Prior to landing my spot in tennis on the Virginia Slims World Championship Series, the only time I had left American soil was on a trip to Laredo, Texas, to interview for a television sportscasting job there. At the time, around 1980, I was working in small-market radio in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and had never given television any serious thought because of my eye condition. I had a genetic defect known as Duane Syndrome. In a nutshell, the muscles that pull my left eye to the left are paralyzed.

“I’ll look weird on camera,” I always thought.

Well, the actor Forest Whitaker looked “weird” on camera, too. He was born with ptosis in his left eye, a condition which causes the eyelid to droop significantly. According to the website AllAboutVision.com,

I applaud Whitaker’s courage in putting his disadvantage aside to follow his dream and achieve success. I could not pull that off, at least as far as television was concerned. My only time on camera was during my interview for Laredo job. I was asked to read a prepared script from one of the station’s tele-prompters. I read just fine, but probably looked weird. Anyway, I did not get the job, but while in Laredo, I crossed over the border into Mexico so I could say I had “been there, done that.”

I picked up that phrase, “been there, done that.” from Aussie colleagues during my  aforementioned time in tennis. Since then, more than 35 years ago, I’ve always just assumed it was a term commonly used in Australia. Only now, as i write this, do I check the online resource, ThePhraseFinder.com.

Before I continue with my Prague story, let me tangentially share with you something I found on the website for the American Academy of Ophthalmology. The page title is “20 Celebrities With Eye Conditions:”

I did not know that.

As the autumn of 1993 drew closer to winter and I was feeling comfortable living in the Dallas area after moving there from St. Louis thanks to a job transfer within the SBC family of telecommunications companies, I decided the time was right to realize a longstanding personal ambition. During my time in tennis in the late 1980s and my travels to Europe for Grand Slam stops in Paris and London–I was a public relations director on the women’s tour–I had hoped to have the chance to visit Prague. Since my mother’s parents had been raised in what today is called Czechia before immigrating to Oklahoma where my mother was born, I considered Czechoslovakia the closest thing I had to a “homeland” and I wanted to see the nation’s capital city. When that failed to materialize while I was employed in tennis, I regrouped and planned my trip to Prague from Dallas in November of 1993.

Unfortunately, those plans were waylaid by a workers’ strike.

As luck would have it–or lack of luck as was the case–my trek to Prague was scheduled to leave Dallas/Fort Worth Airport on the day American Airlines flight attendants walked off the job in a contract dispute with their company. When I got to the ticket counter that day to check in for my flight, I asked about the likelihood that my flight would be cancelled, The agent there played dumb and suggested I check my bags just in case a crew showed up. I played dumb, too, and handed him my luggage, And while I never got on a plane that day, my bags wound up going all the way to Prague. By the time they were finally returned to me about a week later, many of my packed possessions were gone.

So, I decided to go and retrieve them.

LOL. Not really, but that seemed like as good an excuse as any when I told people my plans to leave town a year later. At the airport on the morning of that flight, I was pleased when a full contingent of flight attendants showed up for my non-stop sojourn to London’s Heathrow Airport.

Having previously traveled trans-Atlantic chasing tennis players, I didn’t sweat being cooped up in coach for more than nine hours. I always preferred an “A” seat, next to the window on the left side of an aircraft mostly because of my eye. I’ve always been more comfortable looking to my right, and from the “A” position, everything–except the view out the window–is tin that direction. I prefer that because my eye alignment is normal when I look to the right at people. Otherwise, I look a little like Abraham Lincoln.

Bladder relief is the other major consideration when flying long distances. Thus, an aisle seat is preferable. But when you have to go, you go, and most people understand that you’re going to have to make your way past them.

“Excuse me. Pardon me.”

Arriving in London, I was on familiar turf thanks to my time in tennis. As I had planned the year before, from Heathrow, I would catch a British Airways connection to Vienna, and ride the train from there to Prague. Given that I had a six-hour layover in London, I decided to do a little sight-seeing while I was in town.

Incredulously, I chose to take my bags with me for my walkabout. I had a large suitcase, a smaller bag and my carry-on. I didn’t think to place them in a locker at the airport because I didn’t see any lockers at the airport. Tootling around the city, I realized that I was the walking embodiment of a Monty Python sketch. The bags were cumbersome and awkward and I spent much of the excursion offering apologies.

