Graffiti II

There is so much beautiful graffiti here that I had to do another smattering of it. This first one is a door I pass on my walk to the school building.

After walking up Petřín Tower, we walked down the hill on a different path, and along the way passed this gorgeous piece of work. I love the hand holding and the words unsaid.

The epic scale of this next one is just the first thing that struck me. It’s so intricate and complicated, but it still covers the side of an entire building while hammering home a very big message about war, reconstruction, and profiteering to me. This is on the walk from the Vltava River to the Tesco near our dorm, and I remember very clearly walking around a building and just stopping to let my jaw hang open at the sight of it.

Here’s some graffiti in Budapest, along the rail line that was below our path to the Parliament building. The road that is just out of frame above the picture was flooded because the Danube was so full from all the rain Central Europe was getting during our first three weeks here.

These last two are pictures from Vienna. The first is on a staircase coming down from the castle town of Buda, and the second is on a wall of one of the buildings at the Naschmarkt.

So, in conclusion, I found a ton of street art that I really loved looking at and experiencing on my walks around Prague, Budapest, and Vienna, and I hope that these pictures capture a good sense of all the graffiti that was around us all the time. Like our history professor said, apparently they don’t want to spend all the money it costs to clean all of it off the streets and buildings, but in my opinion as long as its not just scratchy initials painted on the wall and looks as good as it does, I say keep it.

Terezín

A few people flew to Prague at the beginning of the summer through Poland, I believe either Warsaw or Krakow. The only reason I was curious about possibly visiting Poland was to see the sites of the former Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz. For understandable reasons, the National Socialist Party did not want the sites of European Jewish genocide located within their motherland of Germany, and thus placed most of the holding camps close to Germany, and the death camps out of their country, mostly away in Poland.

I apologize if that description seems insensitive, but there’s really nothing I can do other than be point blank about the reasons I have in my brian about such atrocity. In the Czech Republic, the closest Nazi camp was in Terezín, about an hour or so north of Prague. The history of the city is quite interesting, especially since it is still a functioning, if incredibly small, city in northern Bohemia.

Terezín was formerly a military garrison before the Nazi takeover and conversion of the Czechoslovak Republic into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia right before the start of WWII. Once the Nazis came in, they simply ousted the Czech military force and inserted their own. When Jews were rounded up, a great deal of the Czechs were sent through Terezín as a sort of holding station before they were either sent by train to a labor camp, or worse one of the death camps in Poland.

There was a surprising amount of cultural production in the ghetto during the war, or at least I was shocked that it was still possible to produce music scores, plays, poetry, paintings, and drawings under such unbelievable conditions. The museum holds several collections of works by composers, writers, and artists who hid their works so well that they weren’t found until the war was over.

One thing I found important to note about the city, and about the Holocaust in general, is that while the Jews were overwhelming the most persecuted by sheer numbers, there were still other groups that suffered equally or even worse. Adjacent to the Jewish ghetto at Terzín is the prison for political prisoners, which was allegedly even harsher to endure. Plays like Bent explore the times for homosexuals, and I always wonder more about those that suffered in the Nazi camps wearing a star that wasn’t yellow.

Today the city is actually quite poor, and not that many people live there, but I’m not sure the reason is because of the horrors committed here. Yes, a large amount of people died before they were ever sent somewhere else, or died while their final holding place was this city, but it was nothing compared to the chambers at Auschwitz. Terezín has a feeling in the air that it has known terror, and I didn’t feel right taking many pictures, only inside a hidden space used multiple various religious services, and in a chamber where bodies were prepared for burial, which is where the photo above is from, coffins still on the ground as a permanent reminder.

It was a relief to leave the city, and it lifted a heavy weight off our collected shoulders to so easily leave that place, but I do think it was very important to visit something like it. I know that I’d always regret not seeing something full of that terrible treatment. It feels like a pilgrimage to go there, bear witness, and leave, even if I don’t associate any kind of religion with the experience. It was necessary, and it’s and experience that does not simply get placed on the shelf with all the others, this one hold special importance.

Petřín Lookout Tower

Across the Vltava River from us is Petřín Hill, which has a large tower on top of it. One day in history class we walked around the hill, seeing different monuments, and eventually a group of us walked to the top of the hill and up the tower.

This first picture is a monument to the people who disappeared during the Communist reign. It’s a good monument in my mind because you can look at it with only a little bit of the history of the Czech Republic in mind and know what it commemorates. I don’t know why a monument that is easy to figure out makes it better to me, but complex, confusing monuments that is more about the architecture of the display and less about the actual content of the event it commemorates doesn’t seem appropriate to me.

The tower at the top of the hill is modeled after the Eiffel Tower, although the base of the tower is octagonal instead of square like the one in Paris. However, the Czech people did play a tiny little joke on the Eiffel Tower. Petřín Hill is a lot higher of a plot of land than the land the Eiffel Tower sits on, and the country is a lot higher above sea level than Paris, France. In fact, while the tower here in Prague is a much shorter structure than the Eiffel Tower, because it’s on the hill it actually is higher above the Earth. As our history professor put it, if aliens came to earth and looked down on Europe, the tower in Prague would be higher up in the air than the tower in Paris.

