Prague: Day One - Arrival

The flight to Prague is only one hour twenty minutes.  Enough time for a nap to catch up for a week of worry about a son missing in Dominica after Hurricane Maria.  The call that he was safe came in the night, after six very long days.
       No passport control in Prague.  The Czech Republic is part of the European Union now (has been since 2004), so in a way I haven’t crossed any borders.
       The hotel has sent a driver and I see my name on a card.  It makes things easier when you don’t speak the language.  He speaks English much better than he understands it, so I stop asking questions after a while.  He’s decided to drive into town on small country roads, a wonderful decision because it gives me the only look at the Czech countryside that I will get.  And it teaches me that Prague, like Paris, is snuggled in a river basin with higher ground all around it.

The Hotel Paris (no, I didn't do it on purpose) is a bit like me:  a touch of class, a bit bohemian and not quite new any more.  I chose it for its Art Nouveau décor.  There are touches of it everywhere, starting with the mosaics around the curved entrance.
       As it's lunchtime, I slip into the hotel bar for something light before heading out.  The menu offers a triangle sandwich on traditional multi-grain breat - with warm ham, sliced dill pickle and a side salad (with dressing just a touch sweeter than I expected but well within gastronomic limits).  Washed down with a glass of Czech pinto gris that's quite acceptable.
       Then it's off to foray into a new culture.

Alphons Mucha

First stop:  the Mucha Museum.  (And here that’s pronounced moo-ha - with the “ha” part just the slightest bit guttural, as if it were Arabic).  Alphons Mucha (1860-1939) was one of Europe’s great Art Nouveau illustrators, more or less of the same generation as Gustav Klimt from Vienna but a bit more understated, using pastels instead of bold colors.  As a young man, he moved to Paris, where he designed jewelry for Fouquet and was chosen by famous stage actress Sarah Bernhardt to be her one and only illustrator.  Overnight he was the toast of the town, and became even more so after his work on the Universal Exhibition in Paris.  After four years in the U.S., he returned to Prague and started to decorate about anything that could be decorated:  the Theater of Fine Arts, the mayor’s office, the Municipal Hall...  His last major work was the Slav Epic, a sort of glorified history of the Slavic people in twenty huge paintings.  Then came World War II, and the Nazis invaded his country.  Given his Slavic nationalism, Jewish roots and membership as a Free Mason, he was among the first to be arrested by the Gestapo.  Due to the prison conditions and multiple interrogations, Mucha soon contracted pneumonia.  Not wanted to be accused of killing such an artistic genius, the Nazis released him, but the damage was done and he died shortly thereafter.
       This museum is only a short walk from the hotel... Well, actually almost anything in Prague is a short walk, because there’s so much concentrated in the center of the city.  But this is literally just a few blocks away.  There are a good many of Mucha’s works on the walls of the seven rooms, with explanatory cards in Czech and English.  There are also posters - many of Sarah Bernhardt - and decorative panels, some furniture from his Paris apartment, plus a huge oil painting among his most famous:  The Woman in the Wilderness (also known as The Star), dedicated to the suffering of the Russian people after the Bolshevik Revolution.  In the end room loops a video on Mucha’s life and works.  On the way out, you can drop by the gift shop for a souvenir; they have quite a selection.
       I think my favorite memory will be the photo of good friend Gauguin playing the organ in Mucha's parlor, dressed in a suitcoat, his shirtails out and his bare legs on the pedals.  Quite the photo, and it says a lot about the wildness of the Paris Years of both artists.  (One year later, I'll see that very same photo in a Mucha exhibit in the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris.)