#museumsofprague

My semester has ended and I now find myself living in a little house in the middle of France that’s both a home and a “boulangerie,” or bakery in English. Before I can say anything about the current state of my life, though, Prague – the Rome of the North, the Paris of the East, the city of castles – so many names and none quite worthy of this beautiful city that is completely unique and can’t be labeled as just having something like castles (though the castles were incredible there). Mati and I made it to Prague after a series of fortunate events since I very nearly missed my flight on account of a forgotten passport. When we did arrive in Prague we were three hours late and I doubted our Air BNB host, Frank, would still be nearby to let us into our apartment. As it turned out the apartment is actually where he himself lives and rents out rooms to travelers. As it also turned out, he happens to be from Paris and in Prague working as  DJ – who said hostels are the only place to meet the most random people? So we figured out how to get onto the bus after realizing we needed cash to buy a ticket, not having small enough change because the ATM had a minimum withdrawal, being refused by the woman working at Costa Coffee whom we asked to give us smaller change, and finally bought some milk, fruit, and a candy bar at the airport grocery store so that we had change and fuel in the form of a Snickers to make it all the way through one bus and one metro to the apartment. It was a process to say the least. But we made it!

So night one wasn’t quite what we had planned, but the next day the first thing we did was take a run in the beautiful park across the street which mostly involved running up a giant hill – taking in the view of the city which included castles and burnt red rooftops – then finished by walking to a nearby café for inexpensive coffee. So when I say inexpensive – I mean the most amazing prices anyone who has ever lived in Paris has ever seen, ever. The café itself had a warm and cozy feeling with brick walls and wooden floors, a bar where you could order a cappuccino, or a beer, and simple decorations that would have been welcoming in a cold Czech winter. We meant to just get coffee, but instead we both ordered the first thing that looked good to us – for me a homemade ginger infused lemonade and for Mati a beer (which cost about $2.50 total) – but then realized we really did want cappuccinos and each got a breakfast menu of a cappuccino and a piece of homemade pie (carrot and apple). For all of that – a meal that would cost 30 euros in Paris – it cost us about 10 euros or $14. I loved Prague. Not only was it affordable, my cappuccino was foamy and frothy and perfectly delicious – which is really quite an accomplishment since I don’t love coffee by any means. So the first day began with a run and a good breakfast – possibly my two favorite things. You would think that starting with high expectations after breakfast might have let me down, but no – Prague did not disappoint.

After breakfast we ran home, got ready to go out, and mapped out directions to get to a free walking tour I booked which started in Wenceslas Square. When we got there I had completely forgotten the name of the agency I booked the tour with, but of course there were about twenty people holding signs for free walking tours. It turns out all the companies started at the same place and at the same time, and most of them were free with a request for a tip at the end. We randomly chose a group and spent the next three hours walking through Old Town, New Town, and the Jewish Quarter – seeing everything from the square where a young student named Jan Palmuk infamously set himself on fire to protest the communist regime and tragically died, to the oldest synagogue in Europe. We learned about the political, cultural, musical, and literary history of Prague – which was the inspiration of composers like Mozart and writers like Franz Kafka. It was well worth the time it took, as most tours usually are since without them you have no idea that what you’re looking it is actually the oldest building in the city or the place where Stalin once made a speech. After the tour, on the recommendation of our guide, we went back to a café that I think was called the Cubist Café, or it was at least inspired by cubism. The staircase leading to it wasn’t just a spiral staircase that went in a circle, but it twisted in such a way that if you looked up through it at the ceiling from the bottom, it actually formed the outline of a light bulb. As we approached the entrance I could hear piano music coming from inside, and when we walked in we were greeted by a friendly waiter (what!) and took a seat in a booth by the window. The cubist design was mostly in the black and white tiled floor and the simple black tables, chairs, and booth with a very simple structural design. As for the drinks, I ordered a sweet white wine and Mati ordered a specialty drink of honey, warm milk, and rum that turned out to be exactly what I imagine butter beer in Harry Potter to be like – it was wonderful, to use a word that really did fit the situation. We sat for an hour listening to the man at the piano play melodies from movies like Casablanca and talked about how lovely Prague was turning out to be.