The view of Prague from the top of the tower was breathtaking, nothing short of the best view of Prague I’ve seen so far, and that includes Prague Castle, which I’ll be writing about later. This really was the perfect place to get a panoramic view of the city. Here are a few pictures of the view of the Castle, the Vltava, and the residential area to the south of the tower. Enjoy.

Random Shots & Random Thoughts

So I’ve been noticing a few things while here that are just a little different than we’re all used to back home. I’m going to run through them with a bunch of pictures I just couldn’t fit into other posts. This first photo is from our trip to Kutna Hora a few weeks ago.

First, ATM lines work a lot differently than they do in America. In the U.S. you can walk up right behind someone at an ATM and they won’t flinch, you’re just closing down the line to make it take up the least amount of space, but that is completely not the case in Prague. People stand about ten feet back from whoever is using the ATM at the time, and at first it’s a little confusing, leading a lot of people to cut the line on accident because they don’t realize the actual line formed way behind the person using the ATM. I don’t know why this developed, because most of the time you hear about Europe having less of a “personal space bubble” in conversation or in greetings than Americans, but for some reason the ATMs in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Austria I’ve seen follow a different etiquette.

This second photo is of the tops of one of the many trams that travel on the streets of Prague. They’ve been extraordinarily convenient in helping us travel to bars and clubs at night, as well as to some field trip destinations. I really like the shape of the attachments to the electric wires.

Second, and this is going to sound really weird, but urinal cakes are so strange here. I know, but it’s just an observation. We’re used to pink hockey-puck shaped things, but here they resemble brightly colored ice cubes. My roommate last year used to freeze juice in ice trays in our fridge, and that’s pretty much what these things looks like, only they can be bright orange, blue, and sometimes green. It’s just weird to see them because they look like they’re not meant to be air fresheners and instead look like somebody poured a fruity drink out into the urinal.

I didn’t include this next photo in my post about people because it doesn’t really have a full person in the shot, it’s just Jaimie’s legs with a cute little dog. We stopped here for lunch on our overnight to Southern Bohemia, and this dog was walking around on the bridge.

Third, and I think last for now, being here for six weeks is the perfect amount of time for this trip to have left the feeling of a vacation – but I don’t really feel like I’ve lived here for a good amount of time. Knowing that I leave in a little over a week makes my mind prepare to leave, but I imagine if I was staying here for four months I’d only feel as though I was halfway done with my stay in Prague. The amount of time our program lasts is a tricky thing, and it hasn’t really allowed us to get settled like we are living residents of the city; like I said before, we’re all between a vacation and a short time spent living in Prague. Whatever the case, I feel like I know this city very well know, especially the parts close to our dorm, and that feeling of familiarity, coming in six weeks, gives me a lot of comfort.

Pictures of People

For the most part, I have avoided posed pictures of people on this trip. However, I take a few here and there, and I guess it would be good it I posted some of the ones I particularly liked since people do want to see those. There are going to be a couple posts like this where I’m just sort of off-loading photos I’ve been wanting to post, but this first group just went together nicely as the pictures I’ve taken with people in them.

I don’t really like taking posed pictures of people on vacations. I feel like it’s something you do with a disposable camera, and I like to think I’m more serious about my photography than that. That isn’t to say those types of pictures can’t be good; they serve as really nice memories of where you’ve been and can be great reminders of friends made and good times had together. I just would rather take portraits of people instead of posed pictures in the vein of most of the ones that follow. I took these because they were either in an important place or were posed in interesting ways.

These first ones are from a few weeks ago at the John Lennon Wall. I particularly like the second one I took of Mallory.

Pay special attention to the pose that Jaimie, Dana, and Z have in the front row. It’s the so-called “Sorority Squat” picture pose – and it keeps coming back.

Here’s another group photo, this time from the view overlooking Český Krumlov of all the girls on the trip – somebody else took a boy-band-type photo of all the guys sitting on the edge of the bridge.

Once again, Jaimie, Dana, and Z oblige by taking their pose. Then we crossed the bridge into the gardens and started taking photos in front of a fountain and something wonderful happened. Pat recreated that old familiar sorority pose, and the best part was that he did it as the last second, preserving Alan, Taylor, and Rachel in their normal poses for the photo.

Here’s a photo from our first day in Vienna. We were walking near the cathedral in the center of the city and passed a break dance troupe. There were quite a few of these groups doing demos as we walked around that day, but this one was definitely the best.

Then, shockingly, I actually took a semi-posed picture that I really like. In Vienna we visited two of the Hapsburg Palaces, and at Schönbrunn Palace I took a picture of Alan and Rachel as our “King and Queen.” After a regal posed picture I kept snapping, and I think the result turned out pretty nicely.

So there’s the summary of my pictures of people. Coming up is my second post on beautiful graffiti: trust me, there’s so much awesome art on the streets here it’s almost unfair.

