With the end of our time in Prague approaching across our mental dashboard, the city has been making itself more beautiful, working to lure us into staying.
Anthropomorphism aside, no one would argue this collection of palaces, streets and parks is not lovely in the summer, even with the crush load of tourists. The light becomes soft and diffuse in the evening, and lights ripple on the Vltava river, making a perfect foreground for the Prague castle and the city’s many bridges. Pleasure boats skit across the water like water bugs. The air is cool, the humidity balanced, with occasional exceptions like that one day last week. There’s a lot to like.
So I have been endeavoring to suck the juice out of the city, during our remaining months here. (I always drift into edible analogies.) EC and I have dined on the banks of the river in a houseboat. We have been to Hostivař lake, a kind of plebian swimming hole, twice. I work to do things outside.
One thing on my list is sampling the city’s incredible selection of public parks. Prague has larger, nicer and more numerous public parks than any city on earth. So sez me. They are everywhere.
My loose theory is that many of these parks come from lost nobility. The town had a lot of princes, before 1918, and when the new country of Czechoslovakia was created many of these princes “gifted”, perhaps with some pressure, their gardens to the public. But this is just something I had vaguely heard.
Actually, just some quick Interneting puts some meat on this bone.
Stromovka park, a lovely expanse of lawns, forests and lakes on the other side of the river in or near Prague 7, was originally the game preserve for the summer palace. It was converted into a park in the late 19th century. Bully for Emperor Franz Joseph for giving up his game preserve.
Grebovka park or Havlíček Gardens, a lovely park up in or near Vinohrady with working vineyards on the slopes of a hill, where our family had a picnic the other night, had been wine-making land for two estates. Emperor Franz Joseph’s granddaughter and her husband lived in the huge villa, built not by a noble but a wealthy industrialist in the late 19th century. The district of Vinohrady bought the property in 1905 after the prince and princess were transferred back to Vienna, then still the capital of the empire.
The Vojanovy gardens, which at six acres is large for being in the middle of the old city, is in Malastrana, a short walk from the Charles bridge. I call it the secret garden because high walls surround it and you can walk completely around it and not know it’s there. There’s only one small doorway. It used to be a backyard for a convent, thus the high walls. It dates back to the 13th century. The Czech government took it over after 1918.
So the nobility, rich industrialists, and the church played a part in keeping land open in a growing city, enabling this land to later made available to the people.
Lack of democracy and great inequalities of wealth and power have their side benefits, is my moral.
What I’m Reading: Alien Encounters of the Guilty Past Kind
It’s a compelling theme of science fiction to speculate on what happens when humans and aliens meet for the first time. (BTW, will the word “alien” be cancelled as somehow unfair to hypothetical non-terrestrial life?) Childhood’s End, E.T., and Arrival are all great works that play with this theme. The possibilities of violence are always part of the mix.
In preparation for our move to Portugal, I’ve been reading Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley. He is a British historian who has written several books about the Mediterranean around 1500, give or take a few centuries. I read City of Fortune, a great history of Venice, back when I was on my Venice kick. And I followed that up with his Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World.
Suffice to say, I felt in good hands in reading about Portugal.
Until reading Conquerors, which I’m still in the middle of, I had only vaguely realized that Portugal’s exploration efforts were almost entirely about going left, that is east. Columbus actually unsuccessfully asked Lisbon for backing before asking Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain. The Portuguese king’s advisors rightly concluded that Columbus thought the world was smaller than it was, and would never make it to India.
What the Portuguese did instead was continue poking down the coast of Africa, hoping to find a way to India. The country had been doing this since the early 1400s.
To us these trips look small. To the Portuguese, they were risky journeys into the unknown. Ships then weren’t really made for ocean voyaging, and it was necessary to stay close to land. So they made these little half circles, establishing one port after another.
The Portuguese and I suppose Europeans in general knew almost nothing about the world they were traveling into. Africa was just a dark void. How big it was, whether it was actually a continent, whether there was any way around it, was all unknown.
What enabled ships to go around Africa and eventually make their way to India was a stroke of genius or luck. Captain Bartolomeu Dias in 1488, near the bottom of Africa, turned the ship west into the open sea. (Some historians theorize a storm initially blew the ships west.) After sailing for more than a month, Dias encountered a south-easternly wind and took it. This allowed the ships to make a looping curve underneath Africa and around what came to be called The Cape of Good Hope. The Portuguese had found the way around Africa and to India.
