Prague ♥ - Part 2

(photo by Robert Doisneau)

I don't want to write a pure diary-entry-style post, neither do I want to enumerate the sights in a travel-guide way (after all, there are more than enough decent travel guides out there for those who need official Prague info). All I want, is to express what Prague meant to me, it seems though that I lack the ability to transform my feelings into words.

Here is my best shot:

When, at my teens, I read the novels and saw the nostalgic photos of bohemic, intellectual Paris of the 50s-60s, something moved inside me. It was undefined, a peculiar feeling I could hardly discern but knew it was lying there, sleeping. I felt it some more times moving, but even Paris itself didn't manage to wake it up. It was in Prague that it woke up; it was magic, felt like love and overwhelmed me. Prague is all they had told me Paris was.

One evening, after the too crowded Christmas Market of the Main Square, where I could hardly walk (it took my breath away, even under those circumstances), I spent 15 minutes on Charles Bridge, watching the efforts of a French couple to take a specific photo: the girl, on her toes and leaning over the bridge, was trying to attract the seagulls with a cookie, whereas the boy waited, camera on hand, to capture the moment a seagull would eat it. For some moments, a seagull hovered above the girl's head, looking at the cookie and figuring out if he should go for it, finally, decided to pass. It is a pity they missed it, they were too focused on their original plan.

All my week there, I felt like the seagull, those few specific moments he hovered above the girl's head - he was there, still and moving at the same time, free to move towards any direction, each of them offering him something. He could fly higher in the air, dive into the river, land proud and alone on some statue's head, crash into the pavement, eat the cookie, refuse the cookie, join the strange creatures on the bridge or return to his peers: all options open, everything possible, able to do whatever he desired and whatever he imagined. What he chose, never mind: the only thing that counts, is this moment of sublime freedom.