Cafes and Cubism

  Boy, I am just blogging my tuchus off today.  Apologies for the deluge.  It's my first unscheduled day in quite a while, and so I'm trying to get caught up!

  After the abbey, we headed over to Cafe Imperial for a refresher.  I went there in the summer; it's got a nifty tile Art Deco interior, and pretty good food and drinks:

  I think I had a hot chocolate, and I forget what Keewi got.  Hot chocolate, by the way, is something Europe does right.  It has real chocolate melted into it, and it's creamy and rich and smooth and perfect.  Hot chocolate in the U.S. is so often disappointing; even if you buy the gourmet mixes it is usually weird and gross.  I guess I have to learn how to make it from chocolate the way they do over here.  You might also note a shot glass in my handl that is Becherovka, a very yummy bitter liqueur from the Czech Republic.  This was my first taste of it, and I quite like it; Keewi brought a bottle back in her luggage, so if you're nice (and prompt!) you might get a taste!

  Then we walked to the House of the Black Madonna, a cubist building that is now the home of the Museum of Czech Cubism:

  And now, you get another museum tour, courtesy of the Ben Austria blog.  The only bad thing about these tours (really, it's the only bad thing, stop frowning) is that I can't tell you who the artists are that made the works in question.  For that, you will have to go to Prague.  With no further ado:

  I never realized how much I like Cubism, but I enjoyed the heck out of this museum.  The sculpture head, by the way, is Don Quixote, which is just right; it is indeed Don Quixote.  Even their gift shop had nifty things I wanted to buy:

  Horrendously expensive nifty things.

  And that's it for that day.  I seem to have no photographic record of what we did for the rest of the day, so I can't tell you about it.  It's as if it never happened.