We spent Thursday evening just walking around Prague a bit, getting ourselves oriented, and had a very cheap dinner at a pizzeria. Prague seems a lot smaller than Vienna - definitely a very walkable city. Our hostel was just a few minutes from the main square, where the astronomical clock, and therefore hoards of tourists, is located. More about that later...
Friday morning we went for a run. I was actually a little disappointed in the places to run in Prague. There isn’t really a path along the river, and the park that we ran up to, while it did have a great view of the city, was kind of deserted and I would not have wanted to run there by myself. We took a third running shot in front of a giant mural of the EU flag. We then spent the rest of the morning shopping, happy to have found some cute stores with things other than souvenirs. Plus, we figured that we should get our shopping out of the way before we met Maggie’s friend Josh that evening.
Friday afternoon we took another free tour. At first we were really impressed with our guide - he was from LA but had lived in Prague for the last 8 years and he told lots of jokes that made it more interesting. For instance, in front of the astronomical clock, he said that in its day "It was like freakin Sputnick." And when describing how one of the calendars depicted the farming techniques for each month he gave the example: “So June is berries, and July is bigger berries, and then August is picking berries.” As the tour went on though he started to come across as almost disrespectful towards some of the history and just kind of full of himself. However, we were impressed with his ability to speak at least 5 different languages - he would just start talking to random tourists that passed by. The free tours really are a great option though because in 3.5 hours we covered a good part of the city, and while you don't go in any of the churches or museums, you learn a lot about the history of the city. Our guide also called us out for talking during part of the tour, but hey, I think it’s pretty impressive that two and half weeks into the trip we are not only not sick of each other, but we still have things to talk about!
The rest of the tour took us past the concert hall where Mozart played his first concert in Prague; Wenceslas Square, which is actually a main shopping boulevard; a church where, legend has it, a statue of the virgin Mary grabbed the hand of a thief and held it until priests cut his hand off; the Jewish Quarter; the Charles Bridge, where vendors line up to sell hand-made items; and Lennon Wall, where anyone can add their own graffiti. On the wall was written the Czech word for love, which apparently means penis in Polish. Evidently there was a recent cell phone ad in the Czech Republic whose tagline was "small phone, big love." Since all of the other words are the same in Polish except love, you can imagine that they got a big kick out of saying, "look how small my phone is."
Later that evening we met Josh, who is interning for two months in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, and helped him find his hotel. The next morning the three of us walked through some of the areas that we had seen on the tour, giving Josh a shortened version of everything we remembered. We then crossed the river and went up to the castle, which is the oldest castle in Europe (I think) that is still in use. The President has his residences there. The best part of the castle was the torture chambers, where they had many creative torture instruments displayed, some of which even had skulls in them - a nice touch, I thought. There was also a place where you could pay a couple of bucks to shoot a crossbow. Maggie and Josh did it and both managed to hit the target paper several times. We also walked down Golden Lane, which is where all of the alchemists had their shops. After leaving the castle area we had lunch and finally tried goulash soup, which was actually very good. We then saw the sculptures of three faceless, soulless babies, as Maggie calls them. Apparently Prague has more sculptures in it than in other city in the world, and many of them are quite odd. There is a huge telephone tower in a part of Prague that we didn’t get to that has many of those babies hanging from its sides.
After having walked for hours we went to the main concert hall to see a performance by a chamber orchestra. It was not held in the main hall, but the room was still beautiful and the music was great. They played Bach, Mozart, and Brahms, but also a Prague waltz and a few other Slavonic dances.
Sunday morning we went to the Jewish quarter, which had been closed on Saturday, to go to the museum and the synagogues there. After waiting in line for a good 20 minutes we found out that they didn’t take Euros, and we didn’t want to withdraw Czech money again since it’s so expensive, so we had to each buy a postcard from the souvenir stand right next to the ticket booth, which did accept Euros, get our change in Czech currency, and then get back in line. It was worth it though, and probably a better choice than trying to sneak in with a tour group. We visited the memorial first, which has the names of all 80,000 Jews from Prague who died in the Holocaust printed on the walls. Upstairs is an exhibit of children’s artwork from the war. An artist, also a Jew, had given children in the ghetto materials to draw with, and told them to draw whatever they were feeling. The result was thousands of pieces of art, which she hid before being taking to a concentration camp herself. Now the drawings are shown in a rotation in the museum. The next stop was the old cemetery, where there are 11 layers of coffins. It was an amazing sight, as many of the tombstones covering the very uneven ground are hundreds of years old and are crammed in there, many broken or falling over. Finally, we visited a couple of synagogues with information about Jewish customs and history.
After the tour we had lunch and then said goodbye to Josh, who was going to do the free tour, and then headed to the train station. Several hours later we were in Berlin, our second to last stop of the trip!
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