I spent today with Martin Sust, my editor at Laser Books. Martin was a great host, taking me around the gardens of Mala Strana, where we wandered through a mirror maze in a neo-gothic pavilion and enjoyed the woodland atmosphere, and through quaint cobbled streets to Jan Svankmajer’s little gallery of surrealist art. There wasn’t much of Svankmajer’s own work, but there was still some interesting stuff.

Martin graciously treated me to lunch at a restaurant overlooking the city. My Moravian chicken came in a delicious sauce with broccoli and green peppers. As I expressed my appreciation for Moravian tucker, Martin shook his head. “That’s Asian food,” he said. “It doesn’t look Moravian.”

Whatever it was, it was great, and there was a lot of it, as has been the case in every Prague restaurant I’ve been to.

In the afternoon we went to a science fiction bookstore with a cafe and bar upstairs (why don’t we have bars above bookstores in the western world?), where writers meet on Thursdays.

I asked one guy, Vlado, about absinthe (Martin being, by his own account, quite abstemious). Vlado said all absinthe is disgusting and will only make you hallucinate if you drink a lot of it. It’s all starting to sound like too much trouble, so I guess I’ll pass.

Martin showed me the Laser Books edition of The Etched City (Vryte Mesto). It looks cool in Czech, even though I can’t read a word. At another bookshop I bought a couple of interesting looking books by Czech writers translated into English.

Dinner is a really good kung pao chicken down an arcade off Wenceslas Square. This time I ask for a doggy bag and take the leftovers home to have for beakfast. It’s cold enough that I don’t have to worry about not having a fridge in my room.

Blisters are such fun - like your own homegrown bubble wrap. Despite the new shoes, I have a blister the shape - and half the size - of Mongolia on the sole of my foot.

Today I went on a bit of an art shopping spree at the Godot gallery, down a passage off Karlova, not far from Charles Bridge in Stare Mesto - a little adventure of great interest to me but not, I would expect, to anyone else.

But if you’re going to be in Prague this year, and fancy a bit of art, the Godot has some very good and interesting stuff, by artists ranging from famous to unknown, and an especially large and high quality selection of etchings and other prints - all at very reasonable prices that may not be so reasonable next year when the Czech Rep. goes to the Euro. All original works come with a certificate of authenticity.

Seriousy cold and wet today! This morning’s first mission is to buy a jacket, scarf and gloves. That done, I head north across the river, which looks like wet tarmac, to the Valatrzni Palace, which isn’t a palace but a big Functionalist building that reminds me of high school. It houses art of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, and it’s well worth seeing. My favourite from the 19th century is August Piepenhagen, a painter of romantic landscapes, including some lovely dark foggy moonlit scenes. He painted in the studio, “his sole inspiration, at least according to his daughter Charlotte, tufts of moss that he grew on the windowsills of his farm at Jeneralka.”

Also in the 19th Century collection is one painting by Amalie Manesova, sister of the much more famous artist Josef Manes. She rejected her suitor, never married, “sacrificed her artistic talents to look after her brothers,” and eventually opened a school for female artists. She might be disappointed to see that even in the contemporary collection in this gallery there are few women artists represented. Her painting shows a harvest scene with rich afternoon light and lively, Canaletto-like figures. She preferred figurative painting, but painted landscapes in accordance with her father’s wishes.

My vote for queerest and coolest painting goes to “Fauns Fleeing Before an Automobile” (1905) by Benes Knupfer, depicting with rough effective Goya-esque brushwork a large and a small faun running across a forest road, caught in the headlights of a car, which we see from behind in silhouette.

Downstairs, Frantisek Hudecek’s “Railroad Station with a Windmill” has a dark greenish blue sky and a lonely atmosphere reminiscent of Russell Drysdale or Edward Hopper. I’ll be thinking about the shades of difference in mood between this one and Piepenhagen’s night scenes for a while, and wondering why the railway picture seems so much sadder.

