After 8 months on my largest project yet, Written in Water: Portrait of a Town (91 audio tracks linked via GPS across an
English coastal landscape), I brought last loose ends together last week,
including a 30 minute radio version of what you might hear on a hypothetical
soundwalk (to be broadcast shortly, more details to follow...) [additional blog post here]
So I thought a change
of scene was in order, to cleanse the brain, stretch the ears, pace some new
streets. A prolonged online faff about destinations and cheap getaways led me
to the conclusion that package 'deals' are not what they're cracked up to be
and I got 50% off the cheapest city break I could find by booking the hotel and
flight independently.
A memorably insane return
from Innsbruck with Nastyjet in October last year (after a wonderful trip to
the 1st ESSA conference in Berlin,
meeting my newborn niece in Austria and a chance meeting with the finest post-New Orleans jazz band I've
ever heard, on a train, followed by an equally memorable and insane evening
with them at
Treibhaus, Innsbruck), had me forswearing budget airlines forever, even if
it meant doubling the cost and multiplying the journey duration by an unknown
factor.
I succumbed again though to the budget airline
ticket, this time with their Irish counterparts
(although deeply wary of their
colourful CEO, a feeling increased by the erudite description of O’Leary’s
entrepreneurial persona by my friend Dr Lorraine Warren.
Being an infrequent
flyer, my estimate of driving in 2 hrs to Stansted for a
2 hr flight to central Europe for less than the Eurostar to Brussels
overlooked the
confusion of airport parking (add an hour)
and the purgatory of labyrinthine queues at security to half undress into a tub, have
your deodorant sent back for a 2nd scan then put in a sandwich bag
to prevent it being used as a bomb.
(Really, guys? Have you made aircraft hijacking history with that one?)
(Really, guys? Have you made aircraft hijacking history with that one?)
And the queue by passengers for two different countries at a single gate, (add 30 minutes)... leading to the memorable announcement on the plane that we were flying not to Billund,
Denmark, the home of Lego, but to Brno, Czech Republic.
One rather short man
with a round yellow head and cup-like hands confusedly got his luggage and
disembarked before we taxied onto the runway.
A wonderful sleep, coiled like a slinky spring into a
space for an eight-year old, then staring down through thinning clouds at star-like clusters of red-roofed villages, between irregular polygonal fields
and immense woodlands strafed with thick interior lines of bare earth; an apparently thoughtful and selective use of such natural abundance.
The eight huge
cooling towers of the Soviet era nuclear power station at Dokovany rise in an
impassive stare above the flat greens and browns, the invitingly meandering Jihlava
river, the promontories of its steep bends surmounted with angular steep roofed
villages.
 |
| Image: Luboš Motl |
I learnt this from
comparing the view from my seat to a scan of Google Maps, which led to the
discovery (not seen from the sky) of another wonder of energy sourcing, the
hydroelectric dam at Dalešice.
It is these
combinations of conservation and guardianship with high technology that are one
of my strongest foreign impressions of the new Czech republic.
I was here (Czechoslovakia as was) aged 18 in a youth orchestra on tour, in summer 1989, about 3 months before the dour misery of endgame Soviet Europe imploded, supplanted
with a decade of wildly optimistic, often gallumphing political and economic
reforms that changed the country and perhaps most of all Prague forever.
From a place of
poverty and intimidation, secrecy, surveillance and suspicion, the new Czech
Republic is a place of fantastic artistic, theatrical and musical innovation
where tradition and cultural heritage are continually renegotiated, not simply
supplanted with transatlantic commercialism. (You saw raincoated men behind newspapers
in every hotel lobby – those cliches and the less funny, grotesquely corrupt
and abusive police, an all-powerful state machine of censorship and control
were everyday realities for a frightened and bullied people.)
Although it seems a shame to put my boots back on and leave the air-conditioned cool of my home for the next few days...
Probably an afternoon in the pool and sauna, a sausage supper and early to bed, although plans may change.
After all, I have come here also to work and some wonderful unexpected ideas arose for a one-woman web-based opera cinecast amid my crazed in-flight dreams.