Vienna

Upon our arrival in Vienna, I navigated the Underground system. I absolutely fell in love with it, and now I really want a map of the system for my room someday. The city reminded me immediately of a further-east London, especially with the ease and complexity of the Underground, or U-Bahn as it’s known there.

We didn’t go to our hotel first, instead choosing to go straight to the center of the city and look around. Essentially our first view of anything in the city center was the picture below, of St. Stephen’s Cathedral.

Once again, Vienna seemed to embrace the money it makes off of tourism much easier than Prague seems to while we’ve been there. Maybe it’s because we were going to more tourist places than we do in Prague, but the sensibility was still there than the Viennese were happy to help us and accommodate us, while I personally feel shunted aside in Prague most of the time.

The first big site we went to was the Hofburg Imperial Palace, which was the “winter” palace for the Hapsburg family that ruled central Europe for centuries. Today it houses three museums: a gold and silver collection, a museum dedicated to the life of Empress Sisi, and the Imperial Apartments of Emperor Franz Joseph and Sisi. The palace is absolutely enormous, and this picture is just from one of the many courtyards inside it. Just above the clock on the tower is a sphere that signifies the current phase of the moon, which I thought was very interesting.

The gold and silver collection was just ridiculous, with countless sets of flatware and dinner plates made of gold and silver. The sets were for around 40 people for each set, and there were also incredible centerpieces of gold, tea sets, and other plates. The Hapsburg family was incredibly rich, and the palace was built in such a way that says the family just couldn’t stop building. The palace is like an astronomically large version of the Winchester Mystery House, with countless additions to the palace over the years.

We progressed into the Sisi musem next, and then I found out just how Shakespearean the whole family had been. Franz Joseph I became Emperor of Austria in the middle of the 19th Century, and it was understood that he would marry his cousin Helene, but instead fell for her younger sister Elizabeth, nicknamed “Sisi,” who became increasingly disillusioned with court life over the course of her life.

The myths about Sisi’s life were largely perpetuated after her death, which came at the hands of an anarchist assassin who only killed Sisi after another, more important royal changes his travel plans, leaving Sisi the most famous target available. Sisi underwent a huge exercise regimen to maintain her figure and keep up her image. She did not allow portraits to be painted of her after she reached a certain age, and after the suicide of her son and the heir to Franz Joseph’s throne, she began to wear black more often and eventually wore veils to prevent anyone from seeing her face. Even though Franz Joseph had a mistress, upon her death he allegedly said to the messenger who delivered then news something to the effect of “You have no idea how much I loved this woman.” There’s a lot more to the family story, and I couldn’t shake the “Shakespearean” thought from my head as I walked through the rest of the museum and saw all of the apartments of Sisi and Franz Joseph.

The above photo is pretty much the only picture I’ve taken of myself the entire trip. You can see me, and unfortunately see a little bit of my camera in the reflection of the passing U-Bahn train. I really did dig the U-Bahn, and I’m really glad we got 24-hour passes to take it everywhere around the city to complement all of the walking we did around Vienna – it’s a gigantic city. I feel like we saw pretty much all of Budapest in our two days there, or at least all that I was interested in seeing, but we didn’t get anywhere close to seeing all of Vienna, and I know I want to go back someday.

This was a really cool fountain we found after dinner. It started lighting up with different colors, and I just had to take the picture with purple lighting up the water, just for Northwestern pride.

The next morning we got up and took the U-Bahn a mere four miles outside the center of the city to the Schönbrunn Palace, the “summer” palace of the Hapsburg family. I’ll say it again – it’s only four miles away from the Hofburg Palace, which doesn’t really make sense seeing as how the weather is completely the same, but I guess they were just rich enough to pull all of this off.

The rooms inside shed a lot more light on the other really famous ruler of the Hapsburg family, Maria II Theresa, mother of Marie Antoinette. That daughter was actually born in the Hofburg Palace, but there were several pictures of Marie Antoinette as a little girl in the Schönbrunn. Maria Theresa married off all but one of her eleven daughters, who was ill as a child.

The appeal of the palace isn’t necessarily the palace itself, which is a great example of the Rococo architectural style, a French style of interior design emphasizing a room as a complete work of art. The below picture looks at the palace from up above on a hill at the end of the gardens. The whole thing is supposed to rival Versailles, which I’ve never seen, but the entirety of the gardens was very impressive. The complex houses the oldest zoo in the world, founded in the middle of the 18th century.

After visiting that palace in the morning we went to the Naschtmarkt, where we bought fresh fruit and other food before heading for our last ride on the U-Bahn to our train back to Prague. It was an incredible and exhausting weekend, and one travel experience I know I’ll never forget. Going around major cities in Europe on my own without help was difficult, but now I know what to expect if I want to do it again later in life.

Budapest

Over the Fourth of July Weekend a large group of us traveled to Budapest, Hungary and Vienna, Austria. The Czech holiday Jan Hus Day was on the Monday at the end of the weekend, so we had a long weekend to travel to two big cities to the southeast of us here in Prague.

