Prague, pt. 2

 The next day, we have breakfast at the Penzion Alpin, which puts out a kind of random selection to choose from, including a big vat of hot dogs (on our last day there, they had chicken soup).

            This day was our Prague day with George, which proceeded without incident really (besides me almost falling on an old lady on the tram and seeing a girl with short-short short-shorts in the Jewish quarter.

            Here is a quick overview of what we did and saw (and I have to say that George is an excellent tour guide).

            On our way to meet our guide, we pass by the clocktower and Prague’s famous T.V. tower with its pods and babies crawling up it. We meet George in St. Wenceslaus Square by the National Museum (there is a guy protesting there with shirts hung up everyplace. “It’s national do your laundry day,” said George).

            George starts his tour at Prague Castle, started by the Holy Roman Empire (whose parts you can still see), and expanded and modified for centuries, so the entire complex is quite large and expansive. Some highlights are the theater, the gardens with its peacocks, the ‘drip wall’ (which was a Gothic wall created by dripping cement meant to hide monstrous faces. It was reconstructed after WWII), Sternberk Palace, the Gothic cathedral of St. Vitus (under construction for centuries), a Communist memorial, St. George’s, and so on.

            Leaving there, we pass the Kafka museum with its odd kinetic statues, and the replicas of the T.V. antenna babies with bar codes stamped deep into their faces and shiny behinds because it’s really popular with tourists to rub them for some reason. We pass the Love Lock Bridge, with its hundreds of padlocks clipped on the rails, many of which are inscribed with names of couples. Legend goes that you and your significant other clip the lock on with your left hand and throw the key into the river with your right to represent your everlasting love (the irony is that the city routinely clips them off to make more room). We would see other lock bridges in other cities, but Prague’s was by far the most popular. We proceed to the Lennon Wall, which started as a tribute to John Lennon after his death (people left items and graffitied the wall), and continued as a protest after the Soviets kept trying to cover it up and stop it (Lenin vs. Lennon).

            We saw St. Nicholas Cathedral in Lesser Town, before crossing the Charles Brides with its many statues. Some of the more famous of these include the one with the little boy you rub to make a wish come true (and he’s now burnished from years of rubbing), the crucifix whose Hebrew letters were ripped off by neo-Nazis and thrown in the river (recovered by scuba divers and restored), and the spot where the queen’s confessor was thrown into the river because he wouldn’t reveal the queen’s lover to the king (supposedly, they recovered his body and his tongue was perfectly preserved). The bridge empties out to a statue of Charles himself, the Holy Roman Emperor responsible for many reforms in Prague.

            We head into Old Town Square to see the Church of Tyne with its twin towers, one of which is slightly taller than the other, said to be the brother. Also there is one of the few remaining Hussite churches, and the Rococo Kinsky Palace. Additionally, in the center of the square stands a statue of a Protestant martyr, Jan Hus and 14 crosses inlaid in stone in the ground where 14 other martyrs died.

            Here also is the famous Astronomical Clock. Created by a mechanical genius of his time, it was so amazing that the city worried that he would create another for a rival city, so they had him blinded. Learning that he had been blinded by government agents and not random bandits, he killed himself by throwing himself on the clock’s works, thereby ruining it. It was hundreds of years before they could figure out how to fix it. We happened to be there to hear it chime on the hour, where a tiny skeleton rings his death knell, apostles revolve, and a golden cock crows (as we were waiting, we see a kid dressed like a Dickens character weaving in the crowd. Neil: Who is this, the Artful Dodger?).

            On the way to the Jewish Quarter, we stop for lunch (delicious Wiener Schnitzel), pass Gunpowder Tower (guess what they used to keep there), and stop in St. Agnes Convent, a nunnery from the 1200s.

            Prague’s Jewish Quarter is one of the oldest in the world, and it has become a place of pilgrimage for many of the world’s Jews. As we enter it, George points to a shop and says, “You know you’re in the Jewish Quarter when there’s a goat on the butcher’s sign and not a pig.” We see the odd Kafka statue (who lived in the Jewish quarter), and see the girl in the shorty shorts, before going into some synagogues: the beautiful and richly decorated Spanish Synagogue (with its menorah that Michelle Obama borrowed after she toured there), the Maisel Synagogue, the Klausen Synagogue, and the Pinkas, whose walls are filled with the thousands of names of Czech Jews who died in the holocaust written in tiny writing. Another holocaust reminder are the small brass plaques on the sidewalks throughout the Jewish Quarter in front of many of the former residences which tell who used to live there and how they were killed. We also see the Old-New Synagogue, Europe’s oldest active synagogue, which still has a bullet hole in its side from an uprising, and where the golem of Prague supposedly resides (legend has it that a Gestapo officer tried to go into the attic and perished at the hands of the golem. Out of superstition, the Germans then left the synagogue alone, which is why it still stands).  Additionally, we saw the Old Jewish Cemetery, with its layers of graves dating back to the 1400s, and tombstones leaning haphazardly. We see that people still leave stones and coins on the graves that they’re able to reach, many of which are Israeli.

            We leave the Quarter to see the Prague Philharmonic, the National Theater, and the opera house, where Mozart famously premiered Don Giovanni, and there is a creepy statue there to commemorate this. George takes us down National Road, where the students began their protests that led to the Velvet Revolution, and shows us its memorial: a sculpture of a bunch of hands making peace signs (a satirical group once hung a plaque making a ‘sieg heil’ sign next to it to highlight Prague’s racism problems).

            We stopped at a very nice ice cream parlor (where I had, I think, the best chocolate ice cream I’ve ever eaten), and saw our last 2 landmarks: the brightly painted Jubilee Synagogue and the famous Upside Down Horse statue (a parody of  the St. Wenceslaus statue, meant to symbolize the topsy-turvy days of the revolution).

            To end the day, we try to go to the Big Lebowski, but it’s apparently a newspaper stand during the day, run by completely different people. So we go have some pho at a little Vietnamese place, which we eat standing up with dogs winding between our legs, before returning to the Big Lebowski. It turns out to be very much a hippy-dippy establishment, with ripped carpet, pillows on the floor, and large stuffed animals. When George tried to pay later, he was informed by our lanky faerie/aerie waitress that they don’t believe in prices; pay what you think it’s worth.

            We finished the night by going to a local Biergarten, eating delicious brats (or, as Kyle said “dessert”), watching some adventure program on the soccer screen, and eventually meeting George’s linguist friends.