The music at the end of the road
A trip always ends with what I haven't seen, which is why I keep traveling though it becomes harder and harder to do so as the places I was once so eager to see become more and more like the places I've already seen.
I didn't see Villa Tugendhat, Mies van der Rohe's modernist masterpiece, in Brno, Czech Republic, oversleeping, missing breakfast, in the first decent hotel I'd stayed in in weeks, exhausted from the bicycle trip that began five weeks before in St. Petersburg, Russia and ended, the day before Brno, in Bratislava, Slovakia.
I did see a bit of Brno in the evening and at night, enough to know I'd like to see more, walking the streets near its old center, pulled outwards inexorably towards the experimental architecture on the periphery of the old center, architecture that stopped me in its tracks without calling attention to itself. The very old and the very new can co-exist, and without self-conscious flamboyance!
Dinner was at Borgo Agnese, and almost by accident. Philip the waiter brought the fish and meat on a big platter and asked that we choose our cuts. A house apertif followed, and so on. The murmurs in the room could have been the murmuring heard at Troigros in Roanne or Tallievent in Paris. Philip suggested a Moravian wine, white as the reds of the region aren't up to snuff, lack of sunlight being the problem, and gave us a gift bottle as we left.
Philip, a Brno native, was of course as tired of Brno as we were delighted, and hoped to travel to either Canada or London in the hopes of finding work and improving his English.
The next day in Prague, searching the Jewish quarter for Franz Kafka and instead finding his father, Herman, a gruff entrepreneur, business opportunities assaulted me right and left, for Prague seems to be that kind of place, always racing to stay ahead of itself for fear of being left behind.
One opportunity in particular hit me between the eyes with the force of its magnitude and potential, its fierce and WHY hadn't I THOUGHT of this before quality!
Brassieres!
There are more women than men in the world and, according to an informal poll conducted among three of the women I'd been traveling with, a woman was likely to own fifteen brassieres at any one time! The market for bras is huge, and ever expanding.
Suddenly, while walking the cobblestone streets of old Prague, bras were all I could see. The Clock Tower, ho hum. The Castle, big deal, might as well be on a postcard. The Charles Bridge was as crowded as a mall the day after Thanksgiving, its world-class charms hidden.
I considered all the possibilities of the contraption, until the fascination at last passed, somewhere during my second full day in Prague.
We toasted its disappearance at dinner on our last night in the Czech Republic, opening the bottle of white wine we'd been gifted in Brno at the restaurant in Prague named for the poet Rilke. Then we walked through the streets of the old city, sometime past midnight, getting lost at least twice on our way back to the hotel.
Purged of any idea of economic loss or gain, I was once again ready to be a traveler, to return home to San Francisco, carrying with me all I had and hadn't seen.
What a great trip I've just taken! And there was music almost everywhere.