Kafka and Friends

"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug."

That's one of the great leads in the history of writing, from the pen of Prague native son Franz Kafka in The Metamorphosis. If legend is to be believed, he wrote from the old quarter of Prague in a building we came upon yesterday that now houses the Franz Kafka Cafe.

We went in for a lunch of soup, cheese and bread. Upon sitting at our table, a familiar tune by The Rembrantds was playing on the radio: "I'll be there for you, when the rain starts to pour ... I'll be there for you, like I've been there before ..."

Such is the anachronism of the 21st century: The theme from Friends playing in a cafe dedicated to the 19th-century-born Bohemian whose stories dramatized alienation in an increasingly impersonal world.