remembering to remember

so i've been home a week and have been trying to make time to finish up my trip blog and obviously haven't quite managed to cross that off my to-do list yet :/ argh. i was talking with tony about it the other day and he was like "isn't it a little too late now?" and on the one hand he's got a point and i already thought about that, like it's done, it's over, i'm home. half the fun of writing the blog and for those reading it is when i'm actually there and in it. now it's just picking from my memory bank which resembles swiss cheese more than a ball of squished together worms :) but then i think back to the days of My Space and when i was in Hamburg, Germany for 4 weeks and then touring Portugal and Spain with Tony...i never finished those travel blogs. i never uploaded the last photos of the trip, for those who were following. hell, i don't think i even looked at them once i got home. that was another rough trip. anyway, i regret that i didn't finish that up so i'm going to push myself to finish this one and whoever wants to read it, can, and those who don't want to, shouldn't. so that said, here's what i've managed so far:

(written this past Sunday 5/30)

It's a simply georgeous Sunday in SF on Memorial Weekend and I've parked myself at the SoCha cafe where there's a live band playing my favorite kind of jazz and I've got a mimosa to sip on - how much better could life get?! Well, maybe if my travel blogs were already written and I wasn't faced with struggling to put focus to the blurr that my trip is. However, with a raised eyebrow, tilt of the head and chuckle to myself I think maybe it's better this way - so as not to have consumed so much memory on this free blog site and the precious time of all my friends and family reading my often all too overly detailed and lengthy thoughts. Sigh. So with dueling laptops I begin looking back at photos on one as I recall the amazing time on the other. Here goes...

Where did I leave off??

Let's start with some general thoughts and observations about Prague! I started a list...hmmm, guess I didn't get far with it. It says: lace curtains, red hair. Hahaha! Ok, so literally every frickin' window I saw had lace curtains hanging in it! No joke. When I first moved in with Tony he had these kinds of curtains and once I established myself enough in the relationship to feel like I had the right, I took those oldie curtains down and gave them to Goodwill!! He says they were there when he moved in and I'm sure that was true, but funny that he just left them. No, not funny, typical. But I digress, when I first saw these in Prague I thought "ick" then I saw them again and I cocked my head to the side and gave a quizzical look, and when I realized they were in every frickin' window I just snickered and decided it was cool - for Prague. So next is the red hair...ya know, I've got the most rockin' red hair (thanks to my good friend & stylist, Jen) and have played with all the different hues over the last 15 years ranging from a truly natural looking orange-ish red to an intense fuscia that could almost be called pink to a deep mahogony to my current dark red-violet. I can pull this off somehow because of my personality and my skin tone - my paternal grandmother was a natural redhead - but not everyone can, and most people (at least in the US) who know this, accept it, and stick with other colors. Not so in Europe or at least specifically in the Czech Republic. Wow, did I ever see some crazy ass dye jobs - holy moly! And lots of them! On the young, the old and in the middle. Gotta hand it to these women, they aren't afraid to take risks :)

April lives in this totally adorable flat that can be seen in bits in my photos. For the several European flats I've stayed in this one was very typical - the place is made up of rooms with doors off a main square entryway/center space - no hallways. All rooms are off this main small room, all with doors, even the kitchen. The toilet is in a separate room from the sink and bath. "WC" (Water Closet) is how bathrooms are referred to in Europe on signs, etc. This is nice so two people can be going about their business at the same time. WC's there have a toilet brush right next to the toilet so it can be used - and is expected to be used - at each time it is needed! In Germany where their toilets are shaped different inside and you literally poop on a shelf that is washed over with water when you flush (two kinds of flush buttons - one for pee one for poo - which determines the amount of and intensity of the water flushing) this brush is especially nice.
I'll leave it at that. There's commonly just a big tub for cleaning yourself, no real shower like we know in the Western world. There's a spray head on a hose but getting yourself clean without watering the entire bathroom floor is a challenge.

On Thursday, May 13th, after a little breakfast at home we headed out on a walk through the city, passing the statue of a girl releasing a bird (or reaching out for it to land on her hand??) next to the Namesti Miru Church - see photo-I took the exact photo my sister took when she first arrived in Prague and saw the sweet statue and which I loved so much I kept as my screen saver for a long time. We took the metro to Vysehrad Park - a 1,000 year old citadel enclosing a peaceful set of gardens, footpahts and the national cemetary next to the twin-towered Church of Sts. Peter and Paul. We were up on a wall path basically and had the most georgeous view of the city and river. We wandered through the cemetary where I saw the most amazing headstones - true pieces of art that made me start thinking about what I'd like to have mark my spot when I die. We had lunch at a vegetarian Indian restaurant called Beas that April says she goes to not infrequently between classes in that part of town. I got to see the main office of her school, although she's never really there since she goes from job site to job site to teach her classes. We took the tram to the Mala Strana area and did some walking around there. There was this very cool, intense memorial to the people that lived under Communism - see photo. A striking sculptural group consisting of several ragged human figures (all men, seemingly all the same man) in progressive stages of disintegration, descending a staggered slope of stairs.