The Balloon-Blowing Couple on Their Way to Ústí nad Labem, Tokyo Banana World & Three Major Train Stations

Posted on April 8, 2025 by admin

On the afternoon of March 12, a gray, chilly day, Jay and I arrived at the Main Railway Station in Prague (Praha hlavní nádraží) to catch the EC 170 back to Berlin, leaving at 4:28 pm. We were early, and had time to look around the station.

A grand edifice. “One of the final glories of the dying empire,” notes the 2002 Rough Guide to the Czech & Slovak Republics, though perhaps “ramshackle empire” might have been more apt, since who knew the catastrophe of WWI would play out quite the way it did.

“It was designed by Joseph Fanta and officially opened in 1909 as the Franz Josef Station,” the guide book continues. “Arriving in the subterranean modern section, it’s easy to miss the station’s surviving Art Nouveau parts. The original entrance on the Wilsonova still exudes imperial confidence, with its wrought iron canopy and naked figurines clinging to the sides of the towers.”

The grand hall interior is grand indeed.

But largely empty. The crowds were at the more modern lower level, where a long tunnel connects all the train platforms, ticket offices and a fair amount of retail. We boarded our train without any problem and found that our car was nearly empty too. Not many people were headed for Berlin that Wednesday evening.

At one of the suburban stations, however, a young man and young woman got on and sat across the aisle in our car. They had that contemporary Euro-look: casually dressed, visible tattoos here and there, a few studs and earrings for both, and the mandatory beard for the man. They were in a merry mood. Not obnoxiously loud, but making happy-sounding conversations in what I assume was Czech, complete with the universal language of giggling; clearly a couple headed somewhere for some fun. Someone’s wedding, or maybe just a few days off work.

None of that was unusual. Then the woman removed a small air cylinder from her backpack and started using it to blow up balloons, which she and the man proceeded to swat around the car. I’ve been on a lot of trains in a lot of places, but I have to say, that was a first.

That didn’t last long. Soon they got off the train at the last station before the border with Germany, Ústí nad Labem, and the car got quiet again. I hope they continued to have a good time in that town.

On the trip down to Prague on the 10th, in a mostly full car, we had passed the same way going the opposite direction, and it was still daytime. So we got a good look at the hilly territory of the Elbe River Valley south of Dresden, where the train mostly follows the river. A picturesque spot, even in winter.

As for the German-Czech frontier, crossing was perfunctory. Hardly worth calling it a border. No officious or menacing border guards roamed the cars demanding Papers! (Reisepass?) Not in the 21st-century Schengen Area. We were on an Evening Train to Berlin, not a Night Train to Munich. The only indication of entering a new country (either way) was that after crossing each time, our tickets were checked again, electronically, by fairly laid-back workers of the respective railway companies on either side of the line.

The 175-mile trip to Prague began and ended at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, a massive station that didn’t exist the first time I went to Berlin. A predecessor station on the site had been badly damaged during the war, and the new station wasn’t developed until the 2000s, as Berlin’s fancy new main multi-modal transit center. Besides intercity trains, Berlin S-bahn and U-bahn trains go there, along with a lot of buses. There is also enough retail at the station to qualify as its own mall.

Berlin Hauptbahnhof isn’t an old style, but it is impressive.

One more impressive rail hub on this trip was a continent away: Tokyo Station, the busiest one in passenger numbers in that urban agglomeration, which is saying something. It too is a multi-modal facility, with various intercity rail lines meeting there, along with subways and buses. The Shinkansen from Osaka goes there, which is how we arrived. The structure dates from 1914 and amazingly survived war in the 1940s – and just as threatening – urban renewal in the 1960s. In more recent years, the station was restored to close to its original design.

Under the main dome.

Plenty of retail at Tokyo Station as well. Including some places I’d never seen before. We should have stopped to get something from Tokyo Banana World.

Per Time Out: “Tokyo Banana opened its flagship store called Tokyo Bananas inside Tokyo Station on December 8 [2022], and it’s stocked with exclusive goods. Two of the exclusive products are the Legendary Curry Bread and Cream and Red Bean Paste Doughnut — and yes, banana is the hidden ingredient for both.”

Ex Nippon semper aliquid novi, eh?

