Prague Day 1

Reading Kafka to each other on the train. We arrive and are sprinted across the city to the royal gardens with its peacocks and faux cave wine cellars. We looked out across the city peering down the hills that communists used to ski over and over like Sisyphean athletes because they weren’t allowed to leave.

Prague Day 2

Our synagogue marathon day was disrupted by a marathon. We went through old cemeteries and crowded the tight walkways that snaked around, annoying people with strollers and dogs. There were hands on headstones and possible mis-hearings that aristocrats were to dirty to enter or touch . Disposable yamakas were handed out at the synagogues to help male tourists feel closer to god. Then a Kafka fun house and with a Kafka translator who spoke about the tediousness of language and collaboration. The day finished with one of the best meals of my life and a bird named Gustav.

Prague Day 3

We ate in the breakfast dungeon and set off to Radio Free Europe. A reporter with the last name Serafim spoke about jazz, liberty, and the western world; relations with the east mediated through Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Miles Davis. I kept asking myself what was being obfuscated on the tour. The reporter wanted a certain kind of question to be asked but I couldn’t tell what. I tried to prompt a conversation about the multiplicity of ways to define freedom and the limits of western bourgeois freedom becoming a universal standard, especially when it is hard to find even at its origin. Of course this was at the last minute and we were shooed back through security before any conversational momentum could build.