Friday, October 20, 2006

Heights, Anyone?

The other day as I stood on the tram, my eyes were drawn to the newspaper belonging to the man seated nearest me. Apparently suicide season is upon Prague again, so the paper felt obliged to provide us with a large photo of a man sitting atop the fencing on the Nusle bridge while firemen stood nearby, presumably trying to get him to come down on their side. Some statistics about the month's suicides were printed to the right, but they were a little too small for me to read.
As it happens, when I was in Zlín, Alex and Jesse and I went to the top of the "skyscraper" there, which has a very fine view of the city, and pondered, among other things, the favorite Czech method of committing suicide. While we knew that jumping off the Nusle bridge is a favorite, the lack of protections elsewhere made us somewhat skeptical that leaping from heights is a national favorite.
Jesse offered the suggestion that Czechs more typically commit suicide by drinking themselves to death.
Personally, I don't regard drinking oneself to death over a lifetime as real suicide, even if it comes from the same basic psychological source as quicker deaths, but someone else (I have now forgotten who) later also posited this as the favorite Czech method.
When we were back at Alex's, we discovered that a dubbed version of the film High Anxiety was on tv. I suppose that was rather suitable.
Today's photos are of and/or taken from the so-called 21 building in Zlín, which was the Bat'a company's headquarters. I am not terribly fond of skyscrapers, but as skyscrapers go, this one is not bad, at least from inside and on the terrace.



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