12/28/2010

I will simply say what an honor it is to exist in a city with this many sculptures. The architecture in Prague is an amazing. There are so many co-mingling of styles all in such a relatively small area its nothing short of pure excitement.
I don’t remember too much about my first trip to Prague almost 20 years ago… scratch that, I do not remember much of the city as such. I remember traveling with my friend Walle as we first arrived in the outskirts of town and took the 1st “youth hostel” we came upon which amounted to a spare room in a man’s apartment. In the morning before we left for the train station the owner gave us a cup of “cowboy” coffee, the type where the grounds are in the bottom of the cup your drinking out of.
I remember meeting a Nigerian man who shares my middle name of Bandele in our next choice of youth hostel. Upon arriving at the main train stations it became clear that there would be many choices of “youth hostels.” The one we ended up choosing I can scarcely even imagine where that would have been 20 years after or even if it still retained its function. Bandele was traveling much like we were and between the three of us we tried to have a conversation with the clerk at the desk of our hostel. She was an older woman from Hungary and did not speak, English or German. Bandele spoke Bulgarian, which seemed similar enough to get basic gist of what she was asking of us-, which were posters. Posters from the west. She wanted images to put up around the hostel and it didn’t seem to matter what sort of images as she named many different names of pop culture icons like MLK, John Lennon, Bob Marley, and so on. It had never really dawned on me the cultural currency images were and are such that there might be a desire to import such images and that simply the acquisition of such images might be important. During this time I was only maybe twenty years old and not too aware as the trip to Germany was my first excursion out of the country, first real excursion out into the rest of the world. The fall of the Berlin wall was televised across the world and made it into my bedroom, however the events of the Velvet Revolution remain elusive in my memories.