“Excuse me. Pardon me.”

"Shut up, you American!” (So says the Grim Reaper in the 1983 Monty Python movie, The Meaning of Life.)

Despite my moronic encumbrance on the streets of London, I got to see what I wanted to see: the House of Parliament, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, inside Westminster Abbey (even with all my baggage…fitting I suppose), and, of course, Buckingham Palace. Near there, I happened to catch, at 11 a.m. sharp, The Queen's Lifeguard on Horse Guards Parade. This consists of a Squadron of The Life Guards, who wear red tunics and white plumed helmets, and a Squadron of The Blues and Royals with blue tunics and red plumed helmets. Horse Guards are named after the troops who have protected the Sovereign since the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660.

I did not know any of this at the time, but researched the matter while perusing photographs taken nearly 30 years ago.

And speaking of photographs, to catch all the sights, I rode the Underground to get from place to place. And it was there, beneath the streets of Ole London Towne, I snapped my favorite photograph of all time.

When I took the shot, I didn’t know I had captured anything out of the ordinary until I got home and had thirteen rolls of film developed. See, this was in the days before cellphones or even digital cameras. Back then, you took a photo, and maybe another photo just to make sure you got it right. Then, you took more and more photos until you’d exposed all the film in your camera. There was no instant gratification of immediately seeing what you had taken a picture of. Instead, you waited until you could drop off your rolls of film at a nearby grocery store or pharmacy which shipped them to a photo lab for processing.

Back home in Dallas a couple of weeks after my trip, I was shuffling through the hundreds of pictures I had taken when I was suddenly struck by an image that looked to me like a work of art.

While waiting on the platform of the London Underground, I decided to snap a couple of quick pictures as a reminder of the experience. With a train approaching, I took two shots: one with a flash and one without the flash. In photographic terms, that’s called “bracketing,” The flash photo, as it turned out, cast a bright light on figures in the foreground near the camera while leaving everything else in the dark, including the oncoming train whose motion was frozen by the rapid shutter speed. But when I looked at the second photo, the one without the flash, my heart stopped.

A framed enlargement of that picture has hung on the walls of my homes ever since. And while I consider it to be one of the best pictures I’ve ever take, I also realize it was simply a lucky break.

That’s a somewhat low-resolution version of the photo at the top of the page, overlaid against a panorama of the city of Prague. When I first wrote this chapter, I didn’t plan on showing readers the image. So, I attempted to describe it. I’ll forego that description here because you may be saying, “What about Prague?”

Well, I’m “getting there”…but first I have to tell you how I got to Prague.

I made it back to Heathrow in one piece–and with three bags–in plenty of time for my connecting flight to Vienna. I arrived in the Austrian capital around 4 p.m, and was a bit surprised that it was nearly dark. You can do an Internet search for the term “sunset in Vienna” and bring up a chart that gives you the exact time of nightfall, and in mid-November, when I made my trip to Prague, that time is around 4:20 p.m.

A travel agent in Dallas helped me plan every aspect of my trip. Although the Internet was up and running in some places by late 1994, there was still no Expedia or Trip Advisor or ability to conveniently book international travel online.  My hotel reservation in Vienna was for the Hotel Prinz Eugen because of its proximity to the city’s main railway station from which I would depart for Prague. A taxi from the airport delivered me to the hotel, and after checking in, I breathed a sigh of relief when I got to my room. It had been an exhausting day, but not so much so that I couldn’t go out for a run. After all, this was my first time in one of the world’s most beautiful cities, so it wasn’t like I was going to hole up in my room the rest of the night.

That run, that night, that experience is one of the most memorable times of my life.

After donning my running togs, I headed downstairs to the front desk of my Viennese hotel. (I’ve always liked that word, “togs,” but only now do I realize that “tog” can be a verb as well as a noun. So, let me redo the opening sentence of this paragraph.)