Jewish Museum in Prague

Posted on April 3, 2025 by admin

One good thing about the historic core of Prague, at least for old visitors, are the small squares (náměstí?) with benches and sometimes trees. Walkability doesn’t mean much if you can’t sit down at regular intervals, and old Prague provides that, unlike some other pedestrian-intense places on this trip (and I mean you, Osaka).

We stopped often at this one, often as our first rest out from the hotel. Once Jay waited here for a few minutes while I wisely went back to the hotel to fetch a cap to wear.

We stopped here more than once as well.

Of course, in early March, the air was distinctly cool, and the squares weren’t so green. Or quite so busy. The views from the first small square looked more like this.

During our first ramble through the old city on March 11, we came across this unnerving figure.

Kafka. Of course. Rub the shoes for luck? Isn’t there only one kind of luck for Kafka, and it isn’t good? The bronze dates from 2003 and inspired by one of his lesser-known stories, “Description of a Struggle,” which I haven’t read, but which sounds Kafkaesque all right.

I had to look up the sculptor, Jaroslav Róna, a resident of Prague and a member of its small but enduring Jewish community. Looks like he specializes in unsettling figures, so Kafka would be right up his alley.

I don’t know whether it is coincidence or not, but the statue happens to be near the Spanish Synagogue (Španělská synagoga). An exceptional piece of work, dating from 1868, built on the site of a much older synagogue. There has been a Jewish community in the city since at least the 10th century of the Common Era.

Now a museum, the Spanish Synagogue – referring to the Moorish Revival style – is part of the Jewish Museum in Prague, which oversees a half-dozen or so structures in the former Jewish quarter, including the aforementioned Pinkas Synagogue and Old Jewish Cemetery.

After decades of misuse and neglect, beginning with the Nazis and continuing under the Communists, the Spanish Synagogue was restored not long after the Velvet Revolution. It is magnificent.

The view from the upper level.

Another synagogue-turned-museum is the Maisel Synagogue (Maiselova synagoga).

What would a Jewish museum in Prague be without mentioning everyone’s favorite clay man animated by one of the names of the Lord? On display at the Maisel.

An active congregation gathers at the Old-New Synagogue (Staronová Synagoga), another of the historic structures.

It was once the New Synagogue, then there was a newer one; so it became Old-New, built in late 13th century of the Common Era. More than one source says that Staronová Synagoga is the oldest active synagogue in Europe.

Yes.

The Old Jewish Cemetery & The Pinkas Synagogue, Prague

Posted on March 27, 2025 by admin

Memory’s a dodgy bastard, so I’ll never be sure whether or not I saw souvenir golems for sale in Prague in 1994, when I bought a book of Golem stories. Maybe there were some, but those were the early years of the post-communist tourist economy. It takes a while to ramp up the tourist merch. I am sure, however, that I saw them in just about every gift shop we visited in the Czech capital in 2025. Some smaller, some larger, some gray, many the color of a dirty orange flower pot.

I decided not to buy one, though it might have been a good office-shelf companion to my figure of Ganesha or the meditating Bigfoot. But you never can be sure about golems, and since I don’t have the learning or wisdom of Rabbi Loew of Prague, the thing might get out of hand.

I also don’t remember any of the historic synagogues being open during my first visit. I’ve read that the nonprofit that manages them, the Jewish Museum in Prague, was only re-established in 1994, so I expect that most of the structures were still closed in those days.

One place that was open in ’94 was the Old Jewish Cemetery (Starý židovský hřbitov), but only for a glimpse.

Now you can take a stroll through the cemetery, which is adjacent to the Pinkas Synagogue (Pinkasova synagoga), on a stone path that snakes through the grounds. That’s one thing we did on March 11. It remains one of my favorite cemeteries.

I like the seeming chaos of the stones. Not only were people buried close to each other, they were interred in layers. I’ve read that as the cemetery grew more crowded, and use of an ossuary wasn’t an option, more soil was added, and new layers of the dead were added. You do notice, being there, that the ground tends to be higher than street level in most places, with the cemetery walls holding in the excess earth.

Burials occurred from the early 15th to the late 18th centuries. A few of the stones were also marked with modern plaques, denoting a notable permanent resident. Such as one Avigdor Kara (d. 1439).

Or Wolf Spira-Wedeles, mentioned here in passing. By the time he died (1715), some notables were receiving larger memorials, such as his.

I remembered to take a few black-and-whites.

