Prague

Sitting in Mallorca right now, watching middle-aged men in their underwear paddle through the pool with their equally destroyed kids, and somehow I can’t stop thinking about Prague. Which tells me the trip was actually great—I wouldn’t be unable to let it go otherwise.

We went for the Electronic Beats Festival, which Telekom was sponsoring. The lineup alone was reason enough: Grimes, The Whitest Boy Alive, Woodkid, Mike Skinner. But the trip turned into something beyond just catching shows. We were a group—Nike, Frank, Jessie, Katja, Nina, Pierre, Kai, Nele, Johan, and me—and we just kept finding more to do.

Prague is the kind of city that’s genuinely beautiful in a way that catches you off guard. There’s the part that’s been touristed to death, funneled and packed, and then there’s these whole sections that feel almost obscene in how elegant they are. The kind of place where they actually shoot films, where everything looks expensive without even trying.

The shows were technically the reason we were there. Backstage, people kept handing us plastic cups full of beer. We talked to the artists. Took pictures. Met Janet, who runs the Kleiderkreisel operation there. At some point we ended up on a party boat on the Moldau at an insane hour, and then it was sunrise and we were back at the Hilton trying to sleep before checking out, only to find out that 24 hours of internet cost about 40 euros, which felt obscene.

What I realized, though, is that I actually hate traveling alone through unfamiliar cities. You end up feeling like an idiot, shuffling through streets trying to figure out where the real part of town is, where the good stuff happens. With a group, especially one where someone like Pierre is keeping things organized and functional, you don’t have to think about that. You just get to be there.

Anyway. Back to watching these middle-aged men paddle around with their destroyed kids.