I had a couple of errands to run this morning so I went out for a little walk which is always, always interesting in Prague. It was a good day for it, a little cloudy but not actually raining, the snows thawed so suddenly a few days back that it feels like Spring is in the air, even though it’s only January and odds are spring is still several frost and defrost cycles away.
I cut over to take the path by the river and there’s always some development in construction there, although in some ways the project seems to be being dragged out way longer than necessary. There’s a row of very modern looking buildings stretching up in a single line, following the line of the river away from the center of town, and they start building a new one every year or so. 10, 20 years from now this neighborhood will be unrecognizable.
Just across the footpath beyond that, on the strip between civilization and the river, which has been the same for tens of thousands of years regardless of what happens on its banks, is a scruffy little patch of land, some bushes and trees, some slabs of concrete, a fair bit of rubble and rubbish scattered here and there. The whole thing could be beautiful with a minor bit of effort and I’m sure it’s on the schedule to commence the 2nd Tuesday after a full moon in the year of two thousand whenever they feel like it, so I walked along that path, saying to myself, this should be taken down, this should be paved, some trees should be planted here, and I watched the neighborhood transformed inside my mind, if reality only followed fantasy a little bit closer, it would be a wonderful world.
City Under Construction
The 1st errand was to the Post Office and I always prefer to go to the one in the center because they are 24/7 and that saves me having to think of opening hours and holidays and stuff like that and today was a holiday, report card day, which is good for a 3 day weekend here, they do love their long weekends here, it seems they have one about once a month.
That didn’t take long at all. Then I headed over to Tesco, where I almost never go because they never have what I need and today was no exception but from the 3rd floor window I got to look down into the huge pit next to it, which began maybe 10 years ago but then they stopped because they found some historical stuff and that can stop a construction project cold in this town, they’re good about the preservation. Now it’s huge, 5 stories deep, you can tell because there is a construction staircase, like scaffolding, that goes down that many landings.
It’s amazing to me, because the Metro is still below that.
Had lunch at the Gyro stand across the street where I used to eat all the time but haven’t for years. It’s still good.
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