Our night train tickets from Prague to Budapest cost about $35, which to me meant that we would be in the back of the train scrambling for seats with a lot of people. Surprise, surprise, when we got on the platform there was a giant mass of people fighting over almost no empty seats in the back of the train. Somehow I got seats with six other people, but the rest of our group got separated from us, presumably in a car in front of us.

Seven hours later, we were woken up by a conductor and told that we were at the end of the line…in Vienna, not Budapest. Apparently the train had cars that were ending up in Budapest and Vienna, and the other half of our group did in fact get to Budapest on time. We just ended up waiting a little while for the next train to Budapest, and ended up getting to our hostel a few hours late. It was a travel adventure, and now I’m a lot less inclined to take a night train with tickets for unreserved seats.

We set off to explore Budapest on very little sleep, trying to make the best of an arduous, unexpectedly long journey from Prague to the city, and attempting to see as much of the city as possible in only a few days. The city of Budapest (actually pronounced Boodah-pesht, as I’ve heard from my Jews & Germans professor at Northwestern and everyone in the Czech Republic) used to be two separate cities, separated by the Danube River right down the center: Buda, to the west of the river, and Pest, to the east. We chose to cross a bridge at the south of Pest and walk north along the Danube. There are a lot of bridges along the Danube, and a lot of motorists, who took to staring at the girls in the group. I don’t think it’s very Hungarian for girls to wear tank tops, even in 90-degree heat.

The above picture is of the second bridge we came across. We started to climb up a hill, not exactly knowing where we were going. Since this walk we’ve taken to doing large exercise walks in every city we go to. I guess it lends a sense of physical accomplishment to our travels around a city. It certainly gave a rewarding view once we reached the top.

This is a view of the more residential area of Pest. I didn’t like my pictures looking up the Danube that showed both Buda and Pest. We had reached the top of a hill that had the Liberation Monument, remembering the fall of Communism in Hungary in 1990. The Monument is a large column surrounded by large bronze statues. The one below is facing the south of Budapest, I really like the way the clouds look.

Budapest is a lot friendlier than Prague. I’m not sure exactly why, but perhaps they recognize that a lot of their money comes from tourism. People blame some of the Prague disinterest on the number of people in the city, but Budapest is almost four times larger than Prague’s population of one million people. We didn’t get a chance to explore areas of the city that weren’t full of a lot of tourists, but that makes sense to me. We were only there for a little under two days and wanted to see everything, so we undertook long days to see everything we wanted to see.

The next day we got up pretty earlier and walked pretty far north along the Danube to get to the Hungarian Parliament building, which is a beautiful building surrounded by some cool bronze statues of prominent political and artistic figures in Hungarian history.

The picture below is of St. Stephen’s Basilica, and a very interesting event occurred here during the weekend we were traveling. In the morning while we were getting breakfast we ran into the other group of people who were traveling in Budapest that weekend but not continuing on to Vienna. They told us we had to see the Basilica, but when we saw them back in Prague at the end of the weekend they asked us if anything happened when we went there, and that they had been worried.

While walking around Budapest during the day we saw way too many large groups of police in full riot gear. We brushed it off as a training exercise at first, but as we saw more and more units around the city, and constantly heard sirens going off all over the place, it made us more worried.

Apparently there is an extremist right-wing group in Hungary called the Magyar Gárda, or the Hungarian Guard. They were dissolved by the Hungarian Parliament over the weekend, and as we exited the Basilica around noon we saw several people in white shirts, black pants, and black vests sitting on the steps, who were supposedly members of this extremist group. All of the police we saw for the rest of the day were going to the square in front of the Basilica because the extremists started protesting and then rioting in response to the group being dissolved by the Parliament. Tear gas was thrown in to the group of about 200 demonstrators, and 127 people were arrested. Suffice it to say we were very glad we left when we did to get lunch at a market going across the beautiful Széchenyi Chain Bridge on our way to Buda Castle on the other side of the river.

Our last stop was at the Dohány Street Synagogue, which is the largest synagogue in Eurasia and the second largest in the world. It was a beautiful building in Moorish style, but since we were walking around on Saturday we could not go in. Still, even seeing the synagogue from the outside as well as the Holocaust Monument in the shape of a Weeping Willow in the back was very nice. One in every ten victims of the Holocaust was Hungarian, which just seems like a lot to me.

Budapest was a very beautiful city to walk around for two days, but we were definitely eager to get to Vienna with no travel problems and see as much of the Hapsburg palaces and other landmarks as we could.

Český Krumlov

Picking up where my last post left off, the second day of our trip to Southern Bohemia was mainly to the city of Český Krumlov, a beautifully preserved city in the south of the Czech Republic. It was owned for three hundred years beginning in 1302 by the Rosenberg family and for over 200 years by the Schwartzenberg family, starting in 1719 and ending in 1945 at the end of WWII.

The main feature of the city is its castle, which is strangely large for a city as small as it is. We entered over a moat that doesn’t contain water, but is a deep trench that houses bears. Apparently one of the families traced the meaning of their name back to the bear, and as such kept a few as guardian pets in the moat should anyone be stupid enough to get themselves down there. The above picture is of the tower at the entrance, which is actually painted to give the impression of actual depth of the outside features. There were actually a lot of cost-cutting architectural techniques on display in the castle.

