If pressed, I am not sure which of Amsterdam’s appeals I would choose as most responsible for conjuring its magic: Cycling? Cafe culture? Strees filled with water? Maybe baby Doris or Lola on her bike? But for sure high up on the list would be its windows.
Long before it was hip or a world city Jane Jacobs pointed to Amsterdam as a place where eyes on the street offered safety, though that is not really what I mean here. For as much as safety, these windows convey life. Maybe the houses look enough like approving faces that you take the windows as affirming eyes. Maybe that’s just how stone and glass warm up when you set a happy population living and working in front of them.
In Karlovy Vary, a “spa town” two hours west of Prague, there is no such happy face or smiling eye. Instead, this is the place wanna-be Illuminati, the scriptwriters from “The Prisoner” or “The Truman Show,” and Hollywood set designers would put together so former KBG-ites can slouch into retirement.
Look, when I say “all” in the claim that all the buildings here come with over-the-top Bellagio/Vegas-ness of bow frontage, rococo-Rocco-ing and yes, arched windows, I really mean all just as when I say every hotel in town (and there is almost nothing other than hotels) includes a “you can feed here” restaurant of parlor-ized ceiling, be-draped backdrop, and ornate furniture, I really mean every.
While any one or two of the buildings here might invoke charm or beauty located in some hum drum town like Vienna, here the relentlessness of the stately and august stifles perspective and snuffs out joy. The lack of a single ordinary store or home tells you at every step this is the small-town equivalent of a cruise ship or a mall, a construction, a bubble of nothing.
Whatever form of a marketing sham “spa town” is, healing themselves in the healing waters is one thing folks do here now, much as they have been doing for the last few centuries I take it. Yet no one looks all that good. Whatever fire it is in people that gets dimmed by mall-like environments is here extinguished, the pursuit of life with no edges and nothing to bother about full on.
I guess I need to say that Goethe loved it here, which I know because I ate, regrettably, at the Goethe house, where my waiter was an all too pleasant guy whose biceps, tattoos, and chest size made it clear he could crush a car with dissidents inside it if he needed to. And he, along with everyone else, really does give the sense that this is where Putin sends those he does not kill as a reward for serving the state.
Because it is hard to convey the gap between the mill of the people and the surroundings themselves, a gap is expressed in the uniformity of the costumes. If Karlovy Vary is where extras go to pretend they are the star, it seems no one got their call.
When, in my first five minutes in town, I passed a henchman type wearing a brown suede dinner jacket worth between a thousand and a million rubles (it is always hard to tell how much the truly garish sets someone back), I expected dress-up and fancy-time to be the rule. Instead, he turned out to be an absolute exception, with everyone else dressed in whatever the equivalent of Ikea clothing is.
And while I don’t want to get into a whole thing about where in the world people are pretty and handsome and where they are not, the lack of striking women and gallant men was as obvious as the overdub of all the buildings. And so, if I say:
Everyone here is pasty white and between 5’5” and 6’1”
I admit right away that is a rhetorical overstatement because I did not start looking for outliers until I had been there a bit and did, in fact, see four rich Asian kids as well as a scattering of backpackers wondering, as was I, what the hell they were doing here. But otherwise, everyone looked as middle of the road as middle-of-the-road folks from Germany or Russia or the bureaucracy of some security service can look, all of them on their slow move down a Main Street of handbag stores, restaurants, more handbag stores, and more restaurants.
That main street, by the bye, has a small river running through it, a river that was no doubt here before the developers cited this place as its next venture but which still comes across as the towns “water feature.” And while the promenading everyone does proves they are real, just as going into one of the buildings verifies the whole place is not just a movie set, you still spend your time in Karlovy Vary wishing into its synthetic garden any number of genuine snakes.
—
A quick note on artificiality: While there may be other things to buy here besides handbags (dresses, crystals, souvenirs) there is no one making anything. No artist studios or craftspeople are to be found anywhere.
And a quick note on notes: One measure of a place for me is how long I can enjoy its distractions before wanting to get to a coffee shop to write about it. Having arrived in Karlovy Vary just before dinner, I was at the door of Republica Coffee at 8:00 the next morning, since that is when their website says they open. But a sign on the door announced they actually opened at 8:30, an irritation I enjoyed for its realness. And later that day I met Barry, a happy Brit of intelligence and wit whose printed parrot shirt and tall (6’4”) friend Joseph both stood out from the sartorial and physical uniformity of the place. Not snakes, but a welcome relief from a vacation spot where all I did was work.
In the meantime, by comparison, I’ve been in Prague for two days now and have not had a chance to cross anything off my to-do list. Bot notes on cake, castles, and curation are forthcoming.
Insightful underview of Karlovy Vary - thank you. I much prefer Cesky Krumlov ...midweek and out of season.
I have rarely been labelled happy, but I will begrudgingly take it 🙂