Eventually another fleet attempted this, and they went so far west they ran into Brazil. Discovering this land was considered a footnote on the more important journey to India. Luckily, the Pope had already divided the globe and given the Portuguese dominion for what would become Brazil.
Reading of Portuguese exploration efforts in the 15th and 16th centuries, I am reminded of Man venturing into outer space in the 20th and 21st centuries. There is this sense of having to take everything with you, of going out into an area where the most natural thing is death.
When they did eventually make it around Africa, their encounters with the Hindus and the Muslims were like meeting aliens from different planets. The Portuguese did not even know that the Hindu religion existed and at first took it for a different sect of Christianity.
I bet in our psyches, as we watch a movie about first contacts with aliens, we are channeling historic memories about how we treated or were treated by other civilizations.
For the peoples the Portuguese encountered, it generally did not go well. The Portuguese were quick to reach for their guns, their crossbows and eventually, their cannons. A strategy of shooting first as a defensive strategy turned quickly into an offensive strategy of outright conquest. Thus the name of the book. As a part of this effort, the Portuguese did some truly horrible things to entire towns, cities and ships full of people.
With the Muslims, the Portuguese were fueled by a belief in holy war. The Muslims were by definition evil, so killing and conquering them was by definition virtuous. The Portuguese and the Spanish had only recently kicked out the Muslims from the Iberian peninsula. Manuel I, the Portuguese king in the early 1500s, actually had as a goal wiping Islam as a religion off the face of the earth.
Reading all this adds weight to my belief that I should be suspicious anytime I feel I am really in the right about something. People really convinced of their own virtue do almost all the truly horrible things in this world. If you really believe in your cause, then it becomes easier to excuse means - like the firebombing of cities - that help you toward that end.
But getting back to the alien thing, I wonder if there is some way we can prepare ourselves for an eventual alien encounter, where we aren’t the ones to reach for our guns first, but we also aren’t sitting ducks to be killed or enslaved (not to put too fine a point on it). Game Theory often models how two individuals can meet, and how outcomes can be improved or not for both or one party. I hope smart people are also working on models for how two groups can meet and have win-win outcomes.
Tummy Time
In Prague and Czechia, Pilsner Urquell is the Cadillac of beers. It’s pricier and prestigious. The company, headquartered in Pilsner, the town that gave the beer and a type of beer its name, also owns a bunch of other beer companies and may have some monopoly power. Anti-trust anyone, Czechia?
But that’s not why I’m bringing it up. The other night I had a glass of Pilsner Urquell at an outdoor restaurant on a boat on the Vltava. It was a busy and beautiful night, of the kind I was talking about. There was a bit of a line for beer, and when I got to the front, the bartender asked if I wanted a plastic cup or a glass mug.
Glass, I said. We talked mostly in English.
Okay he said, but there’s a 50 korona deposit on that. I said okay, even though this annoyed me. He was impugning my honor that that he thought I might steal his glass!
But sometime later as I finished my beer and meager dinner, sitting with EC, I thought, this is a pretty nice mug. It would be nice to have it. What a great and practical souvenir from Czechia.
I asked myself, is it ethical to simply take the mug? After all, I had already paid the deposit on it? Or was that stealing? Should I ask the staff if this were allowed? That seemed tedious.
I took the mug, sticking it in my backpack. K at home said of course it was okay to take it. The restaurant had charged a deposit. I suppose so, but 50 crowns is only about $2.50. Pretty nice price for a really nice beer mug. It’s of the sort that is commonly used here in Prague. You can pour a half liter of beer into it, and come out with a beautiful full head that takes up about a third of the glass. That’s the Czech way.
Thinking it over, I decided I was within the right to take the glass. When you require a deposit, you must be covering your costs. Or at least, it’s reasonable to assume that. Maybe it’s even a good business strategy. I plan to go back there, and get another mug of Pilsner beer, and keep the mug. It would be nice to have two.
Not completely analogous but see below:
You’re Renting, Not Buying
Paying a deposit does not convey title to the keg. The deposit you pay to borrow a keg is intended to incentivize return of that keg to the retailer, wholesaler or brewery. Deposit amounts usually amount to about 15-20 percent of the replacement cost of the keg. Suppose you’ve paid a deposit on a keg; intentional misappropriation of that keg is akin to renting a car for a week, then assuming you own the car after the week has passed. Not true: the rental car company still has title to the car.
I'm not sure that the deposit covers the full cost of the mug. Before taking another, why don't you see if you can price it somewhere? Can't you find a place other than a bar that sells these?