This town was much quieter than Prague, though a little noisier than where we stayed the previous night. It’s a tourist spot not only for visitors outside of Europe, but for Germans and Austrians as well, which was nice to see. I liked being able to sit down in a place by the Vltava River and have a nice lunch in the shade.

The above picture is a view of the rest of the town from the huge outdoor covered hallway that connects part of the castle across a chasm a couple hundred feet to another high cliff, on which there is a Baroque theatre and the castle gardens, which were very pretty. The hedges were arranged in a very geometric fashion, and there were very nice flowers and fountains everywhere.

My few words of Czech helped me here as well, and I ordered completely in Czech – which was a major first. Most of the time in large groups I end up just giving up and speaking English, but when we were in this town I was able to keep a much lower American tourist profile. These smaller cities seemed nicer, even if the service at a restaurant took longer. They seemed to embrace tourism a lot easier, and want the business to help drive their economy. Prague doesn’t really like tourists even though it needs the money, but perhaps the larger influx of non-American tourists in Krumlov makes things easier for the Czechs there.

Getting back on the bus for the ride to Prague, we made one last stop at a monastery very close to Krumlov which was nicely preserved – we even had to take our shoes off to walk around inside the actual monastery. The picture above is of the other buildings outside the cloister. It was a very peaceful, calm way to end the weekend, and needless to say I was exhausted when we all got back to Prague.

Southern Bohemia Part One

So, I’ve been pretty bad about posting in July. Now I have to go back and post some pictures and reminisce about trips from a few weeks ago. I’ll start with our trip to Southern Bohemia.

It was our first overnight trip, and the first stop was a former Communist labor camp. Our bus broke down about 2 miles away from the camp, so we got out and walked there at about nine in the morning. It was an interesting walk, and after watching Diamonds of the Night, which contained a ton of running through a forest, it was probably a bit eerie to do early on in the morning.

Being somewhere that a lot of people have been imprisoned is pretty weird. Most of the buildings are reconstructed and not the original remnants of the camp, and most of the people who perished in these camps died in a short period of time, and not up until the Velvet Revolution in 1989. The workers at this camp mined for nuclear resources that were shipped to the Soviet Union.

The coolest room in the whole place to me was the hospital wing. It had basically no space for any of the prisoners, so only a few of the sickest people got beds or any kind of actual treatment. The doctor was a prisoner as well, but at least they were spared from mining radioactive material.

I think it was too early in the morning for me to properly process what happened in this place, and talking to one of our professors it seems as though places like this haven’t been open to the public until recently, but considering the United States doesn’t really have places like this, I’m not really sure how to empathize with a situation like this. Opening up the bad things your own country has done, or that the Communist Party has done in your own country, or the Nazis did in your own country as is the case with Poland, can’t be an easy thing to do.

After leaving this camp we headed to České Budějovice, the place where the Czech brand of beer Budvar originated. The American brand Budweiser basically stole Budvar’s name in marketing to America, and now Anheuser-Busch cannot market their own beer in Europe because Budvar owns the copyright to the brand name. We stayed the night, and then moved on to Český Krumlov, a really beautiful city that I’ll post about later.

Kutna Hora

About a week ago we took a day trip to Kutna Hora, which once briefly rivaled Prague for the capital of the Czech Kingdom a few centuries ago. It is famous for its large silver mine, which helped to mint coins for a very large portion of Europe from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries.

Our first stop was the Sedlec Ossuary, which is a church with decorations made from human bones. A few hundred years ago the abbot from the monastery in Sedlec visited the Holy Land, and returned with a sample of dirt from the Golgatha. Upon spreading the dirt around the cemetery of the church, many people wanted to be buried there. When the church fell on hard times years later, they had to sell away a huge portion of their land, including some of the cemetery. They dug up all the bones and put them into pyramids inside the church, which still stand today.

There is a chandelier made from bones, the coat of arms of an aristocratic family that eventually bought and paid for the church to remain an ossuary, and today it is somehow a popular wedding location for what I would assume to be very gothic Europeans. It has also been used as a filming location in a few movies, most of them vampire-themed. I don’t think it’s hard to figure out why.

We took a tour through a section of the silver mines, which was at times incredible and at others very creepy. I don’t like small, cramped, dank, dark spaces where I know people have died before. It’s going to be really tough going to a concentration camp in a little over a week. I just don’t want to know that every step I take I may be stepping where a body was before.

The hollowed out stone of the mine was really impressive when it opened up, but a lot of the mine was flooded during war times, and since most of the mine was devoid of silver by the time it was abandoned, it’s only real purpose is as a museum. The town is now very sleepy, and being in a calmer Czech city was very nice. People were nicer, more courteous on the street, and eating in a restaurant was much calmer. I try to be very quiet in restaurants, only speaking up to order something. Keeping a low profile, especially with the sound of your voice, is a key to not drawing unwanted, anti-American sentiment.