Most dubious analysis of art award goes to the realistic, life-size wax scultpure “Drowned Cat” (1904) by an artist whose name I scribbled down so messily that I now can’t read it. “Storja(?) merged this sensuous conception of light with the romantic and symbolic theme of death and annihilation, whereby he succeeded in capturing the spirit of the age.” Okay… I guess whatsisname’s pickled shark captures the spirit of our age, then. But hey, what do I know, maybe it does.

In the contemporary art I like Ale Guzzetti’s “Imaginary Playmate”, a sort of totem-pole made of plastic objets with a plasma globe (not working) on top, which makes electronic musical noises.

Dinner is more goulash soup and hot rum punch at a hotel on the old town square. The punch is delicious and doesn’t need the sugar that comes with it.

Back on the subject of art, there’s a print of a Modigliani nude above my bed. It’s a nice painting, but if I want to look at a naked woman every morning I can use a mirror. Why can’t it be a picture of a nice handsome naked man? Or even better, a handsome man in a nice suit? Maybe I should carry around a poster of, say, Tamara de Lempicka’s “Portrait d’Homme” to stick over whatever happens to be on the wall in the places I stay.

“The most compelling kind of male beauty is the devil’s” - Buket Uzuner, “The Sound of Fishsteps”. Amen.

P.S. there should be umlauts and circumflexes and things above lots of the letters in these Czech names, but I can’t figure out how to do them with Gmail and I can’t be hassled with doing them in Word and copying them over, so please just pretend they’re there.

Spent the morning wandering around the old cemetery. It’s a lovely one, with lots of ivy and trees and some fabulous family tombs in various styles, lined up like rows of kooky little old closed-up houses on grassy lanes. Franz Kafka is buried in the Jewish cemetery, but I’m not a worshipper of Kafka, and by the time I’d walked around the Christian cemetery I’d had enough of the dead, however picturesque their resting places, so I didn’t visit his grave. Walking around the cemetery I was bothered by morbid thoughts about how I’ll face the deaths of loved ones when they happen, and how I’ll face my own. I’m not very brave about the idea of dying. I wish I had a certain belief in an afterlife. It would be a comfort, and if you were wrong, you’d never know.

There’s a shopping mall next door to the cemetery. I wander around looking for warm clothes, as the weather is starting to get cold. Nothing really appeals, and it’s all kind of expensive for what it is. I stop at a cafe for a hot chocolate. Expecting the usual sweetened cocoa-like drink, I’m utterly unprepared for the decadent beast of semi-liquid sin they put in front of me, which appears to be a melted block of chocolate mixed with just a little milk. I drink 1/3 of it and spending about a week’s ration of willpower leave the rest. Last thing I see of it it’s slouching off in the direction of Bethlehem, while I slouch off in search of sundries like razors and hand cream that I forgot to bring with me.

Downstairs, a couple of Israeli girls are selling a kind of fancy nail buffer at a stand. One of them insists on demonstrating it on one of my nails. I’ve seen this product before, at a stand just like this one, in some other place, where there were also two Israeli girls. The one buffing my nail even looks familiar. Surely it wasn’t her last time?

The buffer does a good job, but if I want to waste time I can think of more entertaining ways to do it than sitting around buffing my nails. The girl says her friend travels a lot and lives in different places.

“It’s the best,” says the traveller girl, but she doesn’t sound entirely sure. I’m not entirely sure either. I can’t think of any place where I really feel at home - not even in Melbourne, much as I love parts of it and appreciate many things about it. Bangkok takes all comers and never assaults you with cold weather, and I did feel at home there for a while, but that’s starting to fade - though I suspect I’ll be happy to get back. In Britain and Europe I always feel like I’m looking through a window into a familiar-looking house that I don’t have the key to. America is an entirely foreign country. I’d actually like to feel at home somewhere, but I don’t know how to go about it.

The exotic can quickly become commonplace. Prague’s lovely streets are starting to feel as familiar and unremarkable as Bangkok’s high rises and grubby terrace houses. This always seems to happen to me in places overseas. Oddly, the only place that has the ability to constantly seem strange and interesting to me is Melbourne. Maybe that in itself is some kind of crazy arse-backwards sense of home.

