ALONG THE RIVER ELBE

I've been out of the country for nearly three weeks and it's always interesting to me how altered my existential perspective gets. Although I long for my home in NYC, I wouldn't mind staying away longer. Perhaps it is the current status of my feelings about my professional life that keep me this way. In anycase, I enjoy the thought of vanishing into some kind of nomadic existence.

There's too much to describe from my weeks in The Netherlands so I'll have to write about it in a different blog.

Many things I always dig about the Euro culture. The food can be had for a bit less (in the real neighborhoods - not the tourist hang) than at home and a notch up in quality, for the most part. The alcohol consumption, namely - BEER!!...is nice and affordable and really fucking tasty! In fact, it's so good that drink it more than wine or hard booze.

My trip here from Holland was an amazing journey through the night, across Germany and into the east. Stopping and passing through Koln, Hannover, Berlin, Dresden and on to Prague, just to name some of the majors. In Berlin my train was split up and half of the train went north to Copenhagen. The other have was set to go south to Switzerland, while my car was coupled to a train of Czech and German cars that would go onto to Moscow, by way of a russian train. Crossing into the east of Europe has been very interesting for me. Walking around the streets of Prague give you a feel of Medieval times, and my fantasies run wild with preconditioned images from paintings, films, and books. I hear the sounds of music from that era as well.

Of course, Dvorak rings through as a central force in later western music and my youth.

The really interesting feeling is when I begin thinking about the hundreds of years before the middle ages that Prague was already a happening city. It is indeed ancient. I arrived by train and so I traveled along the Elbe river in Germany, which forks off into the Vltava river, which flows into the Elbe. As the train snaked its way along the banks of those two rivers I was able to see some ancient castles perched high of the water, literally built on the cliffs. As my train continued along the narrow river, I passed through tiny villages that seemed so quiet. The river valley is very beautiful and I'd love to travel on a motorcycle or bicycle one day.

After a few hours of twists and turns and some cool, small tunnels we were on an extremely modern elevated structure that was just built, and we rolled into Hlavni Nadrazi, the central station in Prague...