Europe really knows human-scale architecture. I'll have more on that later, but I just love this kind of thing (despite having to lug my bag up the stairs):
Tomorrow, more exploring, including possibly lunch in Slovakia.
Between check-out and my departure for Vienna I have about 2 hours to kill. I've had my caffeine for the day already, so I'm not hanging out in Wenceslas Square occupying space at a cafe. Instead, I decamped to the park across the street from the train station:
This might actually be the best thing I've done all week. And whether because either Prague has lax leash laws or no one cares about them, several random dogs have said hi today.
I'll be back here soon.
I have discovered the tram network, so I took it to the Royal Gardens and the Castle. (Also, apparently, to the president's residence, but the Czech army dissuaded me from exploring that area.) I wish we had something like this in Chicago, but then again, we don't have anything like this in Chicago either:
I took a short (5.5 km) walk and ended with a Czech open-faced egg sandwich:
For the record, I didn't stop in the Sex Machines Museum, tempting as that sounded. Stopping ever few meters to take photos didn't help my time. Neither did the perfect weather.
I did stroll around the Czech Senate grounds, which felt a lot different than our Capitol Hill:
It almost felt as if our Senate sits in a building designed to dominate the city around it, while Czechia's sits in a walled garden. There's some profound political theory in there, I'm sure.
I'm in a European-sized hotel room in a European-sized city. I'm also exhausted. But I did get out of Heathrow for about an hour and a quarter, and walked around Ealing a bit:
And now I'm here:
More tomorrow. I'm pooped.
I just got from the curb to the lounge in 18 minutes. No kidding: my bag check line was empty, and so was the TSA Pre-Check queue. I should point out, no other queues were empty; in fact, it looked like the general security queue is long enough to gestate an elephant.
So, at least for the first hour of my vacation, things completely fail to suck.
Boarding pass from Chicago to Heathrow in app? Check.
Boarding pass from Heathrow to Prague in app? Check.
Packed? Uh...sure, once this laundry is done...
I'm serious: I couldn't have planned it better. Remember how I said I booked the early (4:50pm) flight because I wanted to fly on one of British Airways' brand-new 787-10 airplanes, and they swapped it out for one of they're old-ass 777s? Well, I woke up this morning to an email saying that the old-ass 777 won't actually make the trip after all, so they shoved me onto the next available flight on American.
After a not-so-quick call to American Airlines (them, because they issued the original ticket, and long, because British Airways screwed up the rebooking), they got me on the 9:15pm flight on a relatively-new Airbus 380. More to the point, instead of getting in at 6:30 am BST (12:30 am Chicago time), I'm now arriving at the much more humane hour of 11 am BST (5 am Chicago time).
That also puts me much closer to the bag-check time for my flight to Prague, and I'll still have enough time to get out of Heathrow for a bit. I hope.
If not, I have airline status with both American and BA, so the worst case is I cool my heels in the first-class lounge in Heathrow Terminal 3. Not ideal, but not like sitting in genpop with my luggage for 10 hours.
Updates as the situation warrants.
I haven't even left yet and already I've encountered three noteworthy irritations about the first 12 hours of my vacation, two of them involving British Airways and one involving Transport for London. (This will no doubt shock my readers in the UK.)
First, I chose an early-ish flight out of Chicago because when I booked it, BA planned to fly one of their brand-spanking-new 787-10 airplanes with their brand-spanking-new business class seats. But when I reconfirmed my seat yesterday (not my first time flying BA, you'll note), I learned that they will instead fly one of their old-ass 777s with their old-ass seats—and they put me in an aisle seat, which I did not want. I moved my seat without difficulty, but now I'm getting in to Heathrow at 6:35 am for no bloody reason. And because I used American Airlines miles for the trip, I may not be able to change to the later flight. (I don't know for sure because BA's customer service system is offline and won't be back up for a couple of hours.)
Second, they won't check my bag through to my final destination because my London to Prague flight is a separate booking. So my decision to take a 10-hour layover in London has hit a snag, unless I can somehow check my bag when I arrive. At 6:35 am. BA has helpfully suggested I can pay £209 to take an earlier flight, however. FFS.
But third, that might not even matter, because the Piccadilly Tube is shut down between Heathrow and Acton Town all weekend. If I do get my bag sorted, though, it'll be my chance to try out the new Elizabeth Line. At 7am. Which is 1am Chicago time.
So instead of flying to London on BA's newest airplane, leaving my bag at Heathrow for a few hours while I wander London on a beautiful late-spring morning, then coming back to Terminal 3 on the good ol' Piccadilly Line...I may spend several hours in the Terminal 5 Arrivals lounge waiting for my Prague flight to open for bag check.
Thank you for your assistance in these matters, British Airways. And TfL too! You guys rock!
Linguist Anvita Abbi studied the language family on Great Andaman (just south of Myanmar in the Andaman Sea) and made a fascinating discovery:
Somehow my extensive experience with all five Indian language families was no help. One time I asked Nao Jr. to tell me the word for “blood.” He looked at me as if I were an utter fool and did not reply. When I insisted, he said, “Tell me where it is coming from.” I replied, “From nowhere.” Irritated, he repeated, “Where did you see it?” Now I had to make up something, so I said, “On the finger.” The reply came promptly—“ongtei!”—and then he rattled off several words for blood on different parts of the body. If the blood emerged from the feet or legs, it was otei; internal bleeding was etei; and a clot on the skin was ertei. Something as basic as a noun changed form depending on location.
The grammar I was piecing together was based primarily on Jero, but a look through Portman's and Man's books convinced me that the southern Great Andamanese languages had similar structures. The lexicon consisted of two classes of words: free and bound. The free words were all nouns that referred to the environment and its denizens, such as ra for “pig.” They could occur alone. The bound words were nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that always existed with markers indicating a relation to other objects, events or states. The markers (specifically, a-; er-; ong-; ot-or ut-; e-or i-; ara-; and o-) derived from seven zones of the body and were attached to a root word, usually as a prefix, to describe concepts such as “inside,” “outside,” “upper” and “lower.” For example, the morpheme er-, which qualified most anything having to do with an outer body part, could be stuck to -cho to yield ercho, meaning “head.” A pig's head was thus raercho.
[My] studies established that the 10 original Great Andamanese languages belonged to a single family. Moreover, that family was unique in having a grammatical system based on the human body at every structural level. A handful of other Indigenous languages, such as Papantla Totonac, spoken in Mexico, and Matsés, spoken in Peru and Brazil, also used terms referring to body parts to form words. But these terms had not morphed into abstract symbols, nor did they spread to every other part of speech.
I envy Abbi's ability to do that. I've spent 8 weeks now trying to sort out Czech grammar and have only just started to understand the accusative case. It makes a guy want to stick with German...