July 9-12, 2003

Weirdly, one of the first things I actually did in Prague was think about where to go next. Or specifically, whether to go at all.

It was a critical decision, as I wanted to book my stay in the Traveler's Hostel with plenty of advance warning for them, so as not to leave me either scrambling for a bed or packing up and lugging my bag across Prague yet another time. I'd already scrapped an overnight in Amsterdam, and was loath to strike anything else off the itinerary. But after arriving and struggling to find lodging in Prague, all done without the help of a Lonely Planet guide, I made two immediate decisions: I would book rooms in advance for every other city I planned to visit, and I would not go to Budapest.

The latter was a really difficult decision for me, as I've heard nothing but incredible things about what a gorgeous and interesting city Budapest is. People deemed it a must-see, and who knew when I'd get back around to Eastern Europe? It seemed criminal to be so close and yet skip it.

But then I realized that I was right next to a lot of things I wanted to see and wouldn't have time to hit. Plus, I just didn't want the stress of another whirlwind tour through a city for which I lacked an extensive enough guidebook to do it right. And Budapest -- the twin bergs of Buda and Pest, actually -- demanded to be done in style, without haste. And once I figured out it was a mere two-hour train ride from Vienna, which I knew deep down I'd be visiting again someday, I decided that Budapest wasn't going to be evermore off my radar. It just wouldn't squeak on there during this trip.

That decision, hard as it was, lifted a weight off my shoulders. Once I booked all my future hostel rooms, I could sit back, relax, and enjoy the luxuriousness of three full days and nights in Prague -- a night longer than I initially intended to stay, but Prague's a jewel and I wanted to have at least once city that let me love it in a leisurely way.

Still, my energy was low, so the slog to Old Town Square involved less gawking at the old-world beauty of the Czech buildings and more yearning for food and a strong, delicious alcoholic beverage. Starting my tour with Old Town would accomplish both a meal and a little sightseeing, as it's the site of one of Prague's most famed, lauded landmarks.

The Astrological Clock is an elaborate timepiece that tracks time of day, phases of the moon, seasons, and the position of the sun in the Zodiac. Originally built in 1410, it was almost destroyed in the sixteenth century and restored with a slightly different, more involved fa�ade. It's stunning in silence, but its primary attraction for tourists is that a little show starts when its glockenspiel chimes on the hour. It's supposed to be one of the most glorious sights in the city.

It's also the first stop of the day for Prague's pickpockets, rated by Lonely Planet as the best in Europe -- crafty, skilled, wily. I arrived at the clock at 11:45 a.m., and watched for fifteen minutes as independent tourists and tour groups mobbed the clock, creating a throng of densely packed bodies with enough bumping and jerking to render invisible the clawing fingers of a tiny thief. I hugged my backpack to me.

The seconds ticked away. The air became clogged with hoisted cameras and video recorders, and a gradual hush blanketed the mob. And sure enough, when the clock chimed, I was speechless.

Because it was terrible.

The crowd invariably squeals delightedly when the two little windows at the top of the clock slide open, and carvings of the twelve apostles float past them it on a mechanized track. A few other symbols of death, a macabre little touch, float past, and a skeleton waves up and down, slowly, rhythmically, barely perceptibly. But that's basically it; you have to applaud the fact that it's been chiming and telling time for six-hundred years, but a master show it is not. Yet, inevitably, the second it's done, the entire crowd of tourists moans a disappointed, "Ohhhhhh." Not because they didn�t like it, but because they're crushed it's finished.

I stared at them in amazement, and then gazed sadly at the gorgeous clock whose secret show -- deemed a must-see and an incredible thing by every tour book out there -- was such a huge disappointment. So boring. Yawn. Maybe, I reasoned, I just needed to see it again.

For lunch, I chose an outdoor caf� positioned directly across from the clock. I read, I people-watched, I gobbled a steak, and I learned my first crucial lesson of being in Prague: Don't order a margarita. The tequila was crappy and bitter; not a surprise, but a definite depressant considering that all I wanted was a stiff drink to settle me into my surroundings. It was hard to choke down, but I am, after all, a professional: I drank the whole thing.