Monochrome suits the texture and austere beauty of the Old Jewish Cemetery, I believe.

The adjacent Pinkas Synagogue hasn’t had a congregation in a long time. In our time, it serves as a memorial to the Czech Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Inside you can visit two floors.

On the walls on both floors are the names of the dead, and their birth and death dates, if known, inked by hand.

About 80,000 names in all.

Around the World ’25

Posted on March 16, 2025 by admin

At times like this, in the funk that comes after a long trip, I ask myself, did I actually do that? An odd question, maybe, but long travels have that odd effect. Somehow such a trip seems less than real. Also more than real. Those are essential features of the intoxication of the road, and hangovers follow intoxication.

Ponder this: Over roughly the last five weeks, starting on February 8, in a series of eight airplane flights, a small number of intercity train trips on either side of the Eurasian land mass (including one of the fastest trains in existence), a large number of subway, streetcar and even monorail rides, a few taxi rides, other car rides provided by friends and relatives and a hired driver, a bicycle rickshaw ride — and you haven’t lived and almost died (or at least felt that way) till you’ve taken such a conveyance in Delhi — climbing a lot of stairs and using a lot of escalators and elevators, and taking more than a few long walks, and many short walks, on sidewalks and cobblestone streets and railway station platforms, I went around the world in a westward direction, from metro Chicago to metro Chicago, by way of Japan, India, the United Arab Emirates, Germany and the Czech Republic.

All that effort for what? To see the world, of course. That and skip out of much of winter in northern Illinois.

How did I have the energy for this, here at the gates of old age? How are the logistics possible?

But it really isn’t that hard. This is the 21st century, and travel is mostly by machine, and part of a mass industry, so even old men firmly from the middle class can go. Retired and semiretired old men, who find themselves with more free time than in previous decades. Moreover, the logistics were the least of it: all you need in our time is a computer to set things up.

I’m convinced that the hard part, for many people, would be finding the will to go. Luckily I have a practically bottomless supply. My always-eager-to-go attitude toward seeing point A and then points B, C and so forth also meant I was completely persuaded that buzzing around the world was a good idea. Tired as I am now — and boy am I tired — I haven’t changed my mind, though I need to rest up a bit at the moment.

Japan: my first visit in 25+ years.

It felt familiar — I did live there for four years — but the passage of time also infused the place with a feeling of the unfamiliar as well, a strange combo sensation indeed.

India: A major lacuna in my travels, now just a little less so.

A friend who goes to India sometimes on business told me last fall, “India makes me tired.” I might not have been on business, but I ended up feeling the same way.

And yet — a phantasmagoria unlike anything I’ve seen, especially the teeming city streets. Teem was never more an apt verb, in my experience. Yuriko came as far as India with me, after we visited Japan and her family and friends there. Then she headed back eastward to Illinois.

I went on alone from India to the UAE.

In an even less familiar part of the world, a city of towers somehow rises on the edge of the Arabian desert. Just that is astonishing in its own way, but there is plenty else.

Then to Germany: An old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time, since about five golden weeks in my youth. A long, long time ago: the last time I was there, there were two Germanies and two Berlins and a Wall and the Stassi and Trabbis and a firm living memory of the cataclysm only 40 years earlier.

Berlin was the focus this time, where I joined my brother Jay for the visit. We’d been kicking around the idea of traveling there together for a while, and ultimately didn’t want to wait till either of us got any older. He had not made it to Berlin in ’72.

A major side trip from Berlin was to Prague. Not quite as old a friend, but old enough.

Yuriko and I visited in ’94, but it was new territory for Jay, another slice of the former Astro-Hungarian Empire to go with his early ’70s visit to Vienna.

Actually, when you visit a place you haven’t seen in 40 or 30 years, it’s like you’ve never been there. I had that sensation in both Berlin and Prague. The old memories are packed away, only loosely connected to their setting any more, which has changed partly beyond recognition anyway.

Now I’m back. Unlike Phileas Fogg, I didn’t return a day earlier than I thought I did (we have a stronger awareness of the International Date Line). But I did manage to miss the no one-likes-it spring transition to daylight savings time, just another little bonus of the trip.

Here, Here, Some Beer

Posted on June 12, 2018 by admin

Friends were over on Saturday for meat, beer and conversation on the deck, despite rain that morning. By mid-afternoon, the deck was dry enough to sit around.

