A bit of a strange morning this morning. It started off routine enough, dropped my daughter off at school and then had to visit the ‘Christmas Market’ which is an annual event there, and this is the thing I hate most about Christmas, the absolutely obligatory spending of money (under penalty of having my wife and daughter not speak to me, like forever). Anyway, bought a nice little ceramic castle candle holder, so the light will shine through the windows. Then, I had to stop at the cash machine and then at my son’s school to pay for his lunches for the month.
Statue of One Eyed Jan Žižka – the woods where I was lost are to the right in this photo
Headed home and since I don’t have any actual work on Tuesday’s I wasn’t in a great hurry. As I came up to the tunnel under Vitkov Hill (would have been home in 15 minutes), I noticed some stairs going straight up into the park which I don’t think have always been there, at any rate I’d never gone that way before.
It was a bit cold, but a bright and lovely day. Crisp and still, a bit of frost on the grass. As good as it gets, for December.
I headed up the steps and my plan was to go straight across the park and down the steps on our side, but I took the wrong path and, knowing how way leads onto way, I wound up in the woods where nobody goes and the path petered out next to the railroad tracks, with no way to cross.
Back to the top of the hill, walked a bit further up the park, and started down another path, which led me back the same way. Up again, and then the same thing a 3rd time. It was starting to be a bit Twilight Zonish, although I got a nice short poem out of it: 3.141592653/It has been calculated, out to several trillion places/but that’s all you’re going to get from me/mmmmm, pi. Actually, the poem was incomplete because I didn’t know that many digits, just knew that I wanted that line to end on a 3.
That got me thinking about pi and how weird it is that something as basic as the area of a circle depends on a number that’s so completely irrational and how our mathematics is built on base 10 because of the number of our fingers but this does not at all describe the deep mathematics that controls the universe, but all that’s a separate blog.
Then, I finally did find the head of the stairs and it had an orange plastic mesh thingie across it and signs up saying no entry. I’m guessing for the winter, because of ice, but maybe it’s because of construction, and maybe just because they’re being dicks. I don’t know.
I kept walking and came out of the park up near the Biskupcova end, turned left, and I knew there were a couple more tunnels under the tracks but damned if I didn’t almost get shunted right back into the wilds for a 4th time.
It seemed like forever- not in an unpleasant way, just in an alternate reality, time stopped sort of way – but in the end it was just about two hours.
