Once again it was a night train that dragged our little behinds out of France, this time to the Republic of the Czechs. Our options included either a first-class $160 reservation (I couldn’t understand if the lady said it came with a berth or not) or a 2nd-class $12 reservation with reclining seats. I was proud of my cheaper decision at the time. We ended up ‘sleeping’ next to a German family of 4 in our seats that certainly didn’t recline. Once we figured out that they spoke English they were all more than happy to prove it to us.; halted sleepy political conversations turned out to be much easier than the feat of sleeping upright next to strangers. Jeremy woke up (though who knows if he was actually asleep) a few times with the youngest girl’s sleepy foot in his side. They left us at 5am before we could even get their names, though we now know much about their social, political, and familial opinions. Thoughts of “I’m too old for this!” and “$160 wouldn’t have been bad…” rang through my sleep-deprived brain.
After missing our connecting train out of Munich because of a middle-of-the-night delay, we got assigned two seats on a 4-hour bus ride into the heart of Prague, or Praha as the locals call it. We settled into our colorful “Hostel Elf” sleeping arrangements, (away from everything, but nice and quiet in the evenings), and bundled up for the cold, brave night. I must admit; I had high expectations for that preserved medieval town. Its the only Central European capital to escape the bombs of both World Wars. Rick Steves pointed us in the correct direction of the Old Town (Star maesto) square, through cobblestoned and tourist-shopped streets. The Old Town Hall, the wise grandfather clock of the city, watches over everything from its 250 foot tall spire (such amazing views of the ‘Golden city of 2000 spires’!) and dutifully keeps time with its animated astronomical clock, constructed in the 15th century. Supposedly it keeps track of the phases of the moon, sunrise, and sunset. Of course, Death, dressed in a skeleton, is the true timekeeper of this piece. I couldn’t quite figure out how it worked, but the four working clockwork machines decorating the stairs up to the spire caught Jeremy’s engineer eye.
Before hunger set in we marched through the crowded streets, towards the river, and halfway over the 700-year-old stone Charles Bridge. The age of the bridge, and number of tourists’ feet pitter-pattering over the ancient statue-covered bridge, ensures jobs for maintenance men. On this night, the scaffolding covering half of the bridge turned into a rendezvous for Czech pigeons, noisily partying it up. Earlier in the days vendors selling typical, yet somehow beautiful, paintings of Prague and the bridge fill up the other half.
We returned to town to search for a ‘typical’ Czech restaurant. We sat down at Plzenska Resturace u Dvou Kocek (By the Two Cats) in a cozy corner booth, listened to a man with rosy cheeks wheeze away on his accordion, sipped cheap beer from thick, cold mugs, and indulged in the warm comfort food of spicy goulash and pork and dumplings. A small group of backpackers arrived holding a worn Rick Steves travel guide, similar to ours. Glasses were raised and winks were exchanged. Its possible that we were over-charged on our meal, but we couldn’t quite decode the receipt, and the exchange from dollars-euros-kroner had us all in a financial knot already. I never quite got the hang of the exchange rate.
The language of the Czechs also completely escaped me. Normally in a new country I grab a few key phrases to toss about as necessary. But here we both came completely empty-handed. Jeremy sometimes got lost in his languages and reverted to the tablespoon of French he has picked up. I wasn’t much more help. Instead we relied heavily on the path the Czech-less tourists paved the awkward way before us.
The next morning we cuddled up with the rest of the hostel-ites (some of them drastically hung over from their bar-hopping the night before) for breakfast, then hit the road. Normally we enjoy whatever public transportation system is around us to its fullest, so I don’t know why we stuck to our feet in Prague. My shoes pinched my toes, the wind blew bitterly cold and rain pounced on us at its whim. Still we depended on the legs God gave us to weave our way through the stoney grey streets.
Our day began in the Jewish Quarter, the place of the largest Jewish Ghetto in Europe. Respectfully, Jeremy grabbed a provided yarmulke, honoring the Jewish head-covering tradition, before we whispered our way through Pinkas Synagogue. This synagogue from the 15th century was turned into a memorial after the 2nd world war. Chilling ‘Wallpaper’ displaying 80,000 names in red number the Czech Jewish victims of the Holocaust. A voice singing Jewish prayers echoes through the bare-floored and already-emotional rooms. Goosebumps and tears.
A side room honors the children of the Terazin concentration camp. A Jewish teacher endeavored to keep life as normal as possible for the confined kids and held a hodge-podge art class in the concentration camp’s midst. Scraps of paper turned into solemn yet colorful facets of childlike self-expression.
