It's almost been two months since Week 2 of our stay in Prague, so my forthcoming chronicles will be less detailed and less chronologically accurate than the previous ones. By this point, I was struggling to keep busy and wanted nothing more than to crawl under a rock and sleep until I woke up magically at my home in Utah with the kids all in school. But since that was not to be, I spent my energy keeping us moving, not making a record of our movements.
(By way of disclosure, I did write the rest of the posts about our time in Europe while I was on the flight home, but they didn't save. Bleh. Another reason to hate technology.)
Week 2 began with Sunday church, followed by the arrival of Orlean, Ed's Irish-Scottish post-doc assistant who will be scanning tablets for him in Turkey over the next six months. She came to Prague so Ed could train her on what he needs done and so they could calibrate their equipment. Luckily for Ed, she does pXRF scanning for her own research, plus she's in-between post-doc appointments, AND she has extensive contacts in Ankara, so she's a natural fit. We had a nice time with her and she ate dinner with our family a few times over the week she was in Prague. She went for a walk with us that first day up into the Letenské sady, a park on the north end of the city, just across the river from our apartment. It was a beautiful fall day, one of the last we would have, and I was dying to get out and enjoy it. This park is famous for being a site of students protests during the Velvet Revolution, and I was moved to think of this massive green space teeming with protestors whose solidarity and persistence would help to unseat Communism. This park is also famous as the site of a giant statue of Stalin erected in 1955 and destroyed in 1962. Now its monument is an ugly and massive metronome and the plaza is used as a hangout and skate park for the young and indolent.
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Most green spaces in Europe now also have a dedicated children's playground,
and Letenské sady included some stylized animal statues for the kids to play on. Abby liked this one. |
The hot water in our bathroom had gone out that morning, so our Sunday afternoon ended with a visit from the repairman and the rental agency offering us a new apartment. So we packed up and in three hours we had cooked and eaten dinner and packed our things. Within another hour we were moved into the new apartment a couple miles away on the south end of Wenceslas Square. Ed and I decided we are getting pretty efficient at moving.
Parking in Prague on weekdays is difficult to find and very expensive, so we found a Park and Ride outside the city next to a train station where we could leave our van during the week. On Fridays I would pick up the car for us to use over the weekend, and then return it to the parking lot on Monday. This meant that Fridays and Mondays were the best times to go on field trips outside of the the capital city. This Monday I took the kids to the town of Kutna Hora, which is designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It's a quaint little town with four specific churches also on the UNESCO list. We hit each one for only a few minutes, and spent the bulk of our time playing in giant piles of leaves outside the Sedlec Church of Our Lady and Ossuary and St. Barbara's Church.
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| Leaf Wars |
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| Joe's best smile. |
Our first stop in Kutna Hora was the Ossuary at the Church of Our Lady. Like the catacombs of Paris, it is a decorative collection made from the bones of thousands of people. The legend says that the Church's priest took a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and brought back a handful of Holy Land dirt. He sprinkled the dirt over the graveyard, thus everyone wanted to be buried there. It also didn't help that this was the time of the plague (1330s) and thousands of people were dying each year. Over time they combined the bones into decorative piles. The bone chandeliers and wall decorations, however, weren't made until the 1700s.
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| Gruesome. |
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| Don't forget the royal coat of arms! |
Our next stop was St. James church. It was rebuilt in the early 2000s, and was almost completely empty, so I'm not sure why I paid money to go in there. Interestingly, it shared its northern wall with a Tobacco Museum and its eastern wall with a tobacco factory.
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| Very gothic, but only ten years old, so less wondrous than others. |
My favorite stop of the day was St. Barbara's church. It was a beautiful fall day, and unlike most other old cathedrals/churches, this was surrounded by lush trees and grass instead of cement or other buildings. This meant I could walk all the way around it and study the flying buttresses and towers and other ornamental elements while the kids played "Zombie" in the leaves.
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| Architecturally speaking, I think this may be my all-time favorite church. |
The inside of St. Barbara's was a rather eclectic collection of artistic periods and styles. There was a late medieval fresco, some modern stained glass, Gothic wood choir seats, and a hideous Baroque chapel:
While I enjoyed the art, the kids enjoyed the leaves.
