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.
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...
ReplyDeleteThere'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.
ReplyDeleteI 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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