Photos, drawings and yowlings from another week living in the somewhat damper than usual Czech Republic.
Greetings! I thought, for my weekly turn at posting an open thread for the Street Prophets group and the rest of the orange-faced Oompa Loompas to play in, that I'd take the hint from the poll and comments from
last week and post a motley collection of stuff from my week. The most popular selection in the poll was for pictures of the flooding around here so I did get downtown and take a few photos to share with you. Plus there will be a collection of other photos and a couple of drawings from my week. All fairly bandwidth friendly and nothing that's going to cauterize your eyeballs with salaciousness.
Beyond the ginger hairball, there be slug traps and swans--
I do enjoy all the creative ways diarists on this site find to name the decorative little whorl that divides the INTRO from the EXTENDED (OPTIONAL) sections of a diary. I wonder how odd the introductions to these Daily Kos v. 4.0 diaries will seem if DK5 doesn't implement such graphic frivolities.
And now, on with the show ...
When last we met, dear reader, I was puttering around in my garden which is about a 2 hour drive from where I spend most of my time. The weekend saw me planting one last row of corn, transplanting a few of my pepper plants, some dwarf marigolds, a couple of scrawny cucumbers, and some cilantro seedlings. How all that is surviving is a crap shoot in the casino of long-distance gardening. A casino run by slugs. In an effort to rig the odds in my favor I set out three of these before I left on Sunday:
To make a slug beer trap: I took a two liter plastic bottle and cut out a series of large openings around the narrowest part of the bottle, I smoothed the lower edges of the openings by carefully melting them slightly with a lighter. Then I partially buried the upright bottle and poured in about a pint of cheap beer (and I do live in the land o' beer). Slugs are drawn to the malty goodness of beer but don't swim in it real well.
On a more positive, life affirming note: here's a photo I took of a ladybug resting on my bushy lemon balm plants:
I was also happy to see that the pit dug around my kiln had dried out quite well:
Which brings me back to life in Prague and the recent flooding we've been having. I always hesitate to sing the praises of this place too loudly. We've got our litter, dog crap, vandalism and crime like most any big city but when I get out of the apartment with my camera I tend to take pictures of other things-- like this gorgeous doorway:
It's the doorway to the Physics Institute (part of Charles University) and well off any tour routes. I happened to find it because I walk down this street to take my kids to see a doctor occasionally:
It was a wet, grey start to the week-- but how cool must it be to be able to walk under this face while on your way to class every day?
You may have heard something about the flooding in central Europe. Weeks of rain added to rivers already swollen with melted snow have caused widespread damage to many areas. In Prague, probably the worst hit area was the Prague Zoo whose lower portion at the base of the bluff was once again flooded. They were hit much harder in 2002. This year, most of the bigger animals had already had their homes moved to new pavilions atop the bluffs and some of the animals that were caught in the flood had been provided with enclosures better able to withstand the flooding. The gorillas, for instance, were provided with a tower they stayed in until they were able to be relocated to another zoo (coincidentally a zoo about 9 km from my garden). At its height the flood this year found only about two-thirds of the volume of water rushing down the Vltava (Moldau) in 2002-- but, when the normal level is about one-twentieth it's still a big flood.
The waters had already dropped quite a bit before I went down to the river to have a look for myself:
Still running high and muddy. This view of the east bank shows a muddy little, red-roofed restaurant in the background. A few men near it are busily shoveling mud from one of the sewer entrances. The dark garbed men a bit closer are mostly engaged in talking on their phones but they were tugging at one of the overturned concrete and steel garbage containers earlier. The water they and the swans are standing in is usually a few feet above the surface of the water. The swans in the foreground, near the weed-wrapped bench, seem to be examining a huge dead fish:
I was already living in Prague during the flood of 2002. One of the areas hardest hit back then was Prague's oldest suburb, Karlín. Whole buildings collapsed, massive trees toppled as the soil their roots clung to was churned into slurry. In a nice bit of happenstance just the year before I had quit a job that I'd held teaching ceramics for about 10 years at a recreation center in the heart of Karlín. After the flood waters retreated I went back to visit my old workplace and was given a tour of the now empty basement studio-- stripped down to the bare brick. I gawked at the massive steel and firebrick kiln we had that had been picked up, turned and dumped back onto its meter-high base at a crazy angle-- inside a locked, windowless room.
On the news last week I'd heard that the embankments along the river had held and that Karlín was experiencing flooding from a source that they were less able to prepare for-- the sewers had backed up and the streets were flooded. Geysers from manhole covers ...
On Wednesday, after a meeting about a book I'm working on as a graphic designer, I took the long way home and stayed on the tram all the way into Karlín. I got off at a stop that I remember being at the edge of a deep puddle in 2002. Not much sign of the water from the sewers. I was immediately struck by the police tape stretched across the entrances to the many parks in the area:
Of course, the locals ignored the tape completely. Benches in the parks were crowded on that warm, sunny afternoon. There's still a lot of the damage from 2002 visible:
The ground floor of this building is still bricked up. And do you see the police tape lying in the puddle? Here's a detail pic:
The puddle is from a still bubbling sewer pipe. I came expecting to find reeking puddles of raw sewage everywhere but instead found people, from the new office buildings that had replaced many of the flood-ruined buildings, enjoying their lunches at the tables set out along the sidewalks of the tree lined streets. It was a bit like walking down a boulevard in Paris. I did find a few piles of sandbags that had been used to protect the doorways and the basement level windows:
I walked the length of Karlín and other than the police tape trying to steer people away from areas with possibly unstable trees and the occasional pile of sandbags I didn't see much sign of the flooding until I got into the vestibule of the subway station:
But down, down at the tracks for the trains there were only a few scattered puddles and those were on the upper, 'C' line tracks. The 'B' line is the deepest track of the Prague subway and that was drier than the 'C' at the transfer station, Florenc. Even the stations that had been closed due to the flooding were all open and the trains were running normally.
And despite a bit of rain this morning it looks like things are drying out. We've been promised a hot weekend. I hope to get out for a bike ride on Saturday nice and early and beat the heat of the afternoon.
On Tuesday we managed to get out for a ride through part of the lovely, little, rocky valley to the south of our apartment. There's a tiny, deep lake that we often stop at on our route through the valley. Our local government takes advantage of its sheltered location to place swans there who have been rescued. For years there was a swan with one clipped wing and its mate. We were surprised to see a new pair of swans there that day. I suspect that both had had the lower joints of their wings hacked off by some abusive idiot before they were rescued. People come regularly to feed them and they sure do add a bit of extra sparkle to this hidden gem:
I liked how they would both lift one leg at a time out of the icy water and rest it along their backs. You can see the closer swan doing it. It made us all think of the ballet, "Swan Lake."
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about an artist who inspired me. Thanks to some encouragement and generosity I put the drawing I'd created up on my print-on-demand online store. And I may have something up on Zazzle soon too.
Maybe.
Hopefully.
Well, also this week I sat down to draw a couple of times and drug out the old, neglected croquil nibs and practiced some pen and ink drawing. That artist mentioned in the diary I linked to uses croquil nibs for most of the work on his wonderfully detailed drawings. I like to use them for sketching outdoors but I hadn't done much of anything with them for years. Here are my two croquil pen and ink drawings for the week:
That last one is drawn with a croquil pen with grey tones added with ink wash applied with a brush.
Thanks for letting me share my week with you. It's been a rough week for me to watch US politics. So much demanding outrage and so few moments of calm. I may need another peek at those swans. Anyone else?
There's a metaphor in there somewhere.
Pie will be served in the comments.