Flaneurky

If I said I'd spent the week immersed in a tickertape of library order slips and in the dust of the archives, it would be an unforgivable lie. The problem is that the library at the Institute consists of one wall of windows that looks out on a courtyard with a small fountain in the shape of a grave and the autumn sun.

I come out of the metro in the mornings a hundred feet from the Institute, blink, feel the warmth, and head to a cafe.

Maybe it's because by the time I get to the library all I'm reading about is the cafe culture of interwar Vienna (cynical, ironic, nostalgic for a lost Empire) and the cafe culture of interwar Prague (vibrant, hopeful). There's no other remedy but to sit outside a cafe and think about it, sipping a small, strong shot of coffee.

You don't see people running around sipping bucket-sized coffees with straws, that faintly watery and bitter stuff, fueling non-stop flurry. People actually take the time to sit down and look. Maybe read. None of this laptop stuff. None of the striving. Just your coffee, the sun, and the street.

Last week I met with some of the professors at the Institute to talk about their project on censorship - I thought I was only going to meet with one, but five turned up for the hell of it, and we talked for a couple of hours; they made coffee and tea and then we went for lunch. Nora arrived and was talking about her research about the "flaneur" and made the point that there were no female ones (in Czech, "flaneurky" - a lovely word). They were too busy looking after kids, I said, or paying for the guy to go out and flaner.
But they exist now. I can attest to that.

We met Mateuz and his girlfriend Agniezka that evening and went to a couple of great bars under the castle. Agniezka is traveling around Europe doing a PhD on 16th century drawings, jointly between the Sorbonne, the Uffizi and Central European University. She was heading to Florence and then London to look at drawings. Utterly unpretentious, totally involved in what she's doing for the sake of it. We walked through Kampa, an island under Charles Bridge, half lit. We talked about Polish literature over beer and sausage.

On Saturday, I met Martina who, though from Prague, I've only ever met before in the US. And we went to the cafe at the Lucerna kino. My uncle used to manage it in the 70s and, though then dilapidated and ragged, still exuded some dull glamour of its Art Nouveau past. There's a horseshoe bar, but it's Cubist. And a beaten-up grand piano. They've done it up a little, but it's hard to tell. It just is. After dinner, we walked along the river, Prague Castle hovering over Petrin, and, deciding not to cross over Charles Bridge because it was still jam-packed, we went over Cechuv Bridge instead. It's my favorite bridge, Martina said, and I wondered why because I'd never really looked at it, it seems at first glance quite plain. But she started talking about it, showed me the dragon and snakes on one side of the bridge, the Art Deco panelling and then the winged Victories at the head of the bridge with a lamp beneath them. Gulls perched all along their razor sharp wings. We were the only people there.

Most of the rest of the weekend, I spent with my lovely cousin and her daughter. My cousin is possibly the kindest person I know, very funny. At one point we ended up in a giant Tesco supermarket, and we looked at each other and I knew we were both thinking how unimaginable this would have been 25 years ago. The general affluence here is striking (possibly because they're not part of the Euro), there is an actual middle class here, as opposed to the fake "middle class" in America - a euphemism all over the news - which translates as "working class people who've been f@#*ed by the banks". It's revelatory to see a country that three years after the Nazis left, had forty years of ruinous Communism, and seems still much better, for the average person, than America, in terms of a general standard of living.

We dropped my cousin's daughter off at her school, deep in the Old Town, on Sunday night, racing through the cobbled streets, side-swiping tourists, with 70s music, sung in English by Czechs, blaring out.

Okay, okay. I have been doing research. More of which later.