I’ve just read over what I wrote yesterday. Sorry for all the typos - I’ll try to do a bit better this time.

Charles Bridge, leading to Mala Strana, the old district below the castle, is one of the city’s icons, lined with fancy statues of saints. Every so often a statue has a beggar underneath - all are middle-aged to elderly men, down on their knees on the cobbles. One has a dog, a healthy-looking German Shepherd cross, which looks at me in that unsettling Anubis-like way of intelligent dogs, with eyes that seem to weigh your soul - earning my spare change. (I don’t know whether beggars here work for the local mafia like they do in Bangkok - until I hear otherwise I’ll assume they don’t.)

Dogs seem to be popular pets in Prague. Bangkok is another city of dogs - but strays, abandoned or street-born, living in their doggy world, dependent on man’s scraps but not owned by or loyal to man. I miss seeing them: they’re another layer of otherness, a reminder of the eternal mystery of animals.

The weather is sunny and warm. It’s a long, steep hike up cobbled streets to the castle, past more eye candy. My favourite building on the way up the hill is the Italian embassy, which has splendid silver-embossed doors flanked by a pair of huge, somehow louche-looking stucco eagles - a fine pair of bouncers.

The castle isn’t so much a castle as a sprawling collection of palaces and other buildings, including St. Vitus Cathedral. I’m finding out the literally hard way that cobblestones are far less comfortable to walk on than the asphalt pavements I’m used to. Feeling every edge through the soles of my boots, I stagger ever more feebly around the centuries-old splendour of the castle, taking in the exhibition of freaky Mannerist paintings in the gallery and the ponderously ornate extravaganza of St. John of Nepomuk’s (no, I hadn’t heard of him, either) tomb in the cathedral (it contains 2 tonnes of silver, according to my guidebook).

In the ‘History of Prague Castle’ exhibition I’m impressed by the grave clothes of Ferdinand I, which look like something the Black Adder would wear, complete with a large black velvet codpiece tailored in the at-attention position - just the thing to wear when you go to meet God. The crystal-pommelled coronation sword is nice, too.

The Old Royal Palace is a classy, empty Gothic loft-like space with hexagon-paned leadlight windows, tracery ceiling and an oak floor which feels like walking on pillows after all those fucking cobblestones.

Limping back across the bridge north of Charles Bridge, I receive the blessing of St. Christopher, in the form of a shop selling cushiony and not-unstylish walking shoes at a reasonable price. There’s one pair left in my size. Wearing them out of the shop, I skip lightly back towards the old town square, stopping along the way to sample an alzirska kava, which is a large drink in 3 layers - egg liqueur like advokaat on the bottom, coffee in the middle and cream on top. It’s delicious and tummy-warming.

I finish off the day by going to two evening recitals in the mirror chapel at the Klementinium, the Jesuits’ college. The ticket seller gave me a student discount, even though I said I wasn’t a student - maybe I just look poor enough to need the discount. The chapel is a small, very ornate hall with a pipe organ. The music brings the Baroque interior alive. All that marble, gilding and statuary makes sense in the context of magnificent music. The ghost who walks with me suggests that Baroque decoration is by its nature a setting for a performance, whether of music or ‘just’ of life, and suffers more than most styles when emptied out and left as a museum-piece shell.

One of the concerts is organ, soprano and saxophone. The other is organ, violin and cello. The middle-aged lady cellist rocks out, body and soul, like Angus Young’s classical kindred spirit.

As my contribution to recommendations for dining and drinking in Prague, I recommend the vending machine outside the chapel, which dispenses a perfectly acceptable hot chocolate for 10 koruna - about a fifth of what you pay in the cafes in the area.

It’s dark, cold and raining outside. Another taxi home.

It’s a 20 minute taxi ride from the airport to the Pension Manes on Manesova Street, through leafy suburbs with mansion-style apartments that remind me of South Yarra and Elwood in Melbourne. There are trams here, too. The traffic seems light for a capital city. The cars are mainly sedans and hatchbacks - SUVs are very few and far between, and the streets look better for their absence. Melbourne, take note.

