barrier which is obviously there to discourage you but since there was no sign sayng “entry forbidden” I went on, up some stairs and through a tunnel under the tracks and the weird part there was that, although the staircase and tunnels are obviously brand new, the walls are covered with graffiti, the worst kind, incomprehensible scribblings in bubble letters and really thick, bright paint.  Then, at the top of the stairs there is a wider, taller concrete barrier that you can’t go around but by this time I wasn’t just going to go back down so I climbed over it, walked across the construction workers access road and I was in the park.  A tangled, wild, seldom visited side of the park.  It was very pretty and I had a panoramic view of my neighborhood, which was pretty awesome.

It is a lovely spring day, not too hot, not too cool, it must have rained overnight because things are wet, and bright and shiny.

Then I proceeded into the park proper, and I haven’t actually been there for a couple of years, even though it’s right next door.  There’s quite an amazing g trampoline for kids, in the middle of a rope web.  It looked a bit dangerous to me, but I guess the theory  is that if a child is big enough to climb across the ropes and get to it, they are old enough to jump on it.

There was almost nobody in the park.  I saw a woodpecker pecking at a tree and stopped to watch him.  It was like not being in the city at all.

Then I walked to the nearest bus stop and ran into Emma, from Australia, who I hadn’t seen for a couple of years until about two weeks ago we ran into each other on the Metro, and this is our 3^rd very random meeting since then.  We took the bus one stop and then walked back through the tunnel to Karlin.

She had to teach a class there and I took a quick walk through blog park and then home.

I wish I  knew more of the names of the plants and trees and birds.  I can tell you the lilacs are in bloom and it’s lovely.  The chestnut trees have their white flowers on which look like miniature Christmas trees.  And I watched a group of quite large birds, as big as pigeons anyway, with bright white chests, white and black wings, and the rest black.  They were very beautiful, but I wish I knew their name.