After I “togged up” for my run, I headed downstairs to the front desk of the hotel. I approached the clerk and asked, “Is it safe to run here?” He seemed confused by my question. What I meant was: “Is your hotel in a safe part of town where a somewhat crazy American can go out at night alone and not get mugged?” Fortunately, I kept those words inside my head, otherwise his response would have likely been, “Where do you think you are? AMERICA???”. His answer to the question as I posed it was a tentative head nod, a curious look, and the word, “Sure.” I’ve learned through the years that many non-English speakers will respond to something they don’t really understand with a one-syllable reply, often the word, “Sure.”

I turned toward the front door of the hotel figuring if Vienna was good enough for Mozart, I should be able to make my way through its streets at night without incident.

I had bought a Vienna travel guide before leaving Dallas and with the “free city map” it contained, I had tried to orient myself for the run. Best as I could tell, when I left the hotel, I should turn right, then make another right and that would take me north toward the center of the city.

About a mile into my run, I came upon Vienna’s Museum of Natural History. A short obelisk, no more than 25 feet high, had been erected on next to the Karlsplatz “U-Bahn” station near the museum. The signage wrapped around its bottom half read “Agypto,” the German spelling of “Egypt,” suggesting that an Egyptian exhibit was currently featured in the museum.

You do know Austrians speak German, right?

I was able to read the sign because the obkelisk was brilliantly illuminated, casting a towering beacon into the overcast night sky. “That might come in handy,” I mused, thinking of Gotham City’s “bat signal” as depicted in the old comic books I used to read.

Continuing onward, I could tell I was getting close to the center of town by the increasing number of magnificent Baroque-style buildings I was passing. “Toto, we’re not in Kansas any more,” I thought to myself. In fact, Kansas had not yet been invented when most of what I was seeing was built in the 17th and 18th centuries.

A light rain began to fall which cleared the streets of pedestrians, enabling me to take in the glorious sights without having to dodge passersby. Because it was dark, I didn’t really know what I was seeing, but I liked what I thought I saw. If I spotted something interesting at the far end of a thoroughfare, I would turn and run toward it. My goal was to reach the Danube, and once there I turned around and headed back the other way.

As far as I could tell, the Danube wasn’t blue, but I felt satisfied nonetheless for reaching the inspiration for Johann Strauss’s most famous waltz, written, by the way “for the Vienna Men's Choral Society to uplift the people of Vienna who were reeling after losing the Austro-Prussian War.”

I did not know that.

I found that little jewel of minutiae on the KUSC website in a story entitled, “Waltzing from the Blue Danube to Outer Space,” a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s use of the composition as performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for his epic film work 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of my favorite movies of all time.

KUSC is the campus radio station at the University of Southern California. I still have a t-shirt from my student days at KGOU, and I also have a KUSC t-shirt that I picked up on a visit to the land of Troy.

As for my return to the hotel, that turned out to be a piece of cake, even though I had no idea where I was, other than somewhere in Vienna, Austria. I wasn’t the least bit concerned for two reasons.

When in Paris for the French Open tennis tournament, I joined a group of women working for the Women’s Tennis Association at a Genesis concert held outdoors at the Hippodrome de Vincennes, a horse track located on the city’s east side. We journeyed there by Metro–the Paris subway system–as a group, but when I decided to venture closer to the stage and found a spot standing twenty feet from Phil Collins, I opted to stay there. When the concert ended at midnight, I knew it was hopeless to find my friends in the midst of a gathering of more than 50,000 people. By the time I reached the nearby Metro station, the railway was closed for the night. Being the adventuresome type, I decided to see if I could walk back to my hotel, about twelve miles away.

I walked for about two hours when I ran across a sign indicating the direction to the Bastille. I had visited that Paris landmark earlier in the week, and felt confident if I made it there, “I could make it anywhere.” But, this was Paris, not New York, so, I looked for a cab and miraculously found one. That saved me another two hours on foot, thus earning me a little extra sleep after my “night on the town.”

The run from the Danube back to my hotel in Vienna was a considerably shorter distance than my Parisian trek, and one I covered at a reasonable hour rather than in the middle of the night.

Plus, I had the beacon from the Natural History Museum to show me the way.

Piece of strudel.

