maanantai 15. heinäkuuta 2019

The forest of abandoned things

The weather of this summer here in Prague has been somewhat unpredictable. Even a Finn living abroad gets to enjoy the occasional rainy, cold and grey summer. And naturally because it was a weekend it was even more rainy and cold, so when my friend suggested a Sunday morning walk I wasn't convinced in the beginning. To go out in the damp morning to get pneumonia, wouldn't it be better to stay in bed and read ebooks from my new best friend, Kindle? But when I heard that there is a Chinese style pagoda quite near I made up my pusillanimous mind to venture out to the wild. After all, I need to create a reason to possess a new sports jacket.


One big motivator to go out even though the weather is not so nice is to avoid the crowd. On a rainy Sunday morning around 10 o'clock one can be relatively sure that not even a jump of a mouse will disturb the peace and quiet of the moment. In this city of about a million and three hundred thousand people and ten million tourists (I am not trying to insinuate that tourists are not people, just that any given day they probably triple the population of Prague) it is a futile and exhausting exercise to look for an empty spot.

As assumed, the landscape was empty like in the beginning of the times. People here are quite easy to read. When the weather is good, everybody is out and biking routes, parks and jogging paths are crowded. When the weather is bad, most people will not want to leave the comfort of their warm and cozy sofa to be outdoors. Instead bad weather guarantees that swimming pools, sauna and gym are going to be packed. The best weather for sauna is when it's +35 degrees Celsius. For sure you can sit there in the sauna in noble solitude.
The surroundings or Prague are quite interesting. The nearby areas are the bottom of an ancient ocean and where there used to be a big, wild body of water there are now cliffs from which, if you are lucky, you can pluck a fossil. And in the middle of the huge trees in the forest you can also find an assortment of curiously out-of-place things.  On our route there were statues of the Greek gods. Shabby statues of Zeus, Diana and Cronus were all standing there in the wet forest looking absurd and bohemian, at a respectful distance from each other. Not far from the collection of abandoned statues there was also a tower. On that spot there has been a tower some thousand years even though the current tower probably doesn't date back quite that long. Anyway the landscape from the tower was very beautiful.

And what about the Chinese pagoda? Well, surprisingly enough it was under construction, covered by scaffolding. Never mind, I found a silly cat graffiti. (Supposing that it is a cat). In addition the silent, empty forest boosts the mood and helps to survive the 3 km queues to cashiers in the grocery store and endure someone's sharp elbow between my ribs in a rush our metro without too much frustration.

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