Greetings and welcome to another slice from The Liver of Europe. Other than the usual supply of pea-brained patriots piddling on Texas’ carpets, there's not really much of note for me to yowp about in the Hiddens. In the words of the fabulous Molly Ivins: "I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults." So just play nice, kids, m'kay? Seriously, the incessant whining about Texas, as a whole monolithic entity is infantile drivel, just as ignorant and prejudiced as any pithed Proud Boy could spew.
I was a bit sorry to see that further attempts by the Towing Troll to come up with new usernames have not improved. Folks are panicking about A.I., but one look at the quality of the bots still clunking around the site will have you waxing nostalgic over how amazing the robots of The Phantom Empire were.
Anyway, to get this open thread rolling this week we finally got around to taking a walk across a footbridge that opened in Prague last Summer. I took a few photos.
The Štvanice Bridge crosses the Vltava River from the neighborhoods of Holešovice to Karlín, with a couple of nice, broad ramps leading down to the island of Štvanice. It’s also known as “The White Bridge”, but more commonly, “Hol-Ka”— and you can pretty easily decipher how it got that name from the names of the neighborhoods it connects. Holka also happens to be a Czech word meaning, “girl."
The site of the old Prague slaughterhouses, used for the last several decades as a commercial space filled with vendor's stalls, stores, restaurants, theatrical and sports venues, is at one end of the bridge.
As the railing ends were cow heads on the Market side, they were hares (welcome to March!) on the ramp railings to from the island and horse heads from the Karlín side. No photos from me unfortunately.
I worked for 10 years in Karlín and it was interesting to see the upscale neighborhood that grew up along the river bank. Mostly fairly ugly office buildings, but the new footbridge was teeming with life. I think it's already proving to be a real asset to both neighborhoods.
Thanks for stopping by.
This is an open thread.