In My Shoes
I walk a lot. This isn’t a particularly interesting or revealing admission, I know. When I was younger, I never paid much attention to walking because I seemed to be running all the time. As a kid, I played the usual sports — soccer, baseball, basketball, hockey — always moving at high speed. I felt kind of like Forrest Gump, the running fool.
When I reached my teenage years, I upgraded to mechanized speed: bicycles. In 1998, I remember recording on VHS the at-the-time minuscule daily coverage of the Tour de France, the year before Lance Armstrong started winning them all. It wasn’t long before coverage exploded and cycling entered the popular consciousness. This was my singular hipster moment.
My favorite rider was an Italian sprinter named Mario Cipollini. Cipollini rode for the Saaco-Cannondale team, which were known as The Big Red Train due to their pioneering method near the end of races to ride to the front of the peloton and push the pace of the pack of riders to breakneck speeds in excess of 40mph all in order to lead out Cipollini, known as The Lion King or Super Mario, who was bigger and faster and more flamboyant than them all. As he raised his arms in victory after crossing the line, I dreamed of racing bikes in Europe. I cut out newspaper clippings with the results for stages in the Tour and taped them to the wall by my bed. I subscribed to the over-sized racing magazine Velo.
I got my first job at the age of 15 in order to pay for a brand road bike, a Cannondale R300. It was — and still is — a smooth riding machine, with the skinny tires and skinny seat and a dual red to yellow paint job that gives off the blurred impression of speed. Friends who rode with me were inevitably challenged to a sprint. My first AOL screen name was Biking4Lif.
I still love to ride, but I long ago dropped my pretensions of becoming a racer. Had I actually made it, today I’d be old enough to be considered a veteran or an elder statesman of the sport; or, more likely than not, already retired. Speed is, in many regards, a young man’s game.
It must have been when I started attending college that I became self-aware enough to enjoy a good walk.
Now wait a sec, I take that back. After all, I have many fond memories of taking hikes through the corn field across the street from my old house to the woods beyond. But those were more like adolescent adventure hikes than leisurely strolls. The purpose of those walks were to discover a secret place or climb a tree or cross the abandoned railroad tracks or enter a huge drainage tunnel or slide across a patch of frozen ice or play hide and go seek.
The mini-tragedy of my adult years was returning to see that hallowed ground gradually encroached upon by the surrounding subdivisions, the railroad tracks ripped up in favor of a paved bike path (which, yes, of course I rode and walked with my dog), and the well-worn trails deemed obsolete by the widened tracks of 4-wheelers passing through.
As a child, I thought of that place like my own Amazonian rainforest. It’s a bit silly, I admit, especially when adult eyes adjust how relatively small and un-Amazonian it really was, but that kind of suspension of disbelief is one of the graceful beauties of childhood.
Back to college. Living on campus is certainly a pedestrian’s game. I went away to school at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, which is about an hour west of Chicago. It’s a modest college town surrounded by corn fields and bean fields and the like thereof. Perhaps it’s greatest claim to fame is as the place where modern barbed wire was invented in 1874 by one Joseph Glidden, who later then gave 63 acres of his land to serve as the initial site for what later became NIU.
Or, should that not interest you, maybe you remember the supermodel, Cindy Crawford. She not only has a famous mole on her face, but an entire Wikipedia entry dedicated to a Versace dress she once wore to the Academy Awards.
I had the good fortune to live in a residence hall (i.e., a dormitory) located in the very middle of campus, right near the majority of lecture halls. Most of the other dorms were these unsightly complexes of towers that dotted the landscape to the west. Further to the north were the slums of Greek Row, where all the fraternity and sorority houses were clumped together onto a few streets. To the east were campus commons, the library, assorted lecture halls, the castle-themed Altgeld Hall, which was forever undergoing renovation, and the music and art buildings.
Cradling the eastern border of campus was a lagoon that was home to a flock of homicidal geese. If you made it past those mean bastards, you’d find yourself in a verdant residential area that had a number of stately homes from the late 19th and early 20th century buried alongside houses that students had overrun. To me, it had that kind of New England feel to it; however, I should note that I have never been to New England and in fact have no idea what I’m talking about.
But it was there that I feel like I learned to slow down, look around, and start to appreciate and admire the world around me. Many of my friends had what I’d like to call ‘urban feet’, where they’d walk at a breakneck NYC pace to reach their destination. I’d lag far behind them, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells. Often I chatted with my friend Dana, who shared my turtle’s pace. Occasionally I’d ruminate and think of synonyms for walking.
My favorites include: amble, sashay, saunter, stroll, and mosey. Promenade and perambulate nearly make the cut, but have too many syllables.
When I moved back to the St. Louis area, I maintained my languid pace, but added a beagle to the mix. We traveled to and fro, exploring neighborhoods and country roads, old cemeteries, secluded creek beds, parks and ponds, and naturally restored prairie fields with long scratchy grasses, chirping birds, and monarch butterflies fluttering in the breeze.
We covered ample real estate in our roundabout way. Still, I somehow managed to plump up like Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating.
I arrived in Prague weighing roughly 190 lbs (or 86 kilos). I was fat, sweaty, and out of shape, but that would soon change.
My preferred method of transport when I visit a new city is walking. Taxis, metros, trams, and buses are good if you need to cover a large distance in a short amount of time and bikes have their own charm, but nothing puts me more in touch with a city’s pulse than traversing its sidewalks, streets, squares, and boulevards on my own two feet.
