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Saturday, March 8, 2008

PragueScape



pince-nez /pins-ney or pans-ney/ n. a pair of eyeglasses with a nose clip instead of earpieces.

I saw this dapper gentlemen sitting on the Prague metro as I was riding home from work. Dressed in an elegant black suit and a bowler hat, and balancing a pair of gold pince-nez on his nose, he was a vision from 1890, not 2008.

The pince-nez had a delicate gold chain hanging from its right lens.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone wearing a pair of pince-nez before.

To make the time-warp even more striking, he was busily tapping away at some sort of PDA or Blackberry.

I can only presume there was a horse and carriage outside his metro stop, waiting to whisk him home.

Forgive the blurry image. I was a little shy about taking the gentleman's picture, so I turned off the flash.

PragueScape is a photo series documenting the quirky, the delightful, the odd, and the unexplainable side of life in the Czech capital.

3 comments:

  1. I've seen this bloke many times around Dejvická. He does look like from another age. The funniest thing about him, though, isn't only his pince-nez, but that his is really short, has very small feet and wears shoes with high heels.... Still, when he walks, he looks like the most serious person in the world...

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  2. There's a whole thread on expats.cz in which they're trying to tell me this guy is an Hassidic Jew. I've tried to convince them otherwise, but to no avail, it seems.

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  3. I don't know what his religion is (isn't there a passage in Deuteronomy forbidding males from wearing high heel shoes?), but he does look like some kind of Toulouse Lautrec impresonator to me...

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