Prague Journal

Friday, May 13, 2005.

It’s a beautiful day today. Eva and I met for coffee near Hradčanská to talk about the faculty workshop that she’d like me to help with on the 26th of this month. This is a week-long course for young faculty and doctoral students on teaching methods. I had given a workshop on case teaching, but this one will be on constructing, using and evaluating student teams.
After the business-side of our meeting, we strolled up to the castle to see the Adolf Born exhibit “From La Fontain to Livingston” at the Imperial Stable. Adolf Born is a Czech illustrator of children’s books and the creator of 45 animated films for children. He was born in Ceské Velenice in 1930, and studied at Education Faculty of Charles University in Prague and later at the Academy of Plastic Arts in Paris. The exhibition had many of Born’s illustrations of Grimm’s fairy tales, Three Musketeers, and La Fontain’s fables. There were also clever and amusing paintings inspired by Greece, Holland, Turkey and Norway.
We also stopped by a small gallery of computer-enhanced photographs by Jaroslav Prochazka. The photographs themselves, mostly of dead trees and branches, were not altered, but copies of the pictures were superimposed on themselves to create mirror images that appeared to look like owls, castles, and monsters.
We walked along some of the less-traveled areas around the castle, including the interesting buildings in Novy Svet (“new world”), one of the last surviving residential neighborhoods at Prague Castle, home to buildings dating back 500 years or more. Many of the buildings are now abandoned, perhaps in restitution-limbo, but a few have been refurbished into cafes, galleries and shops.
Later in the afternoon Charlotte and I met downtown at Patriot-X café, a comfortable restaurant with outdoor seating area near Stara Celnice at Republic Square. It was nice to see her again – she just returned last week from a month visit to Chicago, mostly to see her mother who is 88 and amazingly spry.
Rick and I met up at the Spanish Synagogue for services at 7. Tonight’s crowd was relatively small, with only a small handful of regulars and 20 or 30 tourists. Peter conducted the service himself, in English and in Slovak. After the service, we went out with Howard for a quick dinner. Marketa joined us afterward and we went to a glass gallery before heading home for the night. This particular gallery was not to our taste—nor to Howard’s either – but Marketa liked some of the large vases.

posted by JWinn @ 11:49 PM