Topographically speaking, Prague is a city that was founded on several enormous hills which slope and slalom this way and that. I can imagine this being a major impediment to city planners hoping to have a more grid-like organizational pattern á la New York City.
In the older medieval quarters like Staré Město (Old Town), Josefov (the Jewish Quarter), and Mala Straná (Lesser Town), the streets have a tendency to veer and wobble and form the shapes of question marks rather than straight lines. Especially at night there is this feeling of being trapped in a maze. And I can’t even tell you how many times I got turned around trying to navigate a relatively straightforward place like Žižkov.
Maybe it’s because I’m the son of a truck driver, but I love looking at maps. Do yourself a favor and download Google Earth and spend some time browsing Prague. I find it mesmerizing. Nowadays, I look with a tinge of nostalgia as I spot out where my old apartment is, not to mention pubs, restaurants, or parks I often visited, like a digitally enhanced trip down memory lane.
When I study maps, I always look for some subconscious pattern to the layout to be able to describe it. After all, did you know the arrondissements of Paris are arranged like the spiral of a snail’s shell? But looking at the map of Prague, the first image the comes to mind is that of a brain. The Vltava River runs north-south through the city, splitting it into two hemispheres. And you know when some program or video shows the electrical activity of the brain, that fractal firing of the neurons that seem like tiny lightning bolts trapped inside our skulls? Well, that’s kind of how I imagined the city growing and changing over the last 1,100 years or so.
As I mentioned above, it’s a city of seven hills. One of the largest is Petřin Hill. It’s so large, in fact, the city built a funicular railway that travels up to the lookout tower, which resembles the Eiffel Tower from a distance.
The entire hillside is basically a large park, lined with S-shaped paths, and dotted with baroque statues and blanketed with deciduous trees. Near the base of the hill, not far from the tram stop Ujezd, are a series of decaying bronze statues that depict the Memorial to the Victims of Communism. There are other little monuments, buildings, and places to see spread out along the hill. The view from atop is breathtaking.
My favorite aspect of the hill, however, are its ties to fiction. Petřin Hill is a notable location in the short story “Description of a Struggle” by the writer Franz Kafka.
But it is in the novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera that I came to see Petřin as a place of dreams and supernatural mystery. Upon re-reading that book when I came to Prague, I climbed its paths and stood in a grassy spot near several rows of trees and tried to envision where Tereza had stood in her dream with the rifleman.
Another notable hill is that of Letna, also home to a park, a football stadium, and a beer garden. In my first weeks in Prague, I climbed Letna with a friend. The staircase is fairly long and covered with graffiti. I remember taking multiple photographs of mushrooms and the Andy Warhol-designed banana from The Velvet Underground & Nico album.
At the outskirts of the park is a very large metronome, where once stood a commanding statue of Joseph Stalin. That was destroyed in 1962.
Letna Park is essentially a sprawling green plateau, with yet another lovely view, especially of Old Town and the many bridges spanning of the Vltava. Right near the metronome is a concreted area that had been overrun by skateboarders.
On sunny days, the place is filled with students on roller blades, joggers trotting down a path, or couples walking their dog. Dogs are everywhere in Prague, and Letna is no exception. The beer garden there has a bit of a campground feel to it, with wooden tables and benches laid out under trees, the ground covered in dirt and pine needles. Once you navigate through a thin row of nearby bushes and scrub, there is a ledge, the top part of a wall, where romantics can watch the sunset glimmer off of orange rooftops before dipping below the horizon.
To the south lies the ancient fortification of Vyšehrad. The dark towers of the neo-Gothic Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul stand out in relief from the trees and surrounding ramparts below. Not long after my TEFL course ended, one gray afternoon I decided to climb the ramparts and tour the area.
An old cemetery lies just outside the basilica’s walls where many famous Czechs are buried, such as the composer Antonín Dvořák and the science fiction writer Karel Čapek, who you may not know first coined the now ubiquitous word, robot.
At one point or another, I walked to most places in the central heart of Prague. One of my first solo journeys on foot was to the tourist trap of Staroměstské náměstí, or Old Town Square. Class had finished for the day, so I left Andel and crossed the river. I made my way along the riverfront, passing by the clogged Charles Bridge (Karlův most), and made my way into the heart of Old Town, where several architectural styles (baroque, Gothic) vie for attention from every angle.
Old Town Square is a tourist trip, with cafes lined up across from the medieval Astronomical Clock serving overpriced beer and food. In the distance I could see the spires of Tyn Church, and nearby was the memorial statue of Jan Hus, a religious reformer who was burned at the stake in 1415.
A jazz festival was going on at the time, so a tented pavilion served as a makeshift stage. At the time, I still felt very much like a tourist aimlessly wandering about. I would have gotten lost had I tried to find something specific that day. Somehow, I took a fortuitous path which led me to Náměstí Republiky, where I could take the yellow B line back to my apartment out in boondocks of Stodulky.
It was only later that I could return to that part of town and walk with confidence to go where I wanted to go. I spent endless evenings exploring narrow side streets and pathways and scouted out all the squares and boulevards. And when street promoters would come up to me at night holding flyers to some club or event and ask if I needed directions, I could smile and say, “No thanks. I live here.”