After the café we walked to the Jewish Quarter to try and see the Jewish Museum in Pinkas Synagogue, but by then it was too late in the day and the museum would be closing soon. So instead we walked home and made it back just as it started raining – a perpetual of the afternoons in Prague – and decided what to do next. In the end we went back to the park to watch the sunset. After so many days of running around in Paris trying to see everything the city has to offer – which is infinite really – we wanted to just sit and enjoy the evening. We climbed the giant hill and when we got to the top saw that we weren’t the only ones with our idea – so we sat amidst little groups of Czechs (is that what you called yourself if you’re from the Czech Republic?) and laid in the grass watching the clouds, which looked like they were out of a painting worthy of being hung in the Louvre. It was a warm summer evening and everything was all quiet and peaceful. After the sunset we went to have sushi – which didn’t fit at all with the day – but what did it matter if we had sushi in Prague in a neighborhood and not in the city?

            Our second full day began the Lennon Wall on the other side of the river that divides Prague in two. I thought there would be more people there, but it was pretty quiet until a party of wedding guests and the bride and groom themselves came walking down the street, taking cute photos by the wall. The wall itself was an amalgam of graffiti and art from years and years of people painting on it over and over again so that its existence was that of a living piece of art, always changing with the times and the whims of people who came across it. Alison took photos of it when she visited Prague about four years ago, and her photos look nothing like mine, which is the beautiful thing about the Lennon Wall. After going to the wall we stopped in a park where all the trees, and in particular the lilacs, were in full bloom. We spent about two hours there, trying to do our yoga headstands in the grass while a homeless man with an incredibly long beard watched us from a bench in wonder since we undoubtedly looked bizarre. We decided to go that night and possibly attempt to attend a Shabbat service at the New Old Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter, but when we arrived we realized that Mati had forgotten his money belt with his cash, cards, and ID – and we had already walked about half an hour to get to the synagogue so it had been awhile. He sprinted back, which was a little ironic since he refused to run with me in the morning, and when he came back I myself had gotten lost wandering around and he had to wait for me at the synagogue for ten minutes until I figured out my way back. Again, luck was with us and his belt – which was tan and blended with the dirt and grass at the park – was still there. He returned with his belt around his waste and lilacs in his hand for me, since I couldn’t stop obsessing over how good they smelled and how it reminded me of the ones in my backyard at home.

When we went into the synagogue they explained men and women had different sections to sit in during the service, which Mati didn’t believe was necessary, so instead we went to the store and bought a giant mélange of things to make our own Shabbat dinner or eggplant pizza and lettuce risotto wraps with fruit salad. It was what Kaeli called a “shmorgesboard” or basically when you take everything in the kitchen and just make it into a meal since you have only random things left – except we intentionally bought our random things.

