Day 158: A Serendipitous Symphony

Around noon I met Tash and Kade at the nearby Café Pavlač, where we had some food and coffee.

When they left to return to their beds, I stuck around and finished some work on my computer. Around 4pm, I had a list of destinations that I would like to see and walked into old town to begin checking them off my list. Prague is absolutely stuffed with tourists, perhaps not surprising given that it was a Friday evening, though I have a feeling it's like this just about every day -- especially in the summer. I bought a Trdelník, a cylindrical donut type pastry that you can have filled with frosting or even ice cream. It wasn't bad. Extremely sweet, though.

After walking through the central mass of old town, I moved out towards the river. On the way I passed by a church that had a sign on its front door advertising a performance by, of all things, the Fort Worth Youth Orchestra.

And the performance had just started two minutes ago! I walked inside to ask about tickets, and was told the performance was free! The program they handed me was full of Tchaikovsky, Latin music, a few well-known Czech composer orchestrations, and (you won't believe this, but) a piece that featured a typewriter as a soloist.

Of course, I stayed for the whole thing. And it was one of the coolest -- if not most random -- musical experiences I've had on my trip.

Here is the first piece I saw, archetypal Czech music, Vltava by the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana.

After the performance ended at 8pm it was still light outside, so I crossed a bridge to the new town area. 

An overcast day in Prague

I passed by the Franz Kafka Museum, which I decided I would definitely be going back to after seeing the weird fountain/sculpture outside and reading about Kafka later that night. There's also a neat bookstore along the main cobblestone street closest to the river. It has a lounge area downstairs so you can sit down and enjoy a book for a while before deciding to buy it. 

I was looking for a Kafka book to read, but they only had new copies available, all outside of my budget.

On the way back to the hostel I had to bum a ride off the bus because the company in charge of public transportation here makes it stupidly difficult to buy tickets. The only place to find readily available ticket machines are in metro stations (not that unusual, but you'll see why this is annoying in a moment). The ticket machines only accept coins. I'd just donated all my coins to the church where the youth orchestra performance had been, and there is no change machine, change counter, or human you can buy a ticket from. Buying a longer term ticket is a possibility to avoid having to visit a metro station with a pocket full of coins every time you want to ride the bus, but the closest options to what I need are a three-day pass and a month-long pass (which requires an I.D. to buy, another 150 CZK), neither of which are going to save you money unless you're hopping on a bus every few hours. Get your stuff together, Prague Public Transport!