Olomoc, the City of Plazas

Where a clock chimes ceaselessly the next block over, but none look up to witness it.  I believe that I've passed through piazzas that have been empty for years, except for a bronze crow, or an empty fountain, or a bricked over archway.  I've seen fenced cemeteries without gates.  The canals flow directionlessly - south one day, north next week, sometimes so still you could put your hand in the water and feel no pull at all.  In Olomoc, a man who stands still becomes as a rock in the cobbled streets, and as drab.  You could look at him and think that he was a door, instead of a cobbler, or a blacksmith, or a priest.  And a man can get lost in Olomoc.  I met a widowed fishmonger whose husband spent his life carving a likeness of Fluurm the Six-Eyed Goat, and cast a wrought-iron cage to keep it in, and on his sixty-third birthday placed them both in the Plaza of Encouragement, where she told me a rainstorm drove him into an alley for shelter, from which he never emerged.

The people there cut themselves.  I met a man with no fingers, and a man with no name, and a man with no color, for the lords of Olomoc are cripples and wretches, and the citizenry emulate them.  It may be their only passion.