The next morning, I got up, and in the dawn’s early light, retraced a few of the steps I had taken the night before to take pictures of some of the exquisite buildings I had passed. Included in my Viennese photo safari were pictures of:

Upon my return to the hotel, I packed my bags and walked the short distance to the train station. Nearing the venue, I couldn’t help but notice a large sign on the outside of the terminal building which read “Memphis.” I was fairly confident it wasn’t a reference to the one in Tennessee where Elvis lived, nor to the capital city of ancient Egypt, despite the exhibition at the Natural History Museum. This “Memphis,” as it turned out, was nothing more than a prominent advertisement for Austria’s Memphis brand of cigarettes.

My reason for taking a train from Vienna to Prague was to see some of the Czech countryside. From what I knew, my mother’s parents came from the Brno region of today’s Czechia, in the southeastern part of the country. I wouldn’t traverse that area, but figured what I would see would look similar.

Just five years before my trip to Prague, the Iron Curtain fell throughout much of Eastern Europe. The website History.com tells the story of how the “Velvet Revolution” led the nation of Czechoslovakia toward freedom from communist rule.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, my trip to Prague coincided with the five-year anniversary of the fall of communism. Photographs I took from inside the train show an expansive and well-kept greenbelt along the railway in Austria. One photo shows a series of four-unit, two-story apartment buildings whose back windows or balconies face the green space. Another shot features a modern metal grain elevator, and a third reveals a modern-looking rural power station.

After entering the Czech Republic, nothing in my pictures looks new. Towns crept much closer to the railroad tracks. Almost as if on cue as I crossed the border, the skies turned from blue to gray. Although the Czech Republic was free, freedom, I recall thinking on the train, had not yet transformed the nation’s appearance, at least in rural regions where change can come more slowly.

Once the train entered the outskirts of Prague, the only thing visible from my vantage point were rooftops and church spires. Getting closer to my final destination near the city’s center, dreary-looking apartment blocks began to appear.

I have little recall of my arrival at Praha hlavní nádraží, the city’s main train station. The wear and tear of two-days of sight-seeing in London and Vienna had finally exhausted me. I had three days and nights to experience Prague, so I looked forward to settling in, getting some rest, and recuperating before I began to explore the city.

My travel agent and I had chosen the Prague Renaissance Hotel for its central location and modern conveniences. Although I was raised by a mother who was fluent in Czech and communicated only in that language with her mother, I was never encouraged to learn her native tongue. That may have been because when mother was young and would get upset with the kids at school, she would lash out at them in Czech. In return, the targets of her vitriol made fun of her. As I only realized after becoming an adult myself, my mother’s sense of pride and confidence were adversely affected by those episodes for the rest of her life. No doubt she wanted to spare me from that kind of humiliation by denying me even a rudimentary knowledge of Czech.

Because of the anticipated language barrier in Prague, I chose a “western” hotel rather than something more intellectually intriguing in a historic part of town.

As it turned out, I heard a lot more English spoken in Prague than Czech. Western business people had invaded the country, filling the consumer void left by communism. The importance of the  American dollar leads people in every corner of the world to develop at least a rudimentary understanding of the American language.

Within the community of young people I saw in Prague, there was unquestionably a spirit of optimism and hope, but among the older locals, the less of that I saw in their faces. I remember thinking many people past a certain age seemed skeptical or pessimistic that “freedom” was going to treat them much differently than what they had known in their old way of communist life. Not long after my visit to the country, political and financial crises shattered the Czech Republic's image as one of the most stable and prosperous of post-communist states. Today, though, Czechia is once again considered a strong economic performer based in large part on the service, manufacturing, and innovation sectors.

Late my first afternoon in Prague–remember, the sun sets early in that part of the world during that time of the year–I made the just-over-half-mile walk from the hotel to Old Town Square. In person, entering into the plaza takes one’s breath away. Staroměstské náměstí was founded in the 12th century and has been witness to many historical events. Most majestic within its environs is the Church of Our Lady Before Týn, which gets its name because of its location behind–or “before,” depending on your perspective–the Týn Courtyard, which was established in the 11th century as a customs office and trading center for foreign merchants. Today those buildings, which block half the view of the back of the church, house shops–mostly peddling tourist merchandise–restaurants, and hotels. To get inside the church from the Old Town Square plaza, you must weave your way through a series of narrow passageways and enter through a small and unimposing back door.