As I noshed, sure enough a swarm of tourists staked out some territory in front of the clock, and the same ritual repeated itself: Gushing "awwws" when it began, a lackadaisical and anticlimactic show, and a chorus of anguished "ohhhhhs" upon its completion.

Either people are easy to please, or I'm one hell of a harsh critic.

Old Town Square itself is quite beautiful. Its most notable building is the Church of our Lady of Tyn, a place of worship for the city's Protestant Hussites. It can only be accessed through a well-hidden entrance because of the pink buildings constructed in front of and around it by the city's Jesuits, irritated that the Hussites had their own impressive church and eager to block it and pretend it wasn't there. The late Baroque/early Gothic church has unbalanced spires that, when lit at night, cast an eerie orange glow over the square.

After browsing the square, I wandered past a street market bridging Old Town and New Town. That's where I first got wind of the second important thing to remember about Prague: It's got a puppet obsession. Every vendor sold wood marionettes with glazed, crazed eyes; posters pimped a local production of "Cats," which I thought was the Lloyd Webber version until I realized it was something separate and performed entirely by puppets and their deranged masters. Quickly, I escaped from the market and out toward the Charles Bridge.

This cheered me up instantly. Prague is a gorgeous city: the halves are separated by the Charles River, which is spanned by a handful of old bridges that include this one, its most famed. Artisans and musicians have casual stalls set up along the edges, and rather than having a claustrophobic effect, it gives the bridge a funky pulse. On the other side is a neighborhood called Mala Strana, and the renowned Prague Castle, perched atop a hill and looking over the city and the water.

On this day, I just wanted to look. Scarily enough, a lot of the area looked back at me, as the narrow, winding streets were packed to the gills with tourist-driven shops filled with more frightening puppets -- these, in many cases, even creepier than the first batch I saw. Every shop without fail had them suspended in bunches around the doorframe, almost like anti-tourist talismans, but for the fact that their entire business hinged on the impulse shopping of visitors eager for a piece of the city. Given that I didn't want my piece of Prague to have eyeballs or a movable mouth, I marched right on past.

The only place I actually entered was St. Nicholas -- one of two churches by that name in Prague, confusingly -- and it was lovely, but mostly I wanted to snap pictures and feel the sun on my skin. The sight of the castle against a perfect blue sky perked me up immensely, as did the music and the crafts -- necklaces, earrings, bracelets, pictures -- for sale along the bridge. I made an afternoon of just casually wandering around, enjoying the lack of time pressure.

Never had a shower felt so good. I went back to the hostel late that afternoon and immediately hopped in for a good hot cleaning. Hostel showers all vary -- some are coin-operated, but most of them run on timers that shut off after a variable amount of time. It can get chilly in there if you're soaping up and the spray suddenly shuts off, but you become attuned to the slow dwindling of water pressure and teach yourself to time it so that you hit the button mere seconds before the spray turns off altogether. This one was a thirty-second timer and a powerful spray, so it was twice as luxe as any I'd experienced.

Thirty whole seconds of water. Funny how standards of decadence change.

The first traveler I met was a bubbly strawberry-blonde in the bed above mine. Her name was Dana, and we gabbed for half an hour before making the determination that it made far more sense to talk with food in front of us.

I still don't know exactly what counts as Prague, or Czech, cuisine. Previously, I'd had every intention of sampling the local cultural delicacies, but then I'd peruse a menu and be mired in complete confusion. Do I like that? What is that? Do I dare risk a Donna Martin, when she and Brenda went to Paris and accidentally ordered brains? Also, I'm a huge apologist when it comes to not speaking a country's language, and the prospect of butchering Czech in front of a waitstaff that didn't speak much English -- it's harder to find adept English speakers over there -- didn't appeal to me. I feared they'd find it insulting. Particularly because my experience in France was that they loathe you for not speaking the language, but loathe you even more for trying and failing.

