from this to that

This morning the sunshine was streaming in the east windows, heating my cereal milk as I ate, beckoning to come and make the most of a summer day. We are back in our tranquil little blue house after five days in Prague, Czech Republic.

The pulse of a city is at the same appealing and repelling -- after a bit in the countryside the thrum and vibrancy of a dense human population is drawing. It's music, sirens, murmurings and thumpings, the art, magnificent architecture, and appetites for all kinds of food. People watching. Subway riding. Shop perusing. Accompanied by the sharp smack of sewage stench, broken human beings, twisted and blatant sexual "entertainment", dismal dirty corners filled with garbage and poorly executed graffiti.

My ears have become accustomed to the thick silence of little Holsbybrunn, but at moments it almost feels as if I am going crazy -- the loudest thing the ringing in my ears. But the screech and howl of Communist-era trains shooting by one another was almost too much to bear. (Martin covered his ears, but he's lived sanscity longer than I.) All possible windows of the train were down to combat the stifling July heat and the pervading, rank smell of urine.

We spent four days in the city and one day traveling about 35 kilometers outside of Prague to a smaller village and 14th century castle built by a former Czech king and Roman emperor. We walked up into the surrounding hills and nature reserve to find "little America", a 100 metre canyon with a lake at it's bottom. We passed by large poppy fields with their blue-gray-green bulbs and crumbling cement and wood houses of the bygone peasantry. Fields of yellow grain and shiny-leafed corn.

But the city life -- Czech pub food, gorgeous clothes, spires and steeples of 1,000 years of art and design, river boats, pink/blue/orange flats, warm cobblestone and beautiful light polution, has it's appeal for a few days.