The inside of the church, which was completed in 1511, was worth the trouble to get to. The sanctuary contains medieval furnishings in both the Gothic and Baroque styles. These include:

Across the plaza from Our Lady Before Týn sits the Old Town Hall and its mesmerizing Astronomical Clock. One of the best overviews of the clock can be found on the Czech Center Museum-Houston website.

I visited the clock several times during my stay in Prague hoping to see the Apostles Walk. Not until someone told me the Walk only happened at the top of the hour did I adjust my walkbys to witness the riveting display. I snapped a couple photos and in looking back on them I’m able to tell the exact time the picture was taken…thanks to a YouTube video I found called, “How to Read the Prague Astronomical Clock.” Finding the “T-hand” on the clock–as it’s called in the video–I’m able to determine the picture was shot at 4 o’clock in the afternoon.

I realize this description may be lacking. I encourage you to look it up on the Web.
As the sun sat on Old Town Square that evening, a band started to play…Dixieland Jazz! I turned and walked over to the ensemble and, with a small group of other spectators, took in the street performance. For me, the music was a taste of home, but for the Czech people, the plunky and upbeat Dixieland sound represents freedom.

“After the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis,” reads the Wikipedia listing Jazz in Czechoslovakia, “…jazz was banned and it was not until 1947, when the Australian jazz pianist Graeme Bell and his Dixieland Jazz Band performed at a World Youth Festival in Prague, that the jazz movement (which had begun in the 1920s) was revived.”

I bought a cassette tape the band was selling. They called themselves “Staroměstský Dixieland,” staroměstský the Czech word for “old town.” I still have the tape, although I’m a little hesitant to play it now, given its age. But, it turns out you can buy the CD version of the album on Amazon! And, in conducting a Google search of the band’s name, I came across a photo of the band on Facebook–and their suitcase full of CDs–taken in Old Town Square in 2020. From the cartoonish illustration on the cover of my cassette tape box–which remains the cover art for the CDs still being sold–the band appears to have remained intact!

(Note: In my search for the “Dixieland” tape, the first place I thought to look, in a drawer of the hutch on the desk where I am writing this tome, contained not a musical cassette, but the Living Language tape to learn “Fast & Easy Czech,” which I don’t think I’ve ever played…out of respect to my mother! LOL.)

While on the subject, a couple other souvenirs from that trip to Prague are still on display here in my home office: a pair of hand-made puppets in the form of females dressed in vintage Czech attire. I purchased these from a street vendor near the Old Town Bridge Tower on my last full day in the city.

Concluding my first excursion into Old Town Prague, I returned to my hotel and in the lobby was a group of Americans. And, it turned out I knew one of them! The contingent was made up of businessmen from the American telecommunications sector, and Southwestern Bell Mobile Systems had a representative there. I can’t remember his name, but he said the Czech government was interested in deploying advanced cellular technology throughout the country.

There may have been a strategic purpose behind that initiative, as revealed in a 2001 report entitled, “NATO: U.S. Assistance to the Partnership for Peace.”

That first night in Prague, I ordered room service: a hamburger and french fries with a chocolate shake. Exhausted from my early start that day taking photos in Vienna, the train ride from Vienna to Prague, and seeing the sights in Prague’s Old Town Square, I called it a day early, and looked forward to seeing as much of the city as possible over the course of the next 48 hours.

Feeling fortunate that I had not gotten lost running through the streets of Vienna at night, I chose to delay my long run in Prague until I had a better lay of the land. Day Two in the Czech Republic got started with a walk to Wenceslas Square, or Václavské náměstí, as its known to natives.

“Less a square than a boulevard,” reports WIkipedia, “Wenceslas Square has the shape of a very long rectangle, in a northwest–southeast direction. The street slopes upward to the southeast side. At that end, the street is dominated by the grand neoclassical Czech National Museum. The northwest end runs up against the border between the New Town and the Old Town. Formerly known as Koňský trh (Horse Market), for its periodic accommodation to horse trading during the Middle Ages, it was renamed Svatováclavské náměstí (English: Saint Wenceslas square) in 1848 on the proposal of Karel Havlíček Borovský.”

Borovsky was a Czech writer, poet, critic, politician, journalist, and publisher. Like future Czech poet and dissident, Vaclav Havel, Borovsky also advocated for constitutional reform and national rights.