Guided Tour of the Old Jewish Quarter: Tuesday I treated myself to a sightseeing trip with only Mary and splurged on a personally guided tour of Prague's old Jewish Quarter. It is now THE trendy and expensive neighborhood to live and work, but both the city and the Jewish Community have done much to preserve the Jewish history and character of the area. Taking pictures was difficult because all the old buildings we visited are squashed between (and it feels like beneath) the taller and more modern buildings surrounding them. The tour guide spoke excellent English and was very interesting. She worked hard to talk about things Mary was interested in, but after a couple hours Mary was over-saturated and zoned out. I enjoyed visiting the sights while getting the history, rather than just visiting and wondering, or trying to get the background from written plaques.
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| The Maisel synagogue, one of the oldest in Prague, funded and built in 1590 by the very wealthy Mordechai Maisel. |
My favorite stop on the tour was the Old New Synagogue, which has been in continuous use (except for under Hitler) since 1270. It's also the site of the famous Golem, the mud-man build by Rabbi Loew to help protect the Jews of Prague from pogroms and persecution. Unfortunately, one day the Rabbi forgot to un-animate him before the Sabbath and had to destroy him. He then carried the golem's body up the ladder on the back of the synagogue and left him in the attic, where it still resides to this day . . .
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| The lower roof covers the later addition of the women's room, where women may worship separate from the men. |
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| The stairs to the small attic door. |
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| A tree of life relief above the original entrance to the synagogue. |
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| Interior of the Old New Synagogue |
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| This is the old city hall with a newer tower on top. You see two different clocks--the Jewish one that runs counter-clockwise, and the modern one that runs in the usual way. |
The Pinkas Synagogue has been converted into a memorial for the Jews who died at Terezin, the ghetto and prison camp in the northern part of the country during World War II. The walls were covered with the names of nearly a hundred thousand people, their birth and death dates, and their towns of origin.
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| One panel of the twelve foot walls. |
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| A close-up of the names. Hand-painting them must have been a sobering labor of love and remembrance. |
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| The top floor of the Pinkas Synagogue exhibited art work from children who were imprisoned at Terezin. |
The Old Jewish Cemetery was in use from the early 1400s to 1787, and because of a lack of space and the taboo against demolishing old graves, the keepers of the cemetery would put new layers of soil over existing graves, then putting a new layer of graves on top. Thus, you have thousands of tombstones packed closely to one another but placed there centuries apart.
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| The color of the tombstones also indicate the century they were installed--lighter stone is earlier. |
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| It was such a beautiful, sunny day. |
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| This was a collection of some of the oldest tombstones for young children that had been buried in the cemetery, and just like the Western Wall in Jerusalem, they have become a popular place for people to put small pieces of paper with their prayers written on them. |
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| Mary was a trooper--cold and a little bored, but not a word of complaint. |
Our final stop was to the Spanish Synagogue, built in the later 19th century in the Moorish style as a showpiece for Jewish prosperity. It was nauseatingly ornate, and our guide said it is now used not only for worship, but also as a museum and concert space. You can also rent it for weddings.
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| The interior really was stunning but over-the-top. |
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| This photo was taken looking straight up into the dome. The Jewish star in the center is actually the chandelier. |
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| And what synagogue has a full-size pipe organ? Wow. |
The Karel Zeman Film Museum: One sunny mid-morning we headed out to visit a museum celebrating the Czech director and animator Karel Zeman. It was a fantastic little museum, tucked away in a corner of the Mala Strana down by the river, with lots of hands-on exhibits and fun short films. The kids were mostly not excited to go, but left feeling glad they went. As an added bonus, we discovered in the gift shop on the way out that one of our favorite children's authors/illustrators, Ludmila Zeman, is his daughter. She retold and illustrated the epic of Gilgamesh in three volumes, which we have read and reread. Small world.