Fortunately, I quickly learned that the other food options in general are all excellent and dirt-cheap, particularly those off the main tourist squares. Dana and I chose a Greek restaurant located three blocks from the hostel. Two drinks, two appetizers, and two main courses -- all enormous portions -- cost the equivalent of seven dollars. Total. My Italian dinner on night number two, with Dana and two others, cost ten dollars. The dark beer went down like chocolate. I love Prague.

Except for the fact that the two things I invariably wanted during a day of walking -- Coca-Cola Light and water -- are the only two items that aren't inexpensive. For the price of a full meal with dessert, I could get a bottle of Coke Light and a small bottle of water to lug around with me the whole day. And yet, the prices never stop anyone from picking these things up eagerly and guzzling them with abandon. The Czechs have the tourists pegged right. (As do other Europeans; in Rome, Amy and I desperately paid three dollars for a bottle of Coke Light, but that's an anecdote for another travelogue.)

Dana turned out to be very nice, very easy to chat to� and very, very young. She was nineteen at the time, headed into her sophomore year in high school, and I felt like a senior citizen by comparison. Not because she found it weird that I was 25, or treated me any differently, but because her attitudes and stresses and worries were so very typical of someone that age -- familiar to me as one who once was nineteen, obviously -- that I realized just how much six years can mean. She's dropped two majors and is weighing where to go next. At one point, she leaned forward and earnestly whispered, "Heather, I am so freaked out to be turning twenty."

Biting back a laugh, I nodded and thought about what she was going through -- the pressure to figure out what you want to be when you grow up, thinking that the decision you make in college is the one you're stuck with for life. I told her that I'd felt the same way, assuming that because I'd been into journalism in college, I'd be doing it until I retired. But life and opportunity jointly took me somewhere else, and I'd never have predicted it; I figure the same thing is going to happen to her. Who she is now has little bearing on who she'll be six years down the line, when she's 25 and talking to someone in a small, smoky restaurant in Prague who's desperate for some kind of guidance as to how to pick a path. With age you learn not to mind as much, and you realize you have to stay open to the chances you're given or which you find. But in this respect, though our age difference is apparent, the six years between us also suddenly mean very little. Sure, I've had five years in the working world, but I still haven't pinpointed where I belong, or who precisely I am, in a professional sense. Your identity doesn't get any easier to find. You just learn to enjoy looking for it.

That night, we hit the top-floor bar in the hostel and met a group of giddy Brits who'd just graduated from their equivalent of high-school. With flights to Prague from Bristol on sale for forty pounds round-trip, they all snapped up the tickets and hit Prague for a little celebration.

They were a great bunch of girls, plus one guy who eagerly adored Americans, which made a nice change from what most of the foreign travelers I met seemed to feel. They made for great drinking buddies, so much so that Dana and I were downright drunk by the time we staggered downstairs and into our dorm room.

A spur-of-the-moment jaunt to the Czech Republic -- what a great life. That's one reason I'd absolutely love to live in England again: It's a perfect jumping-off point. My East Coast family wouldn't really be that much farther away, time-wise, than they are with me across the U.S. in Los Angeles, and yet from London it's easy and cheap to hop over to Europe and play. Naturally, our drinking buddies felt the opposite, unable to imagine why someone who lived anywhere as cool as America felt a yearning to leave. To pervert a clich� in an effort to hide its total triteness, I guess the beer is always smoother in someone else's bars.

The rest of my stay there, I did a lot of walking. Prague's metro system is perfectly good, but as I've documented before, I do prefer to pad around on foot the entire duration of a day, if I can. The exception would be in London, because for some reason I love the Tube beyond all reason.

My first stop was in New Town, where I noticed a very curious thing: A statue of a man suspended from a building by a brass noose, essentially an artistic ode to suicide. Confused, and with no one around to explain it, I just moved right along into the Jewish Quarter and the Old-New Synagogue.

