Národní Třída

This station is deep. One of the deepest in the Prague Metro System. During the Prague floods of 2002, it was submerged. But I never have that sense of going underwater when entering. Just a sense of vertigo on the long steep escalators when I leave.

When I first came to this station a little over five years ago, the few Russian words I learnt in history came in useful. I remembered the 'narodniks' were the populists in the nineteenth century Russia. Seeing as there was also a 'narodní divadlo', it was easy to surmise that the word meant 'national'. It was my second day on the mean streets of Prague and I was already learning.

It would be wrong to assume that cognates can always help. This confusion was exploited in the movie Kolja, by Jan Svěrák. In the film, the boy, Kolja, points to the Soviet flag and says 'Ours is red.' The Russian for 'red' sounds exactly like the Czech for 'beautiful'. Zdeněk Svěrák's character assumes Kolja is commenting on the aesthetics of the two flags and promptly chastises him, telling him that the Soviet flag is red like a pair of underpants.

I buy a blueberry pancake and and Turkish coffee. While I'm eating at the counter beside the stall, the woman who served me continues to chat with the store owner from the adjacent stall. They speak in Russian. Their half-intelligible words remove me from this place, and I can delight in the incomprehensibility and just enjoy the sounds.

In the summer there are fruit and veg stalls here, at least as far as I remember. The wasps buzz from the split weeping fruit and dive-bomb any unguarded drinks. Today, it's just the buzz of the commuters and shoppers. There is a shopping centre here too. They have display for Valentine's Day with love hearts that read 'Miluji tě'. I'm not going in. I think I've covered that topic enough.

A man joins me at the counter. He has a lunch time beer. He notices me writing and so turns away. He finishes his beer in a second mouthful and he walks off. There's a couple at the end of the counter chatting and smoking strong foul smelling cigarettes. The man tells someone on his mobile telephone that they are at Naměstí Míru. The woman he's with corrects him and says that they are at 'Národní třída'.

A family arrive at the pancake stand. The two women stop chatting. The second goes back to her stall. The little girl wants a strawberry pancake. The lanky teenage son wants a cola. The cold has made my Turkish coffee drinkable.

It's not the Turkish coffee I know from home. It's not prepared in a small pot held gingerly over a flame. It's ground coffee, over which boiling water has been poured. It's better than instant. The trick is to wait until the mound of granules on the top has settled. But you always get a few grains in your mouth.