On my own

When I started to live on my own (to quote my mom who I like to use as a measure of ultimate stupidity and rudeness from time to time: "It's my appartment. I bought it for you, after all you are in all the papers and things, but it's my appartment."), I got a guestbook. One of the reasons was that after all, I was going to grow old and senile so when I'd be eighty something, I'd be happily browsing it, remembering the days of my youth. Or, rather, saying, Who the hell was this Francesco/Pekka/Marlene. I already managed to get a few comments and removed a few. Not that I was a supporter of censure but there's a certain sort of drunk blabber I don't plan to keep for posterity. Neither for myself.
On Friday my Swedish friend came. She and her son were planning to stay for three days only so I didn't plan any appointments.. well, the things just appear themselves, like urgent need to write a paper on idunnowhat, but I just put them aside and now I'm even more behind. However, they came and we spent three days just walking around and having fun. I hardly ever just wander around in the main interesting places, they're too packed to be comfortable so I'm - as every Prague inhabitant - used to go via all sorts of back alleys, passages and thru the buildings. So I had quite a fun to see the tourist routes again. I confess that probably I'd have more fun if someone finally manged to tie a big piece of concrete to every piece of those who came here because of cheap beer and cheap prostitutes, the streets would be less crowded and sort of calmer. The Italian school trips could find some other destination, too, thank you.
Yrja wanted to get a copy of Kafka's Metamorphosis in Swedish so that she could make her sons read it. I told her that it was quite naive to expect such thing here... maybe if they had it as a stuffing to bookshelves in Ikea (guess where my Swedish books come from) but after all, we can go and see what the big bookstores offer. So we did, they had the desired book in Italian (should you expect that Prague is cosmopolitan, let be warned that there's a shelf or two of books in Italian and no-one seems to admit that there is some sort of culture in Sweden, books included. My private guess is that half of the people don't have much idea where it is), I just wanted to peek into the textbook department (when the naivity was in the air, I decided to try my luck and check whether a nice foolproof book of Swedish grammar hadn't materialized in the shelves. it had not) where Yrja discovered a Czech-Swedish dictionary and decided to buy it - out of sheer curiosity, she doesn't speak Czech and I finally got a map of Scandinavia. I stuck it on the inside of the toilet door so that I could meditate on something more nutritious than old paint but my flatmate later moved it up to the height of a standing person. I have to explain her the point of the thing sometimes.