The last day in Prague

Thursday, my last day in Prague. Being in Prague was another dream come true. Sometimes I had to pinch myself to make sure that I wasn't dreaming. Prague is definitely a place I would love to come back to. Even though I really enjoyed it, I felt a little guilty that I wasn't feeling the same way about leaving Prague that I felt about leaving Bologna. In Bologna, I had to force myself to buy my postcards because I knew that it was inevitable that I would have to leave. In Krakow, I eagerly bought my postcards, ready to leave Krakow and go to Prague. But in Prague, I bought my postcards, knowing that I was another step closer to Berlin, and I would miss Prague more if I wasn't leaving Prague for Berlin. But I don't think I even scratched the surface of Prague, and there are so many things that I did not get the chance to do. Prague Castle, Astrological Clock, Wenceslas Square, the crazy dancing building, Mala Strana, Josefov, Alfons Mucha and Jan Saudek art exhibitions, all check. But there is so much more--to much to list and make myself sad that I didn't do! Naturally, I tried to pack everything into my last afternoon!
If there was one thing that I would be disappointed if I left Prague without doing, it was going to the World Press Photo Exhibition. I really enjoyed the lecture about the World Press Photo competition we had at NOISE. The exhibition doesn't come to the United States, and if I ever wanted to see it if I wasn't in Europe, the next closest place would be Toronto. So this was really a once in a lifetime opportunity! Student admission was 50 CZK, or less than $2.5. I had to do this! We saw some of these pictures at NOISE, but I enjoyed going through and analyzing the images for myself. I noticed nearly everything at the exhibition that Marta had said in her lecture! The "high standards of photography" that is constituted and reaffirmed by middle-class white men for middle-class white audiences. Women portrayed as highly sexual or as the epitome of vulnerability and victimization. "One person's trauma relates to another person's trauma." The "pornography of misery." The first pictures in the exhibit were pictures of animals and the environment (including series of a seal eating a penguin), followed by row after row of sports photos. I should probably interject here that at this point I had hardly seen a photo of a woman or a picture taken by a woman. The sports then gave way to the heavy, political photos. The first I saw was of a rescue effort in the Canary Islands, where relief workers and vacationers alike were rushing to help a boatload of African refugees that had washed up on shore. That part was profound, but the photo focused on women in bikinis bent over a male refugee, giving the dual image of the ever-nurturing women and the objectification of women's bodies. There was another image of (I remember correctly) a Guatemalan or Nicaraguan woman lying dead in the street, her body full of dozens of bullets. The female victim. I nearly missed the photo of the year--the one of the young Lebanese women in the convertible returning to their neighborhood at the beginning of the most recent Lebanese-Israeli conflict--because it was randomly stuck in with the other photos. I looked for "power relations, intersectionality, and cultural meanings" in the pictures, and was disturbed at what I saw. Naturally, I was disturbed by the images, how we live in a world with so much conflict, violence, and hate and order them as the least of our priorities (or make them priorities for the wrong reasons). It brought the rest of the world into my sheltered, educated, middle-class realm, so of course this images would shake my individual world. But I was also further disturbed by the choice of subjects and the photographers' motivations in taking the photos. Did they just sit idly by and watch these events happen, thinking that they were doing their part by bringing these events and issues to the rest of the world? I know that the photographer who took the photo of the African child and the vulture killed himself shortly after taking the photo. Did the photographer in the Canary Islands put down their camera and help? Did the photographer in Guatemala/Nicaragua cry after taking the photo of the woman lying in a pool of her own blood? I thought of my own reluctance to take pictures on the trip. There have been so many times that I have wanted to take pictures, to freeze a moment in time for me to remember the message or the scene in the picture. But that ruins the picture for me, it shatters the moment, and I am the only one benefiting from it--when you take a picture, you are literally "taking" something with nothing benefiting the subject of the picture. That is why I have so few pictures of people,
After I left the exhibition, it started raining, and I didn't have an umbrella. Instead of backtracking a few minutes to grab my umbrella from the apartment. I wanted to go back to the castle, just because I thought there was a 6:00 mass at St. Vitus at the castle. It was a big step for me, because it was my first time at the square or across the river since Saturday. I had my confidence and independence back, but I still looked over my shoulder every so often. As I crossed the Charles Bridge, I remembered that I had not made my wish at the statue of St. Wenceslas. So like every other good tourist, I stopped, in the yucky, drizzly rain to touch the statue and make my wish. I won't say what I wished for, because then it would come true, silly! I overheard a German tourist telling an Indian tourist "If you touch the statue, then you will come back to Prague," at which point the Indian tourist responded "Yeah, if you can afford the plane ticket!" It made me laugh and put a smile on my face! When I got to St. Vitus, I found out that mass wasn't until 7:00, and since it was not even 5:30 and I was hungry and still had a paper to write that evening, I decided to cut my loses, not go to church in the Czech Republic, buy some postcards, and head back to the apartment.
Coming full circle from our first night in Prague, Joanna, Mahina, Olivia and I went back to the same Thai restaurant where we had our first dinner in Prague. We downed amazing Thai food and mango juice, reminiscing about the last two weeks. A great day capped off with great food and great people--the perfect way to finish off an amazing two weeks in Prague.