The last place we visited was St. Barbara’s Church. It’s not called a cathedral in a traditional sense I assume because it is not the seat of a bishop, or archbishop, or however those rules go. The church was started in the 1300s, but not finished until the early 20th century, I want to say around 1904. It was originally supposed to be two times larger, but the silver mine yield dropped off severely and they were forced to scale it back. It was built by rich patrons and not by the church itself, which is why it is so ornate and is dedicated to St. Barbara, the patron saint of miners.

The trip was really fun, but it really can’t go a day here without raining a little bit. It drizzles, showers, pours, monsoons, or something at least once a day, and for either a little bit or the entire evening and night. We’re going to Budapest and Vienna this weekend, and the weather is supposed to be in the 90s and sunny the entire time.

The Legend of the Golem

Once, there was a rabbi who devised a way to create for himself a helper to accomplish daily chores. Just as God had created Adam out of the soil and led to the existence of the rabbi, so did the rabbi create the Golem out of clay. He was enormous, towering over the rabbi with immense height, and in possession of the strength of many men.

His intention was for the Golem to aid him in moving items around the synagogue, performing strenuous tasks that took a toll on the rabbi. In the morning, the rabbi woke up and went up to the attic to turn on the Golem for his daily tasks. The rabbi was free to spend his day immersed in prayer and other activities while the Golem performed his mindless work throughout the day. When the sun went down, the rabbi went back up to the attic with the Golem, sat him down, and turned him off for the night.

This schedule went on for a long time, with the rabbi thoroughly enjoying his newfound time away from the menial labors of his usual days. The golem was clumsy at times, and his strength was too great, causing distress to his workplace at times. The rabbi knew that he must keep the Golem away from others, for the risk of danger would be too great. He was successful, always herding the Golem up to the attic every night, and peacefully switching him off, leaving the Golem at peace after his work.

One terrible Friday as the rabbi prepared to go to bed, he realized in horror that he had forgotten to turn off the Golem. He was too far away to go now before the Sabbath arrived, and was caught in a terrible dilemma. He knew the golem would cause destruction for the entire weekend if left alone and awake, but he could not break the Sabbath to turn off his creation. Eventually, the rabbi decided to wait out the Sabbath without going back for the Golem; he would give his creation its first taste of freedom.

When the rabbi returned to the attic, he found the room in ruins. He followed a path of destruction down and out of the synagogue and into the streets, hearing screams for help and avoiding ruined houses in search. Many people had crossed the path of the Golem during the Sabbath, and some had suffered gruesome fates. The Golem did not understand its own strength, nor did it feel any emotion towards the humans it encountered. It had merely wandered and explored like a child in a park, mindlessly picking up, throwing, and crushing anything it saw fit.

The rabbi was distraught, and found the Golem alone by a river. He coerced his creation back to the attic under the cover of darkness, away from any of the townspeople calling for justice against the culprit. The rabbi destroyed the Golem alone, and scattered the clay through the attic, the attic of the very building you see in the above picture. He had learned his lesson, never to attempt an act of God. The rabbi had undertaken the task of creation in order to make a more perfect automaton, and now his creation had backfired in punishment.

It is believed that the remains of the Golem still reside in the old attic, that the dust on the floorboards still contains the clay that was the rabbi’s creation. The synagogue no longer allows any personnel or visitors up to the attic, but still the memory persists of the rabbi’s forgetful night and the Golem’s path of destruction.

The Lennon Wall

By now the whole world knows that Michael Jackson suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 50 over the weekend. Hearing about celebrity death is a little different in a foreign country, especially when people like Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett, and Billy Mays all die within a few days of the King of Pop. The only death out of the four that seems to matter here at all is Jackson’s, but considering the scope of popularity of McMahon and Mays, that isn’t all that surprising.

MTV Europe played a weekend marathon of Michael Jackson’s videos – they played literally every single video I’ve ever seen by the man, and some I’d never even heard of before. My favorite video was probably “Liberian Girl” where a bunch of Jackson’s celebrity friends wait for him on the set of his “next video” only to find out that Jackson has been filming them the whole time. It was pretty funny. I’ve been spinning Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad a lot in the past couple days, and the man really was a musical genius for a golden fifteen years from the end of the 70s to the beginning of the 90s.

I took pictures at the John Lennon wall about a week ago, and the death of Michael Jackson has finally gotten me to post them, I guess in relation to another dead musical icon. The Lennon Wall here is kind of curious. It’s across the river from Old Town, but not really near Prague Castle. It’s more out of the way, and sort of sneaks up on you even though there are signs pointing you to it once you get across the St. Charles Bridge. The wall is another great example of fantastic graffiti here in Prague, and I’ve got other pictures of some more street graffiti to put up later. I don’t know how to describe it, but the only place I see better graffiti is in downtown San Francisco, so this makes me feel a little more at home walking around on the streets.

The famous picture of the wall is of the huge white peace sign with “IMAGINE” written over it, but that message has been painted over. There’s a large mesage painted in a salmon color that relates politicians to war criminals, which seems to go against the peace and love sentiment. The wall does feel really touristy, and there’s even a John and George cafe right behind the wall itself. We were hungry, so we ate there, and it had some really nice tomato soup, but I couldn’t shake the feeling like we were being really infatuated with something so touristy. There’s apparently a wall similar to this one commemorating Russian rock star Viktor Tsoi in Moscow, which sounds really cool.

