Today is my third and last evening in Prague. This city is really gorgeous and really interesting. I'm not at all surprised that everyone who visits loves it and recommends it to friends! Two days (plus an evening) was the perfect amount of time to spend here; I really feel like I got to see a lot of the city - and taste enough beer and hot wine!
First, I've got to say that eating Czech food was like dying and going to heaven after six weeks of baguettes. I think I was way sicker of French food than I realized I was. Typical Czech food is meat, gravy, bread, and "dumplings," though they're probably not dumplings as you'd picture them. I don't have any pictures to better describe them since I am not the type of person to take pictures of my food, but they're more like loaves of bread/meat/potato that have been sliced into pieces. And paired along with a big glass of beer...mmmm. Mark told me I sounded like I hadn't tasted meat in six weeks when I described it to him. And while I have, I guess French food just isn't as hearty and filling.
Though considering how cold it is here, I guess Czech food has to be hearty!
Katie and I spent the first morning/early afternoon here on one of those free walking tours that exist in a lot of cities in Europe. The tour is free except for the tip you give the guide at the end, and you usually want to tip him or her because the guide is usually really good! It was no different here. Our guide took us to all the big sites in Prague and gave us a brief history of the city over the 2.5 hour tour. To bullet some facts (and pictures!):
This is the bell tower in the Old Town Square. It contains the oldest working astronomical clock in the world - from the 1400s or something, before people knew the Earth revolved around the sun. There's a show (figurines move and make noise) every hour on the hour that people have been stopping to watch for hundreds of years.
Jan Hus. He decided to be a Protestant before Martin Luther made it cool. And was subsequently burned at the stake. Jan means John, Hus means Goose. Apparently the phrase "your goose is cooked" came from Mr. John Goose being...cooked.
This is one of the main concert halls in Prague. There are statues of all the great composers on top of the building. When Hitler went rampaging across Europe, he decided that Prague was going to be the cultural capital of his global Third Reich. That meant keeping this building intact. (He also wanted to keep much of the Jewish ghetto in Prague intact as a monument to "an extinct race." Pretty sick - but joke's on him, cause now some of the oldest synagogues/cemeteries in Europe are in Prague.) Anyway, Felix Mendelssohn was one of the statues on top of the building and even though Mendelssohn was a Christian, his grandfather was a Jewish scholar. So Hitler wanted him taken off the building. The crew he sent to do this was ignorant (and racist) and ended up taking down the statue with the biggest nose - who, lo and behold, was Wagner, a big anti-Semite and Hitler's favorite composer. So Hitler sent another crew around to take down the actual statue, but they were a renegade group and they hid Mendelssohn and then stuck him back up after the war ended.
This is the oldest functioning synagogue in Europe, apparently younger than only synagogues in Israel. It's called the Old-New Synagogue (because it was the New Synagogue until a newer synagogue got built and then it became the Old-New Synagogue. Kind of like Yorktown and the Old-New Building).
Big old gate. Despite its appearance to the contrary, its called the "Powder Gate." But that's cause it used to be stuffed chock full of gun powder.
The only surviving concert hall that Mozart played in! Most of the indoor scenes of Amadeus were filmed inside.
So I definitely learned a lot on this tour and it was a lot fun. The weather was spectacular so after the tour we just walked around some more and checked out Charles Bridge (the famous bridge in Prague) that was so stuffed full of people that it was almost impossible to walk across and the other side of the river with the castle (though we didn't actually go into the castle.)
I couldn't get a good picture of the bridge while I was on it cause there were too many people and if you tried to stop, someone ran into you.
Today the weather wasn't as nice, though the rain held off and we were able to wander around and see some of the Jewish museums in the Jewish quarter and walk up to a viewpoint to see the city. The Jewish museums were okay; some of the exhibits were not so great, but there was also a very moving exhibit of artwork from children who were in concentration camps, almost all of whom did not survive. We also go to see the Old Jewish Cemetery (not a particularly inventive name) that was in use for about four hundred years and as a result is built up about ten feet off the ground with many layers of people in it.
Sorry if it's strange to take a picture of a cemetery. But it was interesting and creepy and a little sad.
All in all, Prague was really cool. It wasn't as cheap as people make it out to be, but I think that's because it's such a fast growing economy - maybe it was cheap recently, but they're certainly up and coming! I could write a lot more about the city, but wouldn't know where to stop! Tomorrow we head to Vienna by bus and have about 2.5 days there as well, then it's back to Perigueux. I've been in Europe six weeks now - and once I get back it will only be six weeks of teaching before the Christmas break. And all my visitors! Woohoo!
Bye, Prague! (Or Praha, as the Czechs call it. Don't know why we decided to translate that one...)
No comments:
Post a Comment