THE FRENCH TOAST CHANNEL

It was hard enough to get dinner after 9pm in Prague, so we spent most our nights watching TV in our hotel room. There was one channel that blew our minds; I still think about it and wonder. It was a cartoon that must’ve aired 24 hours because it was always on. The background was plain, and a brown square that we came to call “the French toast” wandered around mumbling and sometimes singing.

There were no other characters-- just an occasional low, rumbling voice that would talk to the French toast. Sometimes the voice would chant the same word over and over. The French toast seemed terrified whenever this voice spoke.

Maybe the French toast was having a bad trip. He walked around in a trance and sometimes got scared and huddled in the corner of the screen, shaking. Now and then a prop would enter the screen, like a conveyor belt full of evenly spaced teacups. The toast would wonder what these things were and then he might go back to pacing or stare through the screen in silence.

Some friends who were backpacking through Europe visited us in Budapest, and we asked them if they’d seen the French toast channel yet. They scoffed at the idea of a channel dedicated to a piece of toast that barely spoke and never really did anything.

We would say, “Where are you going? Prague? Watch for the French toast channel!” Our last stop before we flew back to the US was Frankfurt, and after watching Predator badly dubbed over with German, we flipped the channel and found ourselves face to face with the French toast. We called our friends and said, “We’ve found the toast channel! It’s here, in Frankfurt!” They laugh and say, “Yeah right, French toast channel... We’ll have to see it to believe it.”