We peeked into a museum displaying traditional Jewish household items and relics from every corner of their culture, from birth to death and all the glories of life in between.
The Jewish Cemetery required a fee to take pictures. A simple postcard bought later from a museum store sufficed for us. Beginning in the 15th century the Jews could only bury their dead on this small plot of land. After quickly running out of room they improvised and started laying the bodies to rest on top of previous graves. After centuries of this practice the land grew and pushed around the heavy gravestones. The apex of the ‘hill’ is probably close to 5 feet above the pathway, and apparently12 graves deep. Hundreds of gravestones crowd together, but now stick up at odd angles from the obese land like rows and rows of unorganized shark’s teeth.
We followed two young Jewish pilgrims through a few sights. Wow! they were hyper and giddy to pray on those sacred grounds.
Warm soup with homemade noodles from darkly wooded Kafka Café soothed our hunger and Jeremy’s continuing cough. Tea and grog accompanied us in the smooth dark wooden benches. We chatted quietly about all we had seen and heard that morning while trying to figure out exactly how to use Jeremy’s tricky cough medicine, with picture-less Czech directions.
The afternoon grew late before we made it back to Charles Bridge to see the old castle. Wow what a castle. From our side of the river it glows and points and turns and spreads and reaches tall and delicate. We followed Jeremy’s normally impeccable sense of direction towards the old castle, after stopping off at a miniscule dusty used bookstore filled with black and white postcards and old pictures. It was run by a bearded man who indeed knew what was valuable in his store, and priced it accordingly (or so I think…again, my mental exchange rate converter was just as dusty).
We continued our walk up the long hill, ignoring the splatter of neon and trinkets in the tourist stores lining the walkways, and instead focused on the pastels of the buildings and the early fall twilight, while sipping the hot spiced wine we bought from a street vendor (I love this country). Unfortunately, we wrapped ourselves up completely in the moment and forgot to look for the turn to the castle, which meant longer lingering in the romance of the streets, but no admittance to the castle once we actually found it. The Castle Cathedral was open (and FREE!) so we popped our head into St. Wenceslas’ bejeweled burial site, gawked at the liquid blue stained glass windows (one even by Mucha) and tried to pretend that it was warmer inside than out.
The Mucha museum closed before we could make it back to the other side of the river. I placated myself with “Next time” promises, and instead picked up a few souvenirs of his lacy sweet drawings.
We found a bright restaurant a few blocks off the main square, with a cardboard cut-out of a busty ‘Ropemaker’s Wife’ greeting newcomers hungry for traditional Czech fare. The waitress led us through the bar to the back restaurant, reminiscent of Las Margaritas in its coloring, and directed us to a table much too large for the two of us. Soon the leftover space was filled up with a shy intellectual German couple. Our conversation started awkwardly, and only after many attempts on my part for eye contact (though I considered it a million times more awkward to sit next to them without speaking). Happily we warmed up to each other, and while Jeremy and I shared a rich platter of everything Czech, they happily recommended Berlin tourist sites.
The long rainy walk home was littered with college students preparing for their soon-to-be crazy bar-hopping experience, restaurant owners leaning out of their warm doors hoping to snag the last of the hungry tourists, and camera-clad youngsters like ourselves hoping to catch the last showing of the ancient clockwork.
The next morning, after a restless night of coughing through sleep (our poor neighbors through our paper-thin walls!), we stood in front of the train station desperately looking for our soon departing train’s number on the screen. One number looked similar, but we squeezed enough information out of a Czeck-only conductor to find out that it wasn’t ours. Zut, alors! We meant to look, but apparently that intention also got lost in translation, for it slowly dawned on us that we were once again at the wrong train station. Our train left without us on board.
Dejectedly, we slogged through the city on the metro, locked our bags up in the cold grey train station across town and wasted what little time we had left before another berlin-bound train left the station. It is possible that a young couple similar to us were sighted at a nearby McDonalds grabbing a warm cup of coffee.
The train ride out completely saved Prague’s dud end. A glistening river traced the cold sun-lit tracks. Bright fall colors sweeped up from the other edge, and ended in craigs and boulders of shapes I had yet to even imagine, high above the river’s surface. Squat stoney red-roofed houses planted themselves around the hillsides, just to show off its fairy-tale side. We bought tea and coffee from the attendant just to use up the rest of our kroner, snapped pictures of the landscape, and snuggled in for a nap.