Manesova Street is lines with 19th century and Art Nouveau buildings. Pension Manes sticks out - it has an undistinguished brown facade, more recent looking than its neightbours, but inside there’s a lovely mosaic floor and a staricase with a gold-painted dragon’s head on the end of the banister.

The pillow on the bed is like a small thick square quilt that can obviously be folded in half to make it thicker. Looking at it I feel dubious, but it’s surprisingly comfortable.

It’s 6 o’clock and I plan to take a short nap and then go out, but lost sleep catches up with me and I wake at 1 a.m. and sleep on and off until morning light comes through the trees out the window.

Living in Bangkok, I’d forgotten what a crisp clear early autumn morning feels like. I lean out the window and treat my lungs to the fine air and a honey cigar.

Walking towards the old town, one of the first things of interest is a shop selling cannabis vodka and several kinds of absinthe. The only absinthe I’ve ever had tasted like I imagine window cleaner would, and didn’t even make me hallucinate. I’ll have to ask my Czech publisher if any of this stuff is really worth it.

Towers, oriel windows, wrought iron balconies, Art Nouveau doorways, atlantes, onion domes and other architectural eye candy keeps me rubbernecking as I walk along. It’s about 9 - in Bangkok, the air would be pungent with the smell of frying chillies and the streets would be busy. Here it’s quiet, reminding me of Melbourne again.

Intermission: I’ve just noticed there’s a small didgeridoo hanging on the wall down beside the desk in the internet cafe where I’m typing this. I wonder if someone here plays it when things aren’t busy. The guy who’s just sat down at a nearby ‘puter gets his friend to turn off the light. I ask if he wouldn’t mind turning it back on.

“You will see better with it off,” he says in a Teutonic accent.

“Actually, I find I see the keyboard better with the light on.”

“You don’t need it,” the friend assures me mystically. I expect him to tell me to use the Force. I wonder if I will have to beat them up with the digeridoo, but the friend turns the light back on. Good boy.

On with the show

I head for the Vltava river. I like any river that’s calm enough to float a boat on, and particularly rivers flowing through old cities and towns, for the sense that they give of carrying history known and unknown in their flow.

By the time I get there, clouds have covered the sky. The modest-sized river looks like liquid steel, all clean ripples in shimmering black and silver. It isn’t wide enough to dominate its banks as Bangkok’s mighty, muddy Chao Phraya does - rather, it’s dominated by the splendid buildings lining its channel; over the other side, immense Prague Castle hunkers up on its hill. Though it’s the biggest attraction in the city, I don’t feel like going there just yet. I feel like idling around the old town streets. After a frothy capuccino at the handsome Kavarna Slavia (there’s a great array of fancy coffees, and as usual when I’m confronted with a large choice I feel fatigued and choose something simple and familiar), I head for the Old Town Square.

Intermission 2: The Germans have gone. A guy is cleaning the monitors with something that smells like absinthe. The lights are off again, but this time in a noble cause - photographing a sculpture incoporating a mask (the cafe doubles as an at gallery) which, with a light shining through it, casts the shdow of a stranger on the wall.

The streets between the river and the square are an almost insanely picturesque cobbled labyrinth, full of tourist shops selling Bohemian crystal, marionettes and Kafka t-shirts. There are a few art galleries around the aquare. I choose one with two exhibitions, Alphonse Mucha and Jan Saudek. Saudek’s photographs of people at different stages in their lives affect me, particularly those of women, whose bodies display those ravages deemed unseemly, wrought by childbirth and plain unkind old time. Here are puckered bellies, caesarean scars, swollen or flaccid breasts. It has occurred to me before now that we glorify male wounds and deaths, but not those intrinsically female ones that are the wages of motherhood. Where are all the monuments to women who’ve died in childbirth? Why isn’t a ceasarean scar as honourable as a duelling scar was for an old-time Prussian junker?

