Lost and confused

I seem to have lost my way with things entirely.  I've been posting photos here as though I've lost all sense of a discerning eye and have become a haphazard, touristy idiot who takes 'snaps' instead of photos.  I feel like I don't have any like-minded souls around me and even my visitor and the architect somehow only brought me back to a level of basic human contact that, though soothing and helpful and even fun, hasn't pulled me back from the edge to the essence of what I'm striving for.

All of that direction seems abandoned.  I've fallen foul of the scenes around me which are tangible and I no longer have time for the intangible.  And yet, the intangible used to be my realm.  That was where I lived.  All around me was chaos, but everyday I used to find at least a few minutes to escape it, even if that were only in my mind while musing on the kind of world Francis Bacon inhabited or while drawing something I later put on my wall to make my own kind of art studio in my room.

But here, at the moment, I appear to have lost my path.  I've not felt this alone in a long time.  The world of work is stealing the architect from me so we rarely get to see each other, and when we do, our thoughts, our lives are overshadowed by the banal and arduous demands of work and mere survival.

Paris awaits.  I only hope I'll have time to breathe and find a way back to where I feel at home.  Surely I only need a little bit of time on my own and everything will come back?  Failing that, some plan to leave my current routine before it kills me will become an urgent one at the top of my priority list.

A Day Off

Ah, the joys of a day off.  I actually got to try out my Czech, and I even got complimented on it.  Out of 5 encounters with people, I got compliments on my Czech from 3 of them.  The first was the woman at the transport office, the second a surprise bumping into a meet-ee and the third, the guy in the cafe.  So my visitor was pleased for me.  

However, I subsequently had the audacity not to give my seat up to a woman on the tram (I hadn't seen her closely enough to see if she were old enough to merit it and I always think I'd be really offended if one day someone offered me a seat just because I looked a bit old and because I'm female) but the transport inspectors got on and while checking my ticket, duly told me to be polite and give 'the lady' a seat.  I would have found that somewhat repulsive if I were her, as she really didn't look very old when I actually caught a proper glimpse of her.  But this is the Czech Republic.  No-one is offended by the polite offering of a seat to one's elders. Oops. My mistake.

My visitor and I did a mammoth amount of walking around today and it was so sunny we actually had to buy some sun cream.  It was that hot.  So we did the usual things, and enjoyed a rather yummy Magnum ice-cream each on the way to the castle.  We took some photos, of course, but I was too tired and too hot under the stronger-than-expected rays of the sun, so I didn't come up with anything particularly creative.  (Sorry.)

Having done all that, we stopped off at Kavárna Slavia and had something to eat before going and doing the food shopping and coming home.  Because, as everyone knows, there's no greater mistake than to go food shopping on an empty stomach.

P.S.  As a complete aside, did anyone actually notice that the title 'L'homme au bouquet de fleurs' in a previous post was actually a link?  It doesn't seem to have come up highlighted.  I had to watch it again this morning for a bit of encouragement to remember I was free for a day to do engaging, soothing, delightful things.  But I ended up not using the inspiration particularly well.  It dawned on me towards the end of the day that my advice on how much money my visitor should bring was somewhat inaccurate.  I was quoting for four-day survival, not four-day holiday/having a good time.  I had forgotten that in order to enjoy wandering around, you need money (or a packed lunch) because I have had neither the time nor the money to even consider such frivolities as eating in a cafe and buying an ice-cream since moving here.  But buying presents and bits and bobs of meaningless delight, are normal fare for holidays.  Speaking of meaningless delight, I got these ,berušky' earrings:

So, inspite of our rapidly acquired poverty, we did have an interesting day and I suppose I must take comfort in the fact that at least it didn't rain.  It is still April afterall, and one should be grateful for precipitation-free days.  Not to mention downright sunny ones.