Thursday, July 06, 2006
What happened on Monday.
[tag: _travel]
Prague in Summer: I wake up at 4:45am (3:45 by my body's reckoning) to go count stock in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. We are each paried up with a DHL expert and ride off in cages attached to forklifts. The detritus of the digital age surrounds me: dusty DVD blanks; video cassettes; discs of every description (mini, DVD, UMD). Brand new PSPs in their boxes. 2 Gigabyte memory sticks blisterpacked, worth their weight in gold. 50" TVs and an enigmatic "Jumbo Pack", shrouded in white, so large that a pallet holds only one. We tote them up on our clipboards, counting across, down, and around. The crows nests' soar to the top shelves, 30 feet in the air. I try not to look down.
For my diligence I am rewarded with the afternoon off and I soak my tender feet for an hour before retiring to Tyn Square's Legends Bar in a quiet and largely tourist-lite corner of old Prague. Bohemia crystallized (and commercialized), Prague now lives off its wealthy stag nighters and transient rich kid artiste wannabes. In winter the streets should be the color of absinthe. In summer they are the amber and deep brown of aged wood. They smell of marionettes and cheap beer. Fat genial americans and pimply english youths pass me in binary succession, a string of 1s and 0s encoding a secret fascination that all tourist cities hold, the magnetic pull of the ancient and wondrous.
Prague in Summer: I wake up at 4:45am (3:45 by my body's reckoning) to go count stock in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. We are each paried up with a DHL expert and ride off in cages attached to forklifts. The detritus of the digital age surrounds me: dusty DVD blanks; video cassettes; discs of every description (mini, DVD, UMD). Brand new PSPs in their boxes. 2 Gigabyte memory sticks blisterpacked, worth their weight in gold. 50" TVs and an enigmatic "Jumbo Pack", shrouded in white, so large that a pallet holds only one. We tote them up on our clipboards, counting across, down, and around. The crows nests' soar to the top shelves, 30 feet in the air. I try not to look down.
For my diligence I am rewarded with the afternoon off and I soak my tender feet for an hour before retiring to Tyn Square's Legends Bar in a quiet and largely tourist-lite corner of old Prague. Bohemia crystallized (and commercialized), Prague now lives off its wealthy stag nighters and transient rich kid artiste wannabes. In winter the streets should be the color of absinthe. In summer they are the amber and deep brown of aged wood. They smell of marionettes and cheap beer. Fat genial americans and pimply english youths pass me in binary succession, a string of 1s and 0s encoding a secret fascination that all tourist cities hold, the magnetic pull of the ancient and wondrous.
Labels: travel
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