every man a Buffalo?

Prague continued...

That night at the bar Jon and Ashley and I also discussed the diet that Ashley is currently experimenting with – Raw foodism. The idea is that food loses its nutritional value when cooked above 115 degrees Fahrenheit, and that our bodies evolved to handle raw food, not cooked. So raw foodists pretty much eat only raw fruits, veggies, dried fruit, nuts and seeds. (no bread, rice, pasta, meat….) Ashley said it was really tough (duh!) and that she only succeeded in making about 80% of her diet raw, but whenever she went four or five consecutive days of 100% raw food she felt amazing. Jon said he didn’t like the terms “raw foodism” and “raw foodist” and suggested they be changed to “rawism” and “rawists”.

The next morning I was talking to my Australian roommate when I realized his t-shirt said “Kansas State Buffalo”. I’m kicking myself now for not taking a picture.

I invited myself to join Ashley and Lin for sightseeing that day. They said okay, and Jon joined us of course (he and Ashley had some “chemistry” going between them). We went back to the Old Town Square, where Lin and I went to the top of the Town Hall clock tower :

Then we met up with Kate and Maureen, and were going to go to a sex machine museum that those girls had heard about, but we ended up not going because it was too expensive, even with the group discount they gave us. At that point Jon had a total of 200 crown (about $13) to last him until he left Prague. He was planning on taking his guitar to the square the next day to go “busking” (playing in the street for money). He’d done it once before in Vienna and made 8 euro in one hour. I’m really curious about whether I’d be able to make any money playing my violin here in Toledo some Saturday afternoon, but I’m probably too much of a chicken to try it.

Since the sex machine museum was a bust, the six of us walked towards the Petrin Tower, and Eiffel Tower imitation that’s much smaller than the ET but on a hill, so you get a great view of Prague. But on our way across the Charles IV bridge we stopped to look at all the caricaturists, musicians and the old statues lining the bridge and ended up losing Kate and Maureen. So the four of us continued up to Petrin Tower, stopping in a hydrangea filled section of the hill to rest. Then we climbed a tree and took these pictures:

I’ve done a really bad job of describing this day, but maybe that’s because it would be nearly impossible to do justice to everything I felt that Saturday in Prague. I saw less “sights” than I’d planned on, but had a lot more fun than I would’ve had sightseeing alone.

I also ended the trip feeling as if the teasing of my college friends, who used to say that I’d grown up in a box (because, for example, I’d never seen Star Wars or American Pie), might have contained a lot of truth. After meeting so many people who knew so much about things that I only had a vague notion of, I really started wondering “what was I doing while these people were reading about/discussing/forming opinions on Darfur/Iraq/NATO/UN/Burma/China?” And I guess the answer isn’t that I spent too much time playing tennis or running or reading fiction (because I like doing all those things and don’t regret spending my time there), but maybe that I just wasn’t overly interested in world news in high school and college, that it’s more of a recent interest (perhaps encouraged by living in Spain and traveling) and I just have a lot of catching up to do.