The sidewalks of Prague

From the Meteor Plaza Hotel in Prague

It's all about walking. You need to feel a foreign country with your feet, and you can't do that without a large measure of walking. But thankfully, the city of Prague lends itself well to our footfalls. While we both marvelled at the majesty and the grandeur of the old town square, the stunning Charles bridge, the castle and the great cathedral within, I also found myself hypnotised by the sidewalks.

All the sidewalks are paved mosaic style with squares or parallelograms of coloured stone - white, gray, black, pink. Granite? I promise myself I will look it up once I get the chance. And such a variety of patterns. The white diamonds wrapped in black squares. The large black and white checkerboards. The pink rectangles with the grey borders. The pink crosses lined with white. The white crosses enclosed in black squares. Such simplicity in what seems to be a complex way of paving what will simply be trodden upon. Why? What for? It certainly can't have been easy to lay all those square stones evenly enough, and yet not so evenly - with imperfect perfection.

T says, "Isn't there just one basic pattern?" I insist I've counted more than seven.

And as we walked and walked through the old town and the new, sauntering through Kafka's beautiful city, we felt it pulsing upon the very soles of our feet, with every step we took.