Currently the oldest synagogue in Central Europe, the Old-New Synagogue gets its name from the fact that the only older building in Prague was destroyed in 1142, and other new ones cropped up around it that relegated the New Synagogue to being the old new Synagogue; the ensuing hyphenate name stuck. It's survived numerous fires and a severe flood, despite being an incredibly humble and simple-looking building that's of modest construction. Old-New Synagogue is also, according to local lore, home to the Golem of Prague. If you've read Kavalier and Clay, you've heard it mentioned.

A golem is a mythical creature that, according to religious writings, can be animated by a confluence of the right holy words and writings. In the 1500s, a Prague rabbi built a life-sized golem from clay and successfully animated it by putting a tablet in its mouth on which was carved some scripture. It would perform menial tasks, and then he would turn it back to clay on Friday nights in advance of the Jewish holy day. But legend has it that one night, he forgot to remove the tablet, and the Golem of Prague ran rampant and left destruction in its wake. The rabbi and his friends sought it, de-animated it, and carried its clay remains to the attic of Old-New Synagogue, banning everyone from accessing it and even destroying the staircase that led to the attic. To this day, no one is allowed in that attic, and the Czechs like to point to the fact that other Synagogues in the area allow visitors access to their attics as proof that Old-New Synagogue has something hidden up there.

Unless you believe what you read, in which case, Joe Kavalier's got the Golem.

My sister Julie spent a semester living and studying in Prague, and was both delighted I'd be seeing it myself and despondent she couldn't visit it with me.

She'd eagerly asked me if Prague was as charming as she remembered, or if Westernization had stolen some of its specialness. My answer on the first two days would have been that Prague was a gem, truly wonderful and relatively unaffected by anything but the tourist trade that resulted in a little more English spoken around town and a horde of food carts catering to out-of-towners.

On day three, though, I ventured to Wenceslas Square and deeper into New Town, and that's when I spotted the telltale hallmarks of Western influence: Starbucks, McDonald's, and the most nefarious infection of all, a Hooters. I was a little bit appalled to see that there, the orange sign and the owl's eyes poking out from an old world building as if it belonged.

Prague won't ever stop being beautiful, won't lose its wonderfulness, but it's definitely not as much of a remote cultural oasis as once it was. And that's inevitable, I suppose, with the advent of faster, better, cheaper air travel, and technology that spans and miniaturizes the world in ways people even ten years ago could only imagine. But through talking to a few other travelers I repeatedly heard ardent entreaties to go visit smaller Czech towns that seem to have taken Prague's place -- at least, the place of the Prague Julie knew. "Go see Cesky Krumlov. It's not far, and it's what Prague used to be," some would sniff.

I guess it's inevitable that Western hands would grab a city like Prague and seize it hard. That doesn't make it any less shameful that we're so inseparable from our cultural comfort zones that we can no longer live without McDonalds, function without Starbucks, or get our jiggles and jollies without Hooters girls in their tight tees. One can only hope that Prague's metamorphosis magically stops there, and that it remains an incredible historical trove, a portal to the past even as the world around it is whipsawed into the future.

Most of day three was taken up with touring Prague Castle, a complex of museums, churches, and royal apartments walled in atop a hill with breathtaking views of the city.

Its centerpiece is St. Vitus, a cathedral that's a beyond-enormous monument of Gothic Architecture, but which was completed in recent memory -- in 1927, to be exact, when the unfinished church was finally polished off by some impatient builders who seem more than capable of producing the kind of beautiful architecture of the past that no one else today seems willing to attempt. These days, we add nothing more to the landscape than kiosks and strip malls around the truly beautiful monuments built in a technological stone age by people with fewer resources at their disposal than we have.

The Toy Museum in the Prague Castle complex had a specialty exhibit of Barbie dolls through the ages, from the doll's inception to modern-day versions, to rarely seen specialty Barbies created in between. The written introduction to the Barbie exhibit was incredibly defensive. It read, "People noted that, of all Barbie's incarnations, she was never anything like a philosopher. But did little girls need to want to be philosophers? The children's answer was a resounding, 'No!'"

