Prague Spring, Minus the Soviets

My loyal blog-followers: I’m now on a train back from Berlin, which I intend to tell you all about very soon, but I must instead turn my attention to catch-up work. I do this only because the Berlin pictures are on my camera and not yet my computer. At any rate, Prague was cool too.

So Prague. That all started on Friday April 24 and went until Sunday, the 26th.

This is how we got there. We found ourselves are really solid set of bus tickets too and from Prague that were probably the cheapest way there and much faster than the train, strangely enough. I’m still rather shocked that a 3.5 hour car ride takes 6 hours by train, but I guess it’s not very direct. Anyway, the now three of us, me, Brad, and Steve (or Stefan or “Erdbeer Joghurt!”) hoped on this cramped little bus to head over to the town that’s been hyped up to levels like “The Paris of the East”. I might have just made that up though.

We left Munich at 8 AM that Friday.

On the bus we met two girls from Munich headed on over to meet family in the Czech Republic. One of them spoke fluent Czech and was teaching us how to say some things and pronounce some things. We had fun trying to say the names of things for the entire rest of our time in Prague. I’ve also resolved to start trying to shorten the words I write by using special characters from different languages. In Czech the character “č” is pronounced just like our “ch” and I intend to use it so, at least for the purpose of these Prague-y posts (and if I remember).

And then, we were in Prague. On the way in we drove by this building, though I didn’t get a čance to snap a picture. Here is one from the internet:



It’s supposed to look like two people dancing.

From the bus stop we walked our way over to the hostel, through the old part of town. These are the pictures:



This is the Astronomical Clock, which replicates the motion of the sun and moon and stars:




This is the "Church of Our Lady before Týn":



It was closed for service when I went to go see it on Sunday. We did go into this churh:



The insides looked like this:




After settling into our hostel, we headed back out to find some lunč and explore a little bit. The girl at the hostel front desk told us about some foods, drinks, and restaurants that were worth trying and we spent the rest of our culinary time in Prague trying to track these down.

While exploring we found a statue dedicated to Franz Kafka:



It was not a cockroač. Sad.

It began to drizzle. Wet and hungry we ducked into a little place on a side street for some čeese, sausage, and Pilsner Beer from Pilsn, a town in the Česck Republic and inventor of the type. Tasty.

After wandering about for a bit in the rain we decided to go inside a museum or something to stay dry and occupied. Our čoice was naturally the “Museum of Communism”, where we found these guys:




The museum was actually pretty interesting, covering the history of Communism in Czechoslovakia as well as what life was like under the regime. It did seem like the museum itself wasn’t very well established, however, because it shared the building with a casino and generally seemed really out of place. It was also right next to a big McDonald’s

The museum told us about a statue of Stalin, constructed in the late 50’s, that once stood 30 m tall (that’s 10 stories!) above the north bank of the river, overlooking the city. Unfortunately, in Khrushchev’s wave of de-Stalinization, it was destroyed. That would have been hilarious to see. Oh well

This is what it looked like then:



On the way back we saw this:



It’s probably a symbolic representation of the modern history of this town, one of perpetual tanks and bulldozers or, one of construction and repression (think Prague Spring!). I don’t really know though.

That was not too bad. More tomorrow tomorrow.