Your Typical, Exciting Brno Evening
Lately I've been making it to the store just as it's closing. Luckily, I can just pop over to Interspar on the tram any day, any time between 7 and 22 (hundred hours). (That is, assuming the tram is running, which in Brno, is not always a safe assumption, particularly during "late" hours, e.g., after 6 p.m.) Thank goodness for the revolution, I think every time I go, because otherwise all the stores would have probably closed at about 3 p.m. and there would have been long lines for everything, particularly fresh stuff.
Of course, there are still long lines, they've just been moved to more aesthetically pleasing locations. They're no longer outside the door of the only shop in the city selling fresh produce and they're aimed toward centralized paying stations (quaintly known as "check-out counters," or pokladny). The line situation is made worse by the store's decision to have only a few counters open in the last half hour before closing time. This means that everyone &mdash there is inevitably a handful of people in addition to myself &mdash has to wait in a long line.
After my late-night shopping spree, I can walk home along the bank of a pleasant river. In case you are unfamiliar with Brno, this is not like walking along the Vltava in Prague or the Danube in Vienna or Budapest. No, like so much in Brno, the rivers are humble and often unremarkable. Yet it is still a pleasant walk and, in case you're in need of variety, there are two rivers to choose from (and, of course the dam and reservoir).
Along the way home I can think about the wonderfully insightful and witty things I will post on my blog. Or about the few thoughts I wrote down and added to the (small, unbecomingly formless) pile of papers that is supposed to someday amount to a dissertation. It may be small, but it's still worth something. Or about what strange things the Brno dragon might have written if he was still marauding local waterways and had been interviewed by the local paper. Or how the rock band practicing in the garage across the river might sound if they could play more than three chords. Or what all the
fishermen out so late might actually be catching (I don't really want to think about that one so much since all I can imagine is that they will catch something to make a tripe-soup-like dish for breakfast).
At the end of tonight's walk I met a hedgehog. It was so cute! I don't know if I've ever seen one before, but if there is no superstition to this effect already, then I'm sure that meeting a hedgehog on your way home must be a good sign.
Posted 19 July 2006 at 00:02.
A graduate student in music and anthropology writing a dissertation about music in Moravia, the eastern third of the Czech Republic. At some point, the Czech Republic's "second city" (that would be Brno) captured my attention, and I've since been blogging about events, arts, music, and other stuff—basically whatever interests me in and around the cityscape. I'm not living in Brno now, but I keep up with the cultural pulse from afar as best I can.
Comments:
Okay. As you described your idyllic walk, I couldn't help but hear snatches of Ma Vlast as your walking music.
3:50 PM, July 19, 2006
Gang symbols? Yikes!
Ma vlast might have been right, but it would have to have been one of the calmer sections - not like the part where the Vltava flows past the peasant wedding and there is a polka. -)
10:31 AM, July 20, 2006
You can't go wrong with hedgehogs, I say.
3:39 PM, July 22, 2006
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