There were also some unreleased prototypes from the 1980s, plus some glitzy ones with garb specially created by designers like Bob Mackey, whose wedding dress on Barbie looked shockingly and repellently like the vomitous creation worn by Celine Dion the first time she and Rene Whoeverlil swapped vows. Actress Debi Mazar is the absolute spitting image of the doll labeled as the first-ever Barbie. The Tori Spelling Barbie is truly atrocious. You know how, when you squeeze Barbie's head at the ears, her face gets distorted in hideous ways? That's what the Tori Spelling doll looks like without you laying a hand on it.

Eerily accurate, too.

The last night, I ate alone at a pizzaria near where Old Town meets the Jewish Quarter. The calzone was bigger than my head, delicious, fresh, and still surprising given that I'd heard nothing prior to this about the quality of anything edible in Prague besides the beer.

Dana had discussed making plans for our final night, but I just wanted to be alone. I wanted to marinate in the city, its vibe, its air, its buildings, reveling in where I was and how much I loved it now compared to how bleak my outlook was when I arrived. I ate quietly, eavesdropped on Czech conversations I couldn't understand, marveled at how beautiful the language sounded to me compared with how thorny and cacophonous it seemed mere days ago. It all felt peaceful.

I love Prague. Traversing its narrow, twisting alleys, understanding more of its street signs and illogical pronunciations, perching on the Hus statue in Old Town square while writing postcards and listening to a Christian dance troupe singing to tourists in accented English� The whole thing just seeped into me in my three-day relaxed stay. Prague doesn't demand nonstop activity or sightseeing, like Paris seems to; it doesn't ooze bustle. Rather, all it wants is for you to slow down and lose yourself in where you are.

I wanted to stay. I wanted to live in one of those apartments with the flowerboxes that overlooked the restaurant in which I ate. I wanted that wrought-iron balcony. I wanted to walk the cobbled streets every day, and go to concerts and services in beautiful old churches that are marvels of centuries-ago construction.

Dana was having a crisis about turning twenty with no plan for the future, and I was having a crisis about turning twenty-six with no prospects of living abroad. It's hard to dream so much when you know in your heart that it's not in your path.

What left me melancholy that night was admitting to myself that Alan -- a.k.a. Hunky Cameraman -- was in my head the entire time. He's the person who always wanted to live somewhere different and whisk me away with him and just vanish, immersing ourselves in a world all our own and no one else's. He'd longed to see Prague and was envious that I'd be there, and I hated myself for wishing he was sitting with me at the table. I thought about how he'd have hated the lack of cider and loved the accents. I imagined prowling the streets with him, navigating and trying to master the bizarre language quirks, planning our days and nights and enjoying each other somewhere wholly different from our daily life.

He's someone who craves this kind of travel, and I couldn't forget him, no matter how hard I tried. I let myself wallow in what could have been, and might have been, and I didn't like it. In my head I had a hundred conversations with him, asked a hundred questions and made up two-hundred answers. Why? Was it me? What did I do? Was it you? Why the fear? Why the wistful phone calls? Why the sober lack of feeling and the drunk abundance of longing? Who were those girls? Are you still seeing them? Will you ever leave me alone and let me forget? Do I want you to?

Half of those answers, I wanted; the other half, I desperately needed but didn't ever want to hear.

It's about getting used to thinking of someone a different way. I wasn't there yet, for all my bravado and bluster. Recontextualizing Alan was going to take a while, in part because he took so long to redefine me. I prayed it wouldn't be too long; I was on my trip to free myself, and I didn't need to see any shadows.

Someone got here by searching for: bun warmer for toilet seat Thankful: that I can type the above stuff about Alan without being embarrassed of it, yet I also don't remotely feel that way for him any more. Watching: Notre Dame barely squeaking out a victory against West Virginia in the Big East tournament. Next up: Connecticut. Shudder.