I haven’t really heard any Czech music since coming here, and that’s sort of getting to me. I went on a Michael Jackson tear this past weekend, and after seeing the Lennon wall went back and had a few days of listening to a lot of Beatles music, but now I really want to listen to some Czech rock bands and I don’t know any. Maybe I’ll ask the Czech student assistants, but it seems like jazz is a lot bigger here than other types of music. We see jazz clubs around all the time. I don’t know, I should just wander into a record store and head to the rock section to have a look.

Some Truths About Franz Kafka in Prague

Before I read The Metamorphosis, The Trial, or and of Kafka’s short stories I heard a song called “Our Love” by Rhett Miller, the lead singer of the Old 57’s. It was from an episode of Scrubs, and the song described the lost loves of Franz Kafka and Richard Wagner. Here are the lyrics concerning Kafka:

“Kafka in his letters to his lover Milena was alive, but he was waiting for a love that never would alive, their rendezvous was singular, her husband was his friend”

Franz Kafka was born in Prague, in what was the deteriorating Jewish Quarter. The laws restricting Jewish property ownership to the ghetto had just been lifted, so his family moved to the border of the ghetto and Old Town Square out of financial necessity. He apparently never moved very far away from his parents, living in a large number of apartments right in the Old Town Square area of Prague for most of his life.

The building he was born is proudly proclaims that it is the exact one where Kafka was born…but like a lot of tourist sites in Prague, it isn’t the whole truth. The site of the building is accurate, but it isn’t the original building, it only looks old. The above picture shows the building as it is now on the left. His family’s apartment was on the third floor (second floor by European floor counting). A lot is made of the proximity of the Kafka family home to the church that is right beside it, with scholars claiming Kafka’s religious conflict between Judaism and Catholicism was rooted in his watching masses through his window into the church. Once again, this isn’t exactly true: the church was sold to the Russian Orthodox Church, which has no influence on Kafka whatsoever.

The curtain is getting pulled back on so many things for me here in Prague. Nothing that is supposed to appeal to tourists is really what the city sells itself as. You really have to look closely and read a lot to learn what everything is precisely. It’s a lot like American history now that I think about it. You learn the first, very general, very romantic version of events, and then when you are “older” and “ready” to learn the actual truth, it’s revealed to you. I’m not sure what purpose this serves, especially now as an adult having to go through that process with another country’s history and famous figures.

Kafka wasn’t even really Czech, he was a German Jew. His literature doesn’t fall into Czech literature because he isn’t Czech, wrote exclusively in German for his literature, and he really hated Prague, it was just the only place he could find the inspiration to write. He was engaged a number of times, and even moved to Berlin before finding himself unable to write and unable to marry, and slunk back to Prague. His writings don’t fall into German literature because he lived in Prague and was Jewish. The only class I’ve had that he falls squarely into is my Germans and Jews class, where we read him as a German Jew, which made total sense.

I guess I’m just finding it really weird that I have to deconstruct the tourist myths around the people and places of Prague. I struggled with the myth deconstruction in American history a lot, feeling lied to by my own country, but it’s a different feeling when someone else does it. I understand the need to gloss over things to make them romantic and pretty, it sells better, but the truth is far more interesting, and definitely more interesting when it’s covered up in the first place.

How Did I Get Here?

My soundtrack for a couple days has been “Once in A Lifetime” by Talking Heads. It’s the one from all the trailers of Oliver Stone’s W. a while back, though some Talking Heads fans might get mad at me for linking it together with that film. I got lost on Saturday, and walked a long time to get back to the dorm. That incident and the tour today of some of the Old Town region just made me start thinking about being here.

Why did I come to Prague? Apparently in polls the three biggest reasons people come to Prague are beer, prostitutes, and historical sightseeing, in that order. I came for none of these reasons. I have enjoyed beer, avoided the strip clubs and random propositions of prostitution like the plague, and I really didn’t know much about the historical significance of anything in Prague before I got here, but I remember just wanting to study abroad, not that I wanted to come to Prague for a particular reason. Everyone always says that the city is so well-preserved and that it didn’t suffer bombings from the Nazi regime in during WWII, and I remember that being a part of the appeal.

That can be expanded: Prague has never suffered a large-scale natural disaster, nor has it had mass rebuilding to change the city to the extent of some other places like Paris. No Great Fire of London, no flooding, no earthquake, no huge wars. What nobody tells you is that Prague had its heigh of political importance sometime around the 1400s; since then it has been largely inconsequential and therefore ignored to the point of preservation. Guide books build up the ancient look of the city, but neglect to tell you it’s because it wasn’t as important of a place as Vienna or Berlin, and that in the Czech national revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was an architectural swing back to medieval, gothic, and baroque styles so there are buildings that look way older than they actually are. “A Disneyland made of bricks” as our professor said today.