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| Waiting for the subway. |
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| Isaac was always on the lookout for cool motorcycles, and he loved this one. |
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| The museum was just to the left under the bridge--such lovely architecture! |
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| Zeman was a master of special effects in his live-action films of the 1950s and 60s. Here is a reproduction of his flying machine from his adaptation of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. The kids could make the wings flap, turn the wheel, and there was even a fan blowing on them so they could feel the wind as they flew around the room. |
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| Most of Zeman's special effects were playing with perspective and constructed backgrounds in live-action films. There were lots of opportunities for the kids to make their own movies using reconstructed sets. |
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| This exhibit allowed the kids to create a picture of themselves hanging from the bottom of a hot air ballon, framed in a postcard that says "Stolen Airship Spotted in Prague!" |
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| A life-size memory game using illustrations from Zeman's movies. |
The kids were begging to go bowling (actually, Isaac was begging to go bowling), and I consented to take them, but of course I had to make them go first to a museum. The iconic Narodni Muzeum was cold, but the new building was having a an exhibit called Noah's Ark, which was similar to the Bean Museum. It was an excellent exhibit, focused on biodiversity and species endangerment.
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| My own wild animals. |
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| An African wild dog that went extinct around 1900--It felt strange to see a stuffed specimen of a now-extinct species. |
One of the best things about Prague is that there are grocery stores in the underground tube stations--what a stellar idea! It was so easy to pick up food/dinner/etc. on our way to and from sightseeing. After the Museum we went down into the station, got lunch at the Albert grocery store, then got on the train to the one and only bowling alley in Prague. (Apparently it hasn't really caught on there yet.)
Bowling was tons of fun. The kids could be loud and crazy and throw very heavy objects. It was so fun we went back the next day with dad and played for a couple more hours.
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| Joe would throw the ball almost straight up and it would come down with a tremendously loud BANG, after which it would roll at .5 mph down to the pins. Sometimes it stopped halfway, and I would have to tiptoe down the lane dividers and give it a push. |
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| The kids loved the shoes. I think the shoes may even have been their favorite part. |
One of the things I wish we had done more of throughout our entire trip was go to concerts and performances. I had had big plans to take Abby to see a ballet, Mary to a piano concert, and so on, but I was usually sick of the kids by four p.m. and didn't want to take them anywhere else. While in Prague, Ed and I attended to performances, one of which we really enjoyed and one of which we enjoyed less. The first was a symphonic performance at the Municipal House featuring a female Russian pianist playing Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. The Smetana concert hall was stunning, although the acoustics weren't great. But I got a seat where I had a perfect view of the pianist's hands, and I can truly say I can't remember ever enjoying a concert so much. She was marvelous, and that concerto is marvelous. It was a great night.
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| The outside of the Municipal House, with the gate to the Old City on the left. Our first apartment was just four blocks straight north from here. |
Our second performance was at the Estates Theatre, where Mozart himself conducted the premiere of his opera Don Giovanni 1787. Unfortunately, Don Giovanni wasn't playing, so we decided instead to see The Marriage of Figaro. It was exciting to be in this historic theatre--very small by today's standards and with very low ceilings, but we were somewhat surprised at the amateurish production. I was reminded again, however, that just because something is a couple hundred years old and created by a legendary artist, it is not necessarily appropriate to watch. This staging was plenty suggestive. Live and learn. At least I can say I saw a performance there.
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| The interior of the theater--we had box seats (fancy, fancy!). |
Some Miscellaneous Photos and Memories:
One evening Ed and I were walking by the Municipal House and saw a street performer playing water glasses. He was absolutely magnificent!
Right in the heart of the city and enclosed by high-rises, accessible only through tunnels, was an old monastery/convent that had been turned into a public garden and park. The kids had fun there for a couple hours one afternoon.
Another fun activity was the model train restaurant, Vytopna. There are model trains that run from the kitchen to the tables, bringing drinks and taking away dishes. We ate here twice for lunch because the price was decent, there was real food for adults and chicken nuggets for the kids, and because it made the kids so happy to get their drinks from a working train!
One afternoon I walked out of the subway and ran into these street performers. Would have thought you'd see Native American style dancers in Prague?