We had more meat and conversation than beer, though there were a few empty bottles left over afterward, as there have been before. And before that.

I acquired a “flight” of beers before the event at an area grocery store with a beer cave, and these are three of them. As usual, my beer-buying technique was to look for a variety of states and countries of origin, and interesting labels.

Raging Bitch was the hit among the beer names. Its acid-trip Ralph Steadman artwork was remarked upon as well.

A product of the Flying Dog Brewery in Maryland. Later, I read the marketing blarney on the bottle, attributed to Steadman. It’s pretty good:

“Two inflammatory words, one wild drink. Nectar imprisoned in a bottle. Let it out. It is cruel to keep a wild animal locked up. Uncap it. Release it… stand back!! Wallow in its goldenn glow in a glass beneath a white foaming head. Remember, enjoying a RAGING BITCH, unleashed, untamed, unbridled and in heat is pure GONZO!!”

Gonzo, eh? Maybe if you added peyote, which we did not. Otherwise, it was reportedly a pleasant brew.

Voodoo Ranger, by New Belgium Brewing of Colorado and North Carolina, had another amusing label.
It didn’t assert its gonzo-ness. The label did say, “Brilliantly balanced for easy drinking, this pale ale is packed with citrus and tropical fruit flavors from eight different hop varieties.”

The center beer, PilsnerUrquell from Plzeň (Pilsen), Czech Republic, had the most conventional label, appealing to a drinker’s sense of tradition. The label said:

“In 1842, the Citizen’s Brewery of Plzeň brewed the world’s first golden pilsner and never stopped. We make it in the same way in the same place, with 100% of our ingridients from the same farming regions in Czech, as always.”

Not pictured is the grapefruit shandy that I tried, which a guest brought. It went down well, but in combo with meat and another bottle of beer, I later had a rare but fortunately fleeting bout of indigestion. I’d say it was worth it, though.

Prague 1994

Posted on November 8, 2015 by admin

Earlier this year, when I read about Prague in Patrick Leigh Fermor‘s A Time of Gifts, I found myself wondering, did I really visit the same city as he did? The answer is yes and no. He was there in 1934. I was there in 1994. That makes a considerable difference. But more importantly, he had a sharper eye for detail than I did, than I ever could hope to, and was informed by a better education and an all-around aptitude for the road.

But at least I’d heard of the Second Defenestration of Prague, which made it a really cool moment when we saw the window from which it happened.

And I knew about the Golem. Or at least the concept. So I was interested in Prague to pick up Golem by Eduard Petiška, a Czech author and poet in a country that seems to take its poets seriously (and who managed to have an asteroid named after him). The book is his own telling of the various stories about Rabbi Loew of Prague and the creature he created to protect the Jewish population of the city. What is it about the Czechs and automatons? After all, another Czech author, Karel Čapek, gave the world the word robot.

Speaking of authors from Prague, we also made our way to one of the places where Kafka lived. It’s the little blue-hued structure on this pedestrian street. At the time you could buy his works inside. Probably that’s still true.

Kafka seems to be fairly well known in Japan, which might be something of a surprise, except when you consider the Kafkaesque elements of a salaryman’s life. Anyway, Yuriko was familiar with him.

And why is it always Kafkaesque? Guess Kafka-ish or Kafka-like or Kafka-oid don’t convey that sense of dread in the face of anonymous, malevolent functionaries.

A Ride on the Paternoster

Posted on March 13, 2014 by admin

Here’s a term I’d never heard before: paternoster elevator. Or, as Wiki defines it, in part: “a chain of open compartments (each usually designed for two persons) that move slowly in a loop up and down inside a building without stopping.” The site has a helpful illustration.

The term was new to me, not the thing itself, because Yuriko and I rode one in Prague almost 20 years ago. We were astonished to find such a contraption. I never knew it had a special name, but I didn’t forget it.

This YouTube posting gives something of the sense of riding one, and since it was filmed in Prague, that might have been the very one we rode on. Here’s one in Copenhagen that I would have ridden if I’d known about it. I’m astonished that they’re still around even now.

As usual, I came to the term in a roundabout way. After proposing a coffee table book about dirty ice mounds, I remembered another one I came up with years ago, Great Elevators of Europe. For fun, I Googled that term, and the video about the paternoster came up.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: Czech Republic