It's gorgeous.

I thought I would be so European and take advantage of the little washbasins provided in the shower room to do my laundry. I went to the drug store and bought rubber gloves, a plastic clothes line, and Czech soap. Half-way through scrubbing my socks, Brunhilda walks in and says, horrified, "Scuse me, please, no wash." I don't know her real name, but Brunhilda speaks very little English, which is fine for the typical Czech person--I don't expect everyone to speak English--but for someone who works in a hotel, it's necessary. She's tense. Perpetually stressed out and snappish. Breakfast is from 8am to 10am. If I'm there still eating at 10:10am she will tell me to leave, in Czech but I get the idea.

Not able to explain to me why "no wash" or where I may be able to wash she ran and got the desk clerk. The two returned very agitated. He brought a brochure for an internet laundry place ("The first in Europe, perhaps the world!") that charges 70 crowns to wash and 70 crowns to dry per load. (That's about $6 for one load.) *sigh* Do I want to bother with that? Will I try to secretly wash individual pieces in the shower room after hours when Brunhilda is finally off for the night? (I think she works 12 hour days every day.) I bought a hot water pot today and I want to hide it when they come to clean my room incase they tell me that it's contraband.

I still don't know what the pair of floor level washbasins are for. It seemed so logical: one for washing, one for rinsing. I was so proud of the clothes line, too. I'll have to hang wet clothes in the closet to dry and hope that they don't look in there.

Yesterday, I rode the trams to get a better understanding of the city. The 10 ends across the river in the hills amid a city of ten-story apartment blocks with flat, humorless facades and clothes draping the balconies. There is lawn between the buildings, but not enough to make Le Corbusier happy, thank god. For a Sunday afternoon, it was surprisingly deserted considering the 10,000 people who probably live there. On the opposite end of the 10, closer to where I live, it rattles and bumps its way between the walled halves of the quarter-mile-long cemetary that I saw from the new mall.

The 9, which I took from that desolate suburbia, also goes by a cemetary, but this one is darker and lies under a lake of green creepers, with only a monument here or there visible above it. Later, it moves through stone canyons, the bases tagged first by shop keepers and then by graffiti artists. The upper walls are pilastered, pedimented windows. And across the river, it climbs through San Francisco-style neighborhoods rolling over the hills.

The 17, despite what the maps say, terminates at Holesivice, an old train station whose forecourt, bordered by an iron fence, reminded me of a fairground out of season. A used car lot across the street sat on a tiny plot of land at the side of an overpass ramp. I was glad to board the next tram that came along.

This was the 12. South of the city, the railway turns into a gracefully curved ramp high above the trees and houses below. Looking back, I could see the river, the city, and the green hills everywhere else. It was like a (thankfully) tame rollercoaster path or monorail track complete with new color-coded glass and steel stations from which I could see nice apartment buildings.

Today, I went to Petrin Park. (The couple at that link seem to have taken the same route I did, which means they likely had a copy of the DK Eyewitness guide.) At the end of the route I stumbled upon the Strahov library, which the German kids I hung out with the other night had told me about. It's beautiful on it's own, but I wanted to look through the books, which is not allowed, of course. They also had some strange taxidermy displays, mostly of fish.