My favourite picture is a set of two depicting a wedding. In one, everyone is clothed. In the other, everyone’s naked - and they’re all women. I like the idea of playing dress-ups, using the imagination to change your body and loosen up the self the way you did when you were a kid.

After wandering through the remains of Jewish Prague and stopping for a cup of tea at the Franz Kafka cafe - very atmospheric inside, with wonderful wood-panelled booths - but when did the practice of serving tea as a teabag - Lipton’s at that - with a glass of hot water start, and more urgently, when will it stop?

I finished the day by going to Mozart’s requiem at the wonderfully gorgeous Art Nouveau Municipal House concert hall. I’m no music critic, so I’ll just say that it sounded pretty good to me. Prague is a city of music - concerts and recitals every night. It’s raining, so I catch a taxi back to the Pension Manes and fall asleep with an orchestra playing in my head.

Bangkok to Istanbul to Prague: Turkish Airlines score points for warm flannel blankets and metal cutlery (the knife is distinctly daggerlike, reminiscent of something a Turk might have used to slash Christian throats in times past), but loses them for the cabin being so cold that the blankets don’t suffice, and the meat (lamb? goat? a bit of old water buffalo?) so tough that the dagger+1 against infidels doesn’t make much headway against it (at least a dagger+3 against airline food would have been required). I give up and eat the broccoli and the desert. The tea is strong with a nice flavour that I don’t recognise - maybe it’s Turkish tea.

My next-door neighbour is an unwashed Turkish crusty with halitosis and a guitar that he manages to drop on the heads of myself and another passenger when he takes it out of the overhead locker. Between the cold and the smells from beside me I don’t sleep much. I have a 9 hour layover at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport. The international section is smallish, but new and quite nice. I can’t sleep, so I buy some coffee-flavoured cigarillos and honey-flavoured cigars duty-free. I don’t normally smoke, but these are so cheap and look so nice that I can’t resist. They are indeed nice, and help to pass the time until takeoff, as do ‘A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination’ by Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi and ‘The Sound of Fishsteps’ by Buket Uzuner.

Istanbul around the airport is a charmless red and grey sprawl of apartment blocks punctuated by occsional skyscrapers. The Istanbul of Aya Sofia and the Grand Bazaar is obviously Elsewhere, on the other side of some Invisible Cities-like barrier.

We leave for Prague on a 737 - no frills, but it’s only a short trip, and it’s daytime, and I have a window seat, so I bask in the sun and doze. This time my neighbours are two sweet young Turkish girls. The younger one is next to me and falls asleep on my arm. She feels like a kitten.

I forgot to mention - on the first flight there was a movie called G.O.R.A., a loopy Turkish sci-fi comedy about a tour guide of the enough-of-the-monuments-hurry-up-and-get-these-people-to-my-carpet-shop variety who gets kidnapped by some campy aliens. I liked it. Here’s a page with a picture and a review:

http://www.cinematical.com/2005/10/08/fantastic-fest-zathura-and-gora/

On my way back from shopping for last minute stuff, I read this sign in front of our building’s carpark: “The repair structure stops can manage a line of motor vehicles one way for you inconvenience.” A friend just came back from Phuket, where he said he found the best ganja he’d had in ages. “It’s gotta be laced with something. These guys had it and they’re professional smokers…” So there you go, kids. Smoking pot is a career path.

I like Bangkok, but it’s time to move on. I want to check out Istanbul, but hey, maybe Phuket…

I’m shortly heading to Eastern Europe, starting in Prague where I will be doing a book signing on the 30th August, and attending Parcon on the 1st and 2nd of September.

After that, I’m going to Bucharest for the launch of the Romanian edition of The Etched City on September 8th at the Carturesti Book Shop.

I’ll also have a few days in Istanbul before returning home to Bangkok.

A Romanian translation of Maldoror Abroad will be appearing in an anthology edited by Horia Nicola Ursu from Tritonic. Other authors include Jeff VanderMeer, Nicola Griffith and Marian Coman.