This is not to say that the city is not beautiful, it really is. The buildings are fantastic, views are picturesque, lots of jaw-dropping moments walking around corners to see new things. The idea that there is major tourist deception comes from the actual people living in Prague, not skeptics from the outside. Our history professor gave this information plainly, as if pulling back the tourist curtain in an incredibly useful way. It helps to see the real Prague; observing the current culture and how we interact with them instead of seeing the sightseeing facade is a much better way to be infused into the city for me. The average tourist visit to Prague lasts a little less than a weekend, compared to five or so days in places like Paris or London. I’m here for over six weeks, which will hopefully dull the sheen of all the tourist attractions and imbue me to other, less-travelled places.

Going to clubs and bars and hanging out with people has made me really happy here, and I find the classes really interesting so far, but I’m still struggling with why I came here. I’m not in Prague to find myself, to learn the language, or to travel around eastern Europe. I remember saying that I had never been to eastern Europe, but the Czechs sort of define themselves as central Europe. Writing was a big goal, I have a list of things I’d like to complete while I’m here, but so far all I’ve done is a lot of outlining. I’m having a lot of fun, this trip just lacks definition. At least I’ve got a lot of time to figure out what I’m doing here, why I’m in this city, and how I’ll use my time.

More to come on Franz Kafka, other Czech legends, and the John Lennon wall. For now, another pretty picture from the Vyšehrad, this time a “Gothic-style” church near the national cemetery.

The Jewish Quarter

We took a tour of some of the synagogues and other buildings in the former Jewish Quarter of Prague today. There was some really cool stuff. This picture comes from a cemetery where they would add more earth so they could keep burying people, which made the ground really soft explaining why the gravestones are all off at weird angles. We also saw the Holocaust Memorial that has all of the 80,000+ known names of Czech Holocaust victims painted onto the walls all over a synagogue. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Schindler’s List is the scariest movie I have ever seen.

Prague Micro-Legend at the Vyšehrad

According to legend, there was a king seated high in his capital. One of his Lords, from the east, came to protest the mining that had been going on in his lands. The King determined that the mining was legal, especially due to the tax profits he enjoyed from the miners. The Lord, gravely upset by this news, went back to his lands and began destroying the mining equipment with his men. Following the destruction of the mines, he mounted his horse, one that could take him to the king’s court so swiftly it would not be known that he took part in the destruction of the mines.

There were protests against the Lord: that he had destroyed the mines, that he had taken part, but the Lord pointed out that he had arrived in the capital long before any news of destruction had reached the Duke. However, the Lord’s evidence was not taken by the Duke, and he had the Lord imprisoned inside a fortress and sentenced to death.

The fortress was at the southern entrance to the capital, alongside a river, with enormous walls preventing any unwanted travelers. The Lord was led in and prepared for his last night alive. He was granted one final luxury, and the Lord took his time deciding what he wanted.

When he made up his mind, the Lord’s final wish was to ride his beloved horse one last time. His request was granted, and so he rode his horse three times around the courtyard inside the fortress. Upon completing his final lap, the horse bolted for the wall and leapt into the air, carrying the Lord over the walls, over the river, and safely onto the opposite bank. The Lord urged his horse into the forest, and he escaped his gruesome fate.

Graffiti In Prague

There’s a lot of graffiti in Prague. I mean, it’s everywhere, pretty much on every possible wall that isn’t hundreds of years old. We’ve asked a bunch of people why there’s so much of it and so far the only responses have been along the lines of “Prague is too cheap to clean it up.” I don’t mind, I think a lot of it looks really cool. I’m on the lookout for even more cool street art as we go along, but here are two examples. One is right below my room in our dorm, and the other was on the way to our tour of the Vyšehrad on Wednesday.

The Awesome Clock and The First Day of Class

So this is an astronomical clock on the front of Old Town Hall in Old Town Square. It’s close to the statue of Jan Hus, and even though pictures of it are really touristy I figured I’d put one up here anyways.

The first day of class was yesterday. We went to a fortress for our history class – I love being able to say that. I’ll post some pictures from that trip soon.

First Morning

A view out of the window in my room at around 6 a.m. today.

Weekend trip possibilities are being throw around, including Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Munich, France, Italy, Greece, and others. Hopefully I’ll be able to take some awesome weekend trips around Europe while I’m here.

Arrival and First Day

I’m here! After much travel and no sleep, I’ve finally made it to my room for the next six weeks.

My flight from Chicago to Frankfurt, Germany was thankfully uneventful, but the Frankfurt airport is a mess. I went through two security checks and passport control before I got to the gate for my connecting flight to Prague, which was only 40 minutes.

So basically this site is going to document my six weeks and change in Prague and trips to various cities throughout the summer. I’m going to try to post a picture every day from Monday through Friday, with another picture from the week on Sunday. Here’s the first, a very tourist-y photo from downtown in Praha 1.

I’m still working on how to get the images in their full sizes on this site, so while I figure that out you’ll just have to do with a smaller image.

UPDATE: I sorted out the picture size debacle – click on the picture to view it in the full size.