Prague, Prague, Prague

Wow. Prague. One of the most amazing cities I've ever been in and at the same time one of the saddest as well. There is so much history in one city which has existed and still has memorials from the 9th century, but also is still recovering from the Cold War and Russian occupation.
We got to Prague Friday evening and the first item on the agenda was to pick up our tour guide, Dana. Dana is a native of Prague and has been leading Hope College tours for decades and absolutely loves Hope. She is seriously one of the sweetest and most adorable ladies I have ever met and she was so full of joy to see us and show us around the city that she knows so well. She gave us a little mini tour and gave us some facts about Prague while still driving on the bus into the city. She pointed out this building called the dancing house, that was designed to We had dinner at a restaurant inside a monastery that has existed since the twelfth century. Seriously. There's also a brewery there, and apparently the monks contribute to making the beer. It was a pretty funny thing to think about. After dinner we walked from the monastery to the Prague castle a little farther up on the hill. Yes, there actually is a castle! The main part of the castle that is open to the public is St. Vitus Cathedral which is an amazing church that really shows how the castle looked when it was first built. The rest of the castle looks much more modern than I expected, but that's because it has been redone several times throughout the centuries. After the tour of the castle we went to our hotel, which is in a art of Prague that is not quite so beautiful. That part of town looks a little bit like communism never left, with graffitied walls and 70s style buildings. One thing that I noticed while being there is that government doesn't work quickly to rebuild or clean up the city. There was a huge flood in 2003 that devastated Prague, and there is still lots of work being done to try to rebuild from that, and of course there are still lots of effects left over from the communist days.
The next day we got up bright and early for breakfast and then headed out on a tour at 9 am. We were planning on doing a long walking tour, but there was a lot of rain, so we took a bit longer with the bus tour before the walking tour than originally planned in order to try to wait out the rain. When we finally started walking Dana showed us some of the most famous squares in Prague, like Wenceslas Square and Old Town Square. We also walked on part of the Charles Bridge, built by Emperor Charles in the 1300s. We also saw the place where Mozart first premiered Don Giovanni and all the music students got really excited. Also Franz Kafka was born and lived in Prague for his whole life so we saw some places where he lived and in all of the souvenir shops they have all sorts of stuff with Kafka on them and books and journals about Kafka. All of the architecture that we saw was just beautiful and hard to believe that it had been built so long ago. Old Town Square that Dana showed us is probably the most touristy part of Pargeu but also the most beautiful. It has several huge towers that are part of the Old Town Hall, and it also has an astronomical clock that we got to go up in and get amazing views of the whole city. After the tour we got to go on a boat ride down the river and we went through the lock in the river and got to have lunch as well. The food was delicious, but the ride in the boat was a little nerve-wreaking. In the lock there was a long line of boats waiting and we kept bumping into the walls of the lock and almost bumping into the other boats. The hits were pretty hard on the walls so we kept getting knocked over if we tried to get up and spilling our drinks. Interesting boat ride number 2 of my time here!
The boat ride ended around 2 and we had free time for the rest of the day. The shops in Old Town Square and around that area looked pretty cool, so Jessie and I spent some time looking through the shops and buying some cool gifts. We made our way over to the Municipal House where they host concerts and art exhibitions. Jessie is really interested in a Czech painter named Alfons Mucha who is an art nouveau artist, and at the Municipal House they are hosting a collection of his posters and other works so we went through the exhibit. It was a really cool exhibit since I have never heard much about this style of art, so I learned a lot by going through the collection. They had a video at the end of one room that told about how this collection came together and how it came to the Municipal House which was really interesting. However I was so tired by this point that we sat down to watch the video and I fell asleep almost instantly. In a museum. How embarrassing. But after moving on from the art we went and got dinner and then went to one of the coolest shows I have ever been to. Prague is famous for it's Black Light Theaters, where there is no talking and the props are lit up by black light and it looks like things are floating or flying just by using people dressed all in black moving these props around. We saw a performance based on Alice in Wonderland, but it's about after she comes back from Wonderland. It was a little trippy and a little confusing at times, but the prop use and scnery and special effects that they used were so cool and so unlike anything I have seen before in theater. Prague has several black light theaters all around town with all different kinds of performances and if anyone ever goes to Prague, going to the black light theater is definitely something you have to do.
The next day we got up pretty early again and was back on the bus again by 9 am. We went to Prague's Jewish Quarters which has one of the oldest and biggest community of Jewish people in the world. During WWII when the Nazis were trying to exterminate all of the Jews, they left the Jewish quarter in Prague largely intact because after they had exterminated all of the Jews they wanted to make Prague's Jewish Quarters a "museum of an extinct race". Kind of gruesome, but without that there would not exist today some of the oldest and most beautiful synagogues and relics of Jews from centuries ago. We first went through the Pinkas Synagogue, which isn't used for services anymore but has inscribed on all of it's walls people from Prague who were taken to concentration camps and killed during WWII. On the second floor there is a collection of children's artwork from the concentration camp that all the Jews from Prague were taken too and all of this put together was very emotional and made you realize just how much the Jewish people faced during that time. The children's pictures especially were very difficult to look at, and while some of them were very optimistic, others showed exactly how life was for them in the concentration camp. For a lot of the artwork they had the names of the children who made the picture and their life dates as well. So many were killed at such young ages that it was really hard to look at the pictures. After that we went through the Jewish Cemetery which has people buried there from the 1400s and has about 12,000 tombstones there. However people were also buried in layers on top of each other, so there are probably at least 20,000 people buried there, which was really interesting and a little unsettling. Once we left the cemetery we walked over to the Spanish Synagogue a couple blocks away. The Spanish Synagogue is called one of the most beautiful synagogues in all of Europe, and I can definitely believe that. It was built as a reformed synagogue so they actually have a beautiful organ there as well. the Spanish Synagogue was used as a place to store valuable things from Jewish families during WWII, and some of them are still there and there are pictures from before and after WWII. The whole experience was a really cool one and opened my eyes more to just how much these people have faced over centuries of abuse.
After we finished that tour, Jessie and I decided that we were not done with shopping in Prague so we went to more shops and bought some more items. Afterwards I really wanted to go up into the Old Town Tower since we hadn't gotten to do that the day before, and man, were those views beautiful. The Tower is right in the middle of the city and every way you look you can see beautiful buildings and amazing landscape.It was different from the other views we'd seen since those were separated from the city, but this was right smack in the middle and I am so glad we got to go up and experience that. We also tried a traditional Czech dessert called Trdelink, which is basically pastry wrapped around a metal rod, rotated over a fire, and covered with cinnamon sugar. DELICIOUS. I want more. Finally it was time to leave, so we hopped on our bus and started the long 5 hour bus ride back to Vienna. I am so happy that I got to experience this city, but I really missed Vienna. Time to go home!