Double Czeching

You have to love a city that can make you feel good about being lost. And since I've turned getting lost into something of an art, I particularly appreciate being able to wander down a street in Prague — a street which doesn't exist on any map, and has no name, and goes at such an unusual angle from every other street that it might as well be in the fourth dimension — and discover a sunset so beautiful that it makes me stop, stand there and smile. Or that mysterious cafe I visited last year where you're allowed to throw doughnuts at the other diners, which I could never have found in a million years if I'd been looking for it. Or something so strange and unusual that I just have to check it out, even if I thought I was in a rush before.

Because that's what's unique about Prague. In Warsaw and Kraków, I sighed and said, "How in the world could anyone have built such things?" In Prague, I sigh and say, "Why in the world would anyone build such a thing?"

Take the Museum of Minatures, which I stumbled upon while on my way to the Castle this morning. I was expecting — oh, I don't know, miniature cars, perhaps, or miniature paintings, or Billy Barty. I was not expecting to see a flea with golden horseshoes attached to two of its feet, and another foot holding a pair of scissors (I had to look through a microscope in order to see this). Or a train of tiny miniature camels in the eye of a needle. Or an English prayer written on a strand of hair. Why? Why? No answers are forthcoming, at least not in any language I can understand.

Of course, some things don't require an explanation. I don't really need to know how a monastery outside the castle walls began producing some of the best beer I've ever tasted. I'm just glad that they do. I don't know what led the builders of the Loreta to dress two skeletons in wax masks and install them on both sides of an altar, when surely there are sculptors out there who will work for scale. It doesn't matter, because the Loreta — a Czech place of pilgrimage, with a copy of an Italian shrine to the Virgin Mary, a treasury full of silver and an unusual statue of a crucified bearded woman, made with real hair — is the most beautiful thing I've seen in Prague, and my favorite stop in the city. There's something incredibly peaceful and compelling about its chapel, even if some of it doesn't seem to make much sense.

I'd always been puzzled, in the past, at the devoted following that illustrator Alphonse Mucha attracted. I'm a fan of Art Nouveau, and I like his work on bottles of absinthe and the Czechoslovak currency as much as anyone, but to me he always seemed someone who was pretty clever at drawing attractive women and leaves. It wasn't until I saw his work in context, at the Mucha Museum, that I realized there was a method behind his art, one that showed you can get paid for doing the thing you love and still raise it to another level — not to mention using it to help unite the people of your country and raise awareness of it around the world.

It took me a while to find the Mucha museum — it was on one of those streets, and besides I'd been tricked yesterday into buying a ticket to a gallery of his work that was nice, but not as extensive or informative as I'd hoped. And besides, the gift shop was closed. The woman at the front desk apologized, and asked me to come back the next morning. "Perhaps you will meet a lady here, yes?" she asked.

I didn't come back, however. I don't know if I could have found my way there, anyway. And when I'm doing one of these trips for work, I usually leave it to someone else to pick up the Czechs.