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.