It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s heartening \u00e2\u20ac\u201d but I certainly won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say humbling \u00e2\u20ac\u201d to have received a number of comments on the last few Works of Art, describing observations from countries such as the Czech Republic and Austria, during the two weeks-plus we spent there with family.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Humbling\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is the wrong word. It connotes a feeling of humiliation, as if some of my observations were ridiculous.<\/p>\n
But let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s drop the humility and discuss instead the reactions of some people to the articles about Prague and Hallstatt.<\/p>\n
Ray Litherland, who, with his wife Joyce, remembers the extremely popular Austrian tourist area of Hallstatt as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a small town with just one main street going through it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Ray asked me whether anything has changed over the five decades since they visited.<\/p>\n
Well, the town has a great many streets, making it difficult to identify a main street. The tourists are thick, and like Prague, getting caught in a stampede would be my fault.<\/p>\n
Let me explain:<\/p>\n
Previously, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve mentioned the lack of awareness of others. People on streets and sidewalks seem to barrel through others. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been there, in cities like Chicago (a topic for a separate column). In Prague, two weeks ago, I tried taking the initiative by using words like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153please\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153thank you.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But that got nowhere. What surprised me more was, for the most part, the total lack of acknowledgement; if I let somebody go ahead of me in a queue, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d expect a good ol\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 U.S. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153thank you.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d It didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t happen.<\/p>\n
I believe that if I were to have pushed someone off the sidewalk, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d keep the person from falling, dust that person off, apologize and even offer to buy him or her four beers. Well, none of that was necessary, as I doubt the initial push would have even been noticed. It might even have been appreciated.<\/p>\n
In my conversation with Litherland, I also mentioned the tourists\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 fascination with \u00e2\u20ac\u0153selfies.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d To the non-indoctrinated, a selfie is a photo one takes of oneself. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s easy, as most cell phone cameras are self-focusing.<\/p>\n
We saw endless lines of tourists who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d position themselves close to some landmark \u00e2\u20ac\u201d a waterfall, a cable car, a church, a funny sign or an Austrian alp \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and take a selfie. So selfish is this habit that holding up traffic didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t faze the selfers, who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d look at the photo they just took, think about it, then take another.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s heartening, not humbling, that my friend, Ron Wooten-Green, forwarded a copy of the July 2 Work of Art to a friend, Carol Smetana, now a resident of the nearby Pendaries-Sapello area. She was an assistant director for the filming of Red Dawn and assisted in the filming of Roots.<\/p>\n
Carol, wrote, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It is true that tourists abound in Prague. My Czech friends complained that when they walk around the two main squares in Prague all they hear are foreign languages, no Czech.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Carol agrees that Prague is filled with \u00e2\u20ac\u0153pushing, hustling, oblivious crowds,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but she asserts that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Czechs aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t rude, and there are subtle signals given, as here, just not the same. And I suspect (Art) couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t tell the Czechs from the tourists.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
The signals to which Carol refers must indeed be subtle. On our walks from our hotel rooms to downtown restaurants, where we soon began to feel like regulars, we received no observable exchange. The Prague nod apparently is much harder to discern than we imagined.<\/p>\n
Readers may recall that I headlined one of my European columns, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What? No Mozart?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as I lamented that the only music from that boy genius would need to come from a CD, or from memory. I mentioned that Salzburg, Austria, where I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d hoped to get my fill of Amadeus, just wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t on our itinerary. Because we had two grandchildren, ages 5 and 2, we needed to factor in some entertainment for them as well.<\/p>\n
Carol says that as for my search for Mozart, I \u00e2\u20ac\u0153should have looked for him in Prague. Unlike the Austrians, the Praguers loved Mozart. Marriage of Figaro was premiered in Prague at the Estates Theater, and the Czechs embraced Mozart.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Carol added, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Art could have heard Mozart in any number of venues in Prague, including venues where Mozart himself performed \u00e2\u20ac\u201d he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a favorite, considered a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcson.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Now I discover that it really wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have been necessary to take that long trip to Salzburg to get my Mozart fix. Had I dug deeper, I might have learned of the proximity of the music of Mozart.<\/p>\n
And that late-breaking knowledge leaves me humbled.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u201a\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u201a\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
Like many travelers, we Trujillos have accumulated a couple of plastic sandwich bags filled with assorted coins. It contains Danish kroners, Mexican pesos, euros from Austria, Czech korunas and Swiss francs.<\/p>\n
Once on a trip to help build a small church in Anapra, a suburb of Juarez, my youngest son, Ben and I went to a store where I presented a $20 dollar bill and got back a wheelbarrow full of change. That made Ben believe that the more we spent the more we earned. At age 5, he didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t realize the value of money.<\/p>\n
We experienced something like that on our flight back from the Czech Republic, where we were carrying leftover change from three different countries. Though we were famished by the time our plane landed in London\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Heathrow Airport, we held off, as a purchase would have required us to pay in pounds.<\/p>\n
That might have given us even more currency to lug home. Rather than engage in yet another transaction in terms we still don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand, we opted for waiting for regular airline food.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s heartening \u00e2\u20ac\u201d but I certainly won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say humbling \u00e2\u20ac\u201d to have received a number of comments on the last few Works of Art, describing observations from countries such as the Czech Republic and Austria, during the two weeks-plus we spent there with family. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Humbling\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is the wrong word. It connotes a feeling of humiliation, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1242"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1242"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1243,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1242\/revisions\/1243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}