Wenceslas Square was ground zero for the Velvet Revolution which ended communist rule in Czechoslovakia. The website History.com offers this recap of the events which led to freedom for the Czech people:

Perhaps the most well-known element of Wenceslas Square is the statue of “the man himself,” Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia. The “Good King Wenceslaus,” made world famous by the Christmas carol written about him, died before reaching his 30th birthday, most likely at the hands of his brother, Boleslaus. Wenceslaus was posthumously declared to be a king and came to be seen as the patron saint of the Czech state.

The statue of Wenceslaus on horseback, in the square named in his honor, stands more than 20 feet tall. The former duke is also honored with a statue on the famous Karlův most, known in English as Charles Bridge, which spans the Vlatava River between Old Town and the Prague Castle.

According to Wikipedia, construction on the Charles Bridge began

The most famous of the Charles Bridge statues is that of St. John of Nepomuk, who drowned in the Vlatava River in 1383, murdered by edict of the Bohemian king of the time, Wenceslaus IV–definitely not the “Good King” Wenceslaus–who was later murdered himself. John’s crime was failure to reveal information told to him as the queen’s confessor.

Not only is the statue of St. John of Nepomuk the oldest statue on the bridge, it is also the only one made of bronze. On its pedestal, a tiny area of bronze is kept gleaming by the tradition of touching the small bas-relief depiction there of St. John being thrown from the bridge. Ironically, the gesture is thought to bring good luck, but according to the website expats.cz, it’s actually a health hazard, for obvious reasons.

Like most on the bridge-goers that day, I touched the bronze depiction of St. John’s death…and lived to tell about it here.

I suppose the nearly 30 years that have passed since then is proof of the “good luck” that has followed me since.

Once across the Charles Bridge from Old Town Prague, one enters the “Malá Strana" on the west side of the Vlatava. The phrase’s literal translation is "little side,” although it is more commonly known in English as the Lesser Quarter. According to Wikipedia–which wasn’t around when I made my trip to Prague but informs the retelling of that trip (and so much more in this book)–Prague was actually made up of four independent boroughs (Old Town, New Town, Lesser Quarter and Castle District) until 1784, when those districts were merged into a single city that is today’s Prague.

Prague Castle was built in the ninth century and is, according to the Guinness Book of Records the world’s “largest ancient castle.”  Today, as has been the case for centuries, it is recognized as the political capital of the nation, and the spiritual center of the Czech state.

Sitting atop a hill on the west side of the city, the castle dominates the Prague skyline, Katedrála esvatého Víta, or St. Vitus Cathedral, sits roughly at the center of the area confined by castle walls. In fact, a small city is contained within those walls. To the east of St. Vitus sits the oldest section of the castle, dominated by yet another church, the Basilica of St. George.

The highlights of my visit to Prague Castle were the discovery of the Prague Castle Guard and a stroll down Golden Lane. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, the Prague Castle Guard protects the compound that comprises the Presidential Office at the west end of the complex. The Presidential Palace, near St Vitus Cathedral remains the residence of the president of the republic, just as it was the seat of power for kings of Bohemia, Holy Roman emperors, and, from 1918 to 1989, presidents of Czechoslovakia.

As for Golden Lane, let’s visit theculturetrip.com website and this mini-history provided there:

In the three days I spent in Prague. I did nothing but explore the city on foot. I did go on one long run and mostly remember the site of children arriving at school and the small inn where Mozart purportedly stayed in preparation for the Prague debut of his opera, The Marriage of Figaro in 1786. I know this because a sign hung outside the building with a brief description of its history in English. While in Prague and with Mozart on my mind, I purchased a CD set of another opera which the famous composer unveiled to the world in Prague in 1787: Don Giovanni. The cover art depicts the Stavovské divadlo, or Estates Theater, as it would have appeared in Mozart’s time. The Estates Theater is, as it turns out, the only musical venue in which Mozart’s work was performed during his lifetime that remains standing today.

I recall now bringing back cobblestones from the alley way next to the Estates Theater, and in remembering that, I will be devoting time soon trying to find those keepsakes from the trip.

My wife will tell you I’ve got a lot of stuff.

