Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [32]
Eventually the dogs leave the way they arrived— in a dervish of barking and jumping and lolling tongues.The club’s patrons warm their hands on plastic cups of cheap mulled wine, sipping slowly, savoring each swallow. From the vantage point of an uneven wooden bench, Stromovka is a world unto itself: there is no sign of Výstavišt or its unlikely eastern neighbor. There is only the wine, the recently restored quiet, and this place that exists—half-joke and half-dream— beside a gorgeous ruin of a building older than the American Revolutionary War.
ALONG THE EASTERN FLANK of Stromovka, beyond Výstavišt’s exhibition hall, the older version of park is separated from the more recent only by an iron fence. Here, birdsong has been replaced by pop music, trees by machines that twirl and spin.The lack of a buffer is disorienting. Standing there feels like violating an obscure but salient natural law.
Even on a drizzly, gray Sunday Czechs come to Lunapark, open no matter what the season, ten crowns during the week, twenty-five on weekends, children under two meters admitted free. Up by the entrance, a neglected glass case beside the ticket window once contained an intact white cardboard scale model of the amusement park, but now the model is largely collapsed, a miniature vision of destruction that recalls Šlechtovy’s flood photos. Rising from colored construction paper, the ramshackle cardboard structures are accented by oversized, rough-hewn chunks of spray-painted foam, presumably meant to symbolize absent greenery or massive, nonexistent boulders. An air of melancholy hangs about the ravaged model. Rather than a professional display, the materials and execution suggest a painstakingly assembled extra-credit project that has been trashed by bullies on the way to school. Upon purchasing their tickets visitors bypass the glass display case in favor of Výstavišt’s metal entrance gate where, ignoring the cobbled plaza’s neo-Baroque splendor, they head straight for Lunapark.
On a Sunday afternoon Lunapark is the realm of small children. Slump-shouldered parents lug strollers up and down stairs. They have no reason to doubt the ubiquity of stairs in amusement parks—there is only one amusement park in Prague and it comes with stairs. Young fathers are clad in fatigues or camouflage caps and exhibit the wariness of Vietnam vets. Young mothers wear either short skirts and knee-high boots or tight jeans and fuzzy coats, the latter outfit only marginally better suited to the weather. Their children run ahead, intent with mission, their hands grasping a ticket or a coin.
Though Lunapark has neighbored Stromovka for over a decade, its rides are the rides of American parking lots and county fairgrounds. Its bumper cars and go-carts and spinning things could be disassembled in a few hours without leaving a trace. Each ride blares music, techno competing with pop competing with Bollywood soundtracks to create an aural traffic accident. On top of this are the carny barkers, who are universally understood no matter what language they speak because carnies say the same thing everywhere: pay to play.
Supplementing Lunapark’s rides and games are a smattering of odd-lot attractions that give the impression of having been purchased half-price at some sort of amusement park remnant sale. There is a very small aquarium; a planetarium; a reproduction of