Morning in Prague.
As we waited for our walking tour to start, we strolled around and found this tower:
It was part of a town hall at one time and became notorious for defenestration, which is the act of throwing someone out of a window. The window is usually quite high up from the ground and the person is generally some sort of political rival. Prague invented this technique and seems to be quite proud of it.
That top window there? Yeah, that's the one.
The meeting point for our tour was the base of St. Wenceslas (the big horsie statue).
Our tour guide was a guy named Paul, a British ex-pat. He was an energetic guy, knowledgable and fun.
The first stop on the tour was this plaque: it commemorates two students who lit themselves on fire as a protest against the authoritarian ways of the Soviet-backed communist government.
This is a famous old theatre, if I recall correctly. It was the site of a debut of a play or a symphony or something, by some important director or composer.
(Man, this was like two months ago.)
Walking through the streets of the old city...
The skinniest hotel you'll ever see.
St. Nicholas Church, in the Old Town Square.
More Prague sights as we approach Charles Bridge.
This is the entrance to Charles Bridge. It's one of the oldest and most well-known bridges in the world. Construction on it began in 1357 and for a long time it was the only crossing point of the Vltava River in Prague.
Originally built as a gothic structure, the Catholics came along in the 17th Century and filled it with statues of saints and religious symbols.
It's probably the most popular tourist destination in Prague; it was jammed with people.
Just on the other side of the river is the 'Lennon Wall'. It became famous during the Cold War when, no matter how many time the authorities painted it back over in grey, graffiti artists would paint Beatles' lyrics and other hippie shit all over it.
We stopped at a pub for lunch. In my humble opinion, Prague was the best restaurant experience in Europe. The food was reasonably priced, delicious, large-portioned, and came with gigantic mugs of beer. We shared our table with a few British ladies on the tour with us.
After lunch we climbed up a big hill that offered nice views of the city.
We were climbing up towards Prague Castle, seen here from Charles Bridge.
This is one of the largest castle compexes in the world. It was founded in the 9th century and has been constantly added upon ever since. The most notable building is the towering St. Vitus Cathedral, the church you can see rising up from the hill.
It doesn't look much like a castle when you walk up to it. It looks far more like a diplomatic quarter, which makes sense because today it serves as the Head of State of the Czech Republic.
Walking around back you can see the castle structure more clearly.
St. Vitus Cathedral: one of the most impressive churches I've seen in Europe (and I've seen a few).
A church has existed on the site since the founding of the castle, but the present-day building was constructed in the 14th century.
The inside of the church has a creepy rose glow from the large stained-glass panes.
At the far edge of the castle we paused again for some nice views. The streets around here were very narrow and steep, looking as if they hadn't been touched for hundreds of years.
We descended back down the hill and went to the Museum of Communism. After that we got some late supper and turned in for the night.
The next morning we did some random wandering and then explored the Jewish Quarter and Museum.
Wandering around Prague can elicit some strange sights. Catalogued here is an odd memorial to nothing in particular, a Kafka statue of a headless guy, a statue of a man hanging off a building, and a statue of a man riding an upside-down horse.
The first thing that should be said about the Jewish Quarter is that almost none of it exists anymore; most of the district was demolished at the turn of the twentieth century to make way for modern housing.
What remains is still a sight to see.
We made our way through the Jewish Museum, which is spread over six synagogues and covers the history and culture of the Jewish people in Prague. The city had a huge Jewish population but it was a troubled relationship: after the first big pogrom in 1096 all Jews were forced to live inside a walled-off ghetto (the Jewish Quarter). In the 1389 pogrom, 1,500 Jews were slaughtered in one day.
Miraculously, the remaing parts of the Jewish Quarter survived the Nazi occupation; the Nazis allowed the Jews to squirrel away their historical documents. There were some horrific concentration camps in the area, though. If we had had more time we would have gone to see one.
But what burns a hole in your memory is the Old Jewish Cemetary.
The cemetary was in use from the 16th to the 18th century. Having limited space and being the only place where the Jews could bury their dead, the graves were eventually built on top of each other and the gravestones piled up.
In the picture below you can see the street level and the level of the cemetary. I've never seen anything like it.
In some parts of the cemetary the gravestones are reasonably spread apart. In other areas they're practically sandwiched together.
If you remember from my Berlin trip, the Holocaust Memorial was inspired by this cemetary. But to see the Old Jewish Cemetary itself is to understand that the Holocaust was only the final straw in the yearning for a Jewish homeland.
And that was it for our trip to Prague. We got on the train for our overnight trip back home, in which we drank a lot of beer out in the aisles with Dutch and Belgian students, and nothing unfortunate happened afterwards.
