Bones and trains

Now that I’ve decided I am not going to Budapest, I got it in my head that today I was going to take the train to Kutna Hora (about 65km east of Prague) because I wanted to go to the Sedlec Ossuary, the ‘bone church.’ Apparently someone conquered someone else, a monastery was bought and the buyer had a woodcarver make sculptures. Yes I read about this when I was there but really spent most of the time taking pictures. More on this in a bit. This was the first time taking the metro and taking a train and it mostly went well (except for the part where I lost my metro ticket and had to buy a new one). 

I just threw all the pic in the middle. The text is at the bottom.

When I got to Sedlec Ossuary I bought a  combined ticket to see four sites. I had bought my return ticket back to Prague so I had a limited amount of time. The Ossuary and the Cathedral of Assumption of some Lady someone was in one area but the two other sites were in the main town. The sites in the town were the Church of St Barbara, which was pretty amazing, and the Jesuit College which has been converted into the Gallery of the Central Bohemian Region. By time I got there I was rushing. They had an exhibit called ‘States of Mind.’ It was pretty great. It was a collection of different artists with works related to themes like ‘Joy’ or ‘Humility.’ I wish I could’ve spent more time. I asked if they had a book for the exhibit. I was told they sold out but I can email them and get it later.

I rushed back to the train station, got back to Prague exhausted. I checked out a farmers market and bought this really yummy raw food date fig cashew bar thing. 

Oh by the way, I’d regretted buying the train ticket for today when I saw the weather report called for big thunderstorms. Nothing. You think the weather report is bogus in SF, it’s like a meteorological black whole here. 

So what do I want to say about all this picture taking? I might have talked about this when I was blogging from Thailand. When I was in Barcelona for two days in 2013, I felt a pressure to get in as many of the sites in the little time I had as possible. When I got back I said I realized I was hoarding experiences instead of having them. So here I am in this beautiful church and I am totally doing it again. When I was in the Dali exhibit yesterday, which I really liked, I still felt this pressure to get to the next thing. Part of this is my unfortunate temperament. And I think using a digital camera, where I no longer have to be selective about what I shoot exacerbates this tendency of mine. (When I was 23 I left the country for the first time and went to England. I took an embarrassing number of pictures — out the window of moving trains and cars — of the countryside. So in my case, I was inclined towards this behavior before digital cameras were around). What would have been my experience in the ‘States of Mind’ exhibit had I not had a time constraint? In that case I was in some ways fortunate because they did not allow picture-taking. But I would have still felt an internal pressure if not the external pressure of time. So why do I do this? Why is it so important to take all these pictures? Is it just that I am going to a place to collect memories and make a record? What would happen if I went some place and I had nothing to ‘show’ for it besides my internal memories? Of course this all leads to the existential question of if this is all a way of avoiding thinking about death and loss. My experience in a place is temporary but if I take a picture I 1- get to have it forever and 2- get to avoid the fact that I will have to eventually leave that place and that experience will be gone forever and all experiences will go away and everyone I love it going to die and I’m going to die too, yada, yada, yada. Of course I don’t experience this in the moment. I experience the pressure, which is something I experience almost every day in some way. And I am sure that it is a way I have learned to avoid the present moment. 

This kind of reminded me of a Louie episode I saw last week. (I watch his show so we’ll have something to talk about when we get married. I refuse to believe he jacks off while women audition to do comedy with him, but I digress). There is the thought that multi-tasking actually does not exist because when we do it, we are just doing more than one thing poorly rather than engaging with one thing at a time and doing it with our full attention. There is also a theory that the younger generation is actually much better than us older folks at attending to more than one thing at a time, because they grew up with hand-held devices that they look at while going through the world. In this episode Louie is at a play with his daughter and she is on her phone during it. He gets very upset because he thinks she was ignoring the play and texting. But it turns out she was researching the play while watching it and was able to follow the play at the same time. So for her, the experience was richer because she had background info to go with the play in real time. So he’s making a statement about assumptions the older generation is making about the younger generation. I am aware that I am not able to fully appreciate the experience when I am busy taking pictures, or maybe even reading about it on those laminated info sheets they pass out at the entrance. If the brain is changing in its capability to attend to more than one thing at once, I very decidedly have the old version brain. But apparently with some tendency to act like I have the new version. But in my case, that tendency is not in the service of engaging but avoiding. I don’t know if all that is true about the younger generation’s brains. I’m sure a lot of people think it’s bullshit but a lot of people think a lot of things are bullshit when they are considering something that is foreign to them. 

I can’t believe whoever you are read this far. I officially have the entirety of my trip in Prague. I decided not to go to Budapest because I looked at my guidebook and saw all the things I want to do here. So may challenge to myself is to try to engage more, even if that means not seeing as many things.

By the way, that last picture is of the escalator going from the metro station to the street. The station nearest my hotel has the deepest metro station in all of Europe.

Oh, and it just started raining.