Opportunity knocked, good thing we were listening...
Amsterdam was fine, a fun and young mentality, it certainly did provide the chance to get back on track, so we did.
Holland being a practical place, we gave and got but Prague is located closer to our life, our heart, not to mention Northern Italy, which is part of our life and heart.
Feels absolutely fantastic, seems culturally familiar and finer, feels otherly and exotic, like Rome, like Paris.
Also, it's a privilege to live within the luxurious Austrian-Hapsburg architecture.
Prague's emotional environs ring world weary, not unlike Rome. When living in the eternal city from 2002-2005 those kinds of sensations unnerved me and yet now I embrace the same sort, in Bohemia.
I suppose it's much ado with getting older, gliding closer to the half century mark, perhaps I welcome these ideals in our jarringly cruel world, these notions of truth, love, beauty and justice...just the idea, planted, has the chance to grow.
So yes, I'll grab the chalice, grateful but with calm. I can better learn how to apply them to my life; it could happen. Either way, oh so grateful, it's gorgeous here...
The neighborhood's quiet, with train tracks below, the distant sound tempered by triple glazing along the windows in our spacious flat, the soft, periodic rumble barely noticeable after a petite week.
When the windows do open my deep affection for train travel, a mode of movement I find very romantic will cause little complaint...again, always, eternally grateful.
Last week we drove from Holland to Prague in 9 hours, through Western Germany, through the 'tunnel of unity', the picture below, entering Eastern Germany, I love nothing more than absorbing how cultural realities transfer before the eyes, simultaneously fleeing and ready to embrace another quality of life, bracing for emigre mode...sigh, the low level stress at first, having to address all those tedious particulars, banking, neighbors; adjustments to the mind and heart, they tend to go to the bone.
Interesting to me, at least, how this move to Prague collides with a severe winter snap, icey cold air in the evening lending to blissfully crisp days.
Loving the juxtaposition with our initial move across the pond, back in 2002 we docked in Gibraltar, drove through Southern France, hung out with the in-laws then landed in Rome. Back when then the continent literally felt like it was on fire.
Weather's so dramatic, sudden, and here I thought I'd only experience that fact while cruising across the Atlantic on our sailboat, our little cork bobbing along, offshore, with all those dolphins and whales...again, grateful, eternally grateful.
Such are the cycles of life, of moving, experiencing all these gorgeous countries, varying states of mind.
Amsterdam was simple, good, good people, one dimensional whereas Bohemia feels deliciously complicated and magical and sad. The people, deliriously complicated. I'm ready.
Another door, another opportunity to enjoy another slice of peripatetic life, feels right, at this time...
