When I was 13, I visited Europe. Since then, it haunts my dreams and pulses through my veins.

In Prague, I walked the same streets as so many influential authors. I ate ice cream from a shop in a house on Golden Lane and bought trinkets out of a suitcase from a man who probably lived there when Franz Kafka lived in house number 22. Wandering the streets, I heard a children's choir sing Czech folk songs from a festival being held in Old Town Square. My eyes wandered over a million tiny glass animals -- you see, in Prague, every other shop sells Bohemian glass. I bought a pair of fat polygonal cats for my grandmother. I stood atop the archway on the Charles Bridge, looking down on the Vltava river hugging the buildings and imagined that below the water's surface, in the bowels of those buildings could be rooms filled with secrets I could never fathom. My friend and I drank wine in a cafe across from the Jewish cemetery, the maple chairs upholstered with a fabric the color of the strong bitter red wine in our glasses. I marveled at the stained glass of St. Vitus Cathedral, and the chapel of St. Wenceslaus inside it. I giggled with friends in regards to the torture museum, favoring the amusement given by a pole that people were impaled through the rectum and out the mouth on.

We stayed in a hotel outside of Prague 1, the section of which I am unsure, and I will never know. My knowledge of the trip is limited to my memories, which when you are 13 is not much. The apartments near our hotel were many stories tall, and no more than big slabs of concrete. It was almost depressing, and somehow much more charming than the townhouses and luxury apartments that cover our country.

When I go back to the Czech Republic, I am taking a lot more pictures. And going to the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutna Hora, the chapel adorned in human skeletons.


I will post with more memories from Europe tomorrow.
I wish I could go back again.