My Prague pilgrimage has been more difficult to recount than anything else up to this point in my attempts to reconstruct my life story. I took so many pictures on that trip, and as time has passed, my recollections are mostly of the pictures I shot rather than the experiences I lived. So, let me run through a few of those photos to retrace my steps:

The last photo I’ve singled out to mention here turns out to have been taken back at Old Town Square. Let me be honest: I took lots and lots of pictures in Prague, but until now, I made little effort to determine exactly what it was at which I had pointed my camera. Thus, this chapter has proven to be a gratifying exercise when coupling my online inquiries with the Maps app on my iPhone.

The centerpiece of Old Town Square is the Jan Hus Memorial. Hus was an influential 14th century philosopher and reformer, yet the memorial in his name depicts events which took place 200 years after his death. While I did not take a photo of the memorial, other than as part of the overall Old Town landscape, Hus’s story, as I’ve now learned from Wikipedia, is important.

Of the Hussite Wars, they effectively cut in half the Czech population during the fifteen years of conflict, but paved the way for future church reformers such as John Calvin and Martin Luther. The present day monument to Hus depicts victorious Hussite warriors and Protestants who were forced into exile 200 years after Hus in the wake of the lost Battle of the White Mountain during the Thirty Years' War. Alongside is a standing figure of a young mother who symbolizes national rebirth.

Had I known Hus’s story, I probably would have spent more time admiring the monument in his honor. Instead, my attention was drawn toward a “house” on the square’s southern side. As i did frequently on my trip to Prague, I gazed in wonder at what I saw, snapped a photo, and moved on. In the photo I took of this particular structure, a six-story edifice, I also captured two young women walking side by side–“locals” I imagine–and two older men–perhaps fellow tourists?– with their own cameras at the ready…and pointed toward the women.

Also included in that photo is a sign that reads, “Storch House.” At the time of my visit to Prague, the establishment was home to the Sklo Porcelain shop. But there was something else very captivating about the building, as the website CitySeeker.com, explains:

While my four-night whirlwind tour of London, Vienna, and Prague was momentous in almost every aspect, the one thing mostly missing from the trip was the sun. I didn’t see much in the way of blue skies, thus, most of the pictures I took are less than they could have been with a little more illumination. Especially dreary are the shots I took from the top of the Petrin Tower located in the Petrin Gardens Park on the west side of Prague.

Built in 1891 as a one-fifth replica of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Petrin Tower offers magnificent views of Prague from some 208 feet in the air. Even though my photos from that vantage point are of a hazy city under the grayest of skies, there is splendor to be found in the panoramic view of the “City of a Hundred Spires” captured from above.

My last night in Prague I happened upon the making of a movie, whose star turned out to be none other than Dolph Lundgren of Rocky fame. I didn’t have my camera, so I have no visual record of the event, but I stood and watched with a few other onlookers as lighting technicians set up a shot while Lundgren and the director, I assumed, discussed the next scene.

Upon my return home, I feverishly searched to learn more about the film. I discovered it was called Hidden Assassin. One day, maybe two years later, I spotted a VHS tape of the move–DVD players didn’t hit the marketplace until 1997–at a local grocery store and rented it, My intent wasn’t to watch it–I didn’t actually do that until years and years later when the movie could be streamed online–but to simply own it. A day or two after renting the movie, I reported the tape lost, paid the replacement price of $80, and took satisfaction that I had in my possession yet another keepsake of my trip to Prague.

And I know exactly where that VHS tape is today, proudly on display alongside a VHS tape of the movie Sling Blade signed by star and writer Billy Bob Thornton.

If you’re a Dolph Lundgren fan and were unaware of this chapter of his cinematic career, here’s the film summary from the back of the box in which the tape came:

This would be a good place to end yet another unwieldy chapter, but I would be remiss if I didn’t report on my British Airways flight back to London from Prague. A full meal was served during the short time we were in the air, and as the flight attendants picked up trays before landing, a scruffy looking man trailed behind them in the center aisle unabashedly snatching uneaten portions of food. As I watched incredulously, my only rationalization for not only the man’s actions but also the flight attendants tolerance of such behavior, was that this must have been a psychological carry-over from life under a communist regime.

No one else sitting around me seemed to give the matter any thought, one way or the other.