Day three we attempted to catch a bus to Terezin, the town forty minutes outside of Prague that was once the site of a Nazi concentration camp. We didn’t make it in time, but as it turned out that wasn’t the worst thing in the world since we ran into two friends from USC about to take a bus to Budapest. Traveling makes the world seem so huge at time, but you soon discover that those with the means to travel use all the same websites and see the same cities and are usually the same group of people – which means you run into random friends everywhere (such was my experience in Budapest when I ran into someone whose big bro in his fraternity goes to USC and is from Reno, and is actually a friend of mine). Seeing familiar faces out of context seemed strange, yet comforting to remember all the great people we will be going back to next year. Since we couldn’t go to Terezin that day we decided to make it a museum day. Of course, it turned into a day at the Museum of Communism where we learned about the tumultuous, and shockingly recent, history of Prague’s experience under the communist regime – and then we went to a park – and sat there for probably two hours eating lunch and lying on the grass in the warm sun before a security guard told us we weren’t allowed to drink beer in public (??). After awhile we walked up hill after hill after hill to Prague Castle where the view nearly topped that of the park by our house, but didn’t quite compare since from the castle you can’t see the castle (obviously) and that’s part of the splendor of the view from the other side of the river. As we were leaving the castle the afternoon thunderstorm began and we were caught in what started as a drizzle and soon became a deluge. Of course this hadn’t happened until we were on a street with no trees to block the rain. We couldn’t really stop either because we had tickets to se Aida, the opera, that night at the National Theatre and it began in twenty minutes. So we ran through the rain, becoming thoroughly soaked on the way, and when we arrived felt sincerely awkward at our informal and extremely wet attire. Still, we weren’t horrified enough not to attend the show. The National Theater house stood by the river and inside seemed to have never changed since the days of Mozart. The carpets were red, everything was adorned in gold colored ornaments and the frame of the stage was beautiful in its superb detail and intricacy. The opera itself had mediocre dancing but fantastic singing and scenery. The story was of an Ethiopian slave girl, Aida, who served the Pharaoh of Egypt and was in love with the leader of the Egyptian army that had recently conquered Ethiopia and even her father. She had to make a decision between her country and her love, and what’s more, was at the mercy of the Princess of Egypt who also loved the leader of the army – but whose love was unrequited. It was all very dramatic and good for the premise of an opera, but we had already agreed that we would stay until the 8:45 intermission and then walk to Lokal, a local restaurant that Frank recommended, where we could try some real Czech food and get warmed up after the rain. So at the set time we left and walked across the river, my shoes making squelching noises the whole way. Lokal was like a pub only better lit and with much larger tables that the small round ones you usually find. We decided to share a bunch of random things and try it all so we ordered bread dumplings (I really wanted to try these), mashed potatoes, vegetable soup, steamed cabbage, the special chicken, and…fried cheese – maybe for some fried cheese doesn’t stand out as being too unusual but neither of us had ever had it and I have a feeling we’ll never have it again. All of the food turned out to be really good compared to what we’d seen on other menus, but Czech food is also just not the kind of food we’d normally have. Of course, that’s the exciting part of it – not knowing that fried cheese literally means a slab of cheese with fried breading on the outside and that bread dumplings are steamed rolls (that turned out to be all you can eat – so we ate all we could eat of them and the mashed potatoes). The beer was cheaper than water as is the case pretty much anywhere in Prague, so we ordered two beers and were set with our very non-LA meal that gave us a taste of the local cuisine.

For our final day together in Prague we decided to make the trip to Terezin. We took the bus around 9am and within forty-five minutes had arrived in what appeared to be  small and quiet town with nearly no inhabitants, but for anyone who knew of its previous state, gave you an eerie feeling. It was strange visiting a former concentration camp and seeing how life still continued – something I remarked when Mati couldn’t understand how anyone could live there today – knowing how many people died there or lived there temporarily before being sent “East” to their deaths. It was true though, that was we walked from one museum to the next (the entire town was a series of buildings set up as museums) we still heard birds singing and the sun still shone and people still lived there – but it was impossible and should be impossible to forget what was lost at Terezin. I can’t remember the exact numbers but something like 180,000 Jews passed through Terezin and about 3,000 survived the mass murder – which is only a fraction of the total death toll by the end of the Holocaust. Terezin had been used by the Nazi’s for propaganda, to show the world that the concentration camps where they moved Jews provided conditions suitable for living. Prisoners of Terezin performed plays, wrote music, wrote poetry, and published illegal magazines. The first museum we went to was originally a school house and during the time of the Holocaust had been the residence mostly of children. For that reason the things on display were artwork made by the children who lived at Terezin. The name, birth, and death of each child was under the art – most hadn’t lived past fourteen, if that. Being there felt surreal, since you always learn about the Holocaust during world history – but standing where people had stood and being in a room where the walls are covered in thousands of names of victims made it much more tangible. It was both a day of sadness and a day I would never exchange because you have to remember things like the Holocaust so that they will never happen again, and so that you can appreciate what you do have – like Mati having his grandpa, whose family had managed to get fake papers during the war and survived despite living in Poland, one of the countries with the highest death tolls of Jews – or like me having Mati since his grandpa could easily have been killed during that time. At the end we lit a candle in the crematorium and said a short prayer.

When we got back to Prague there wasn’t much time to go to the Jewish museum like we planned, but we went anyhow and discovered that a ticket to one synagogue worked at the museums in all of the synagogues and could be used for a week. We visited the Jewish cemetery – one of the oldest cemeteries in the world that has a traditional structure like we see today, with lots of tombstones in a row – and two synagogues. Afterwards we went out for some Thai food at a place with a terrace – the only stipulation we had that determined which restaurant we chose. It was a warm summer’s night and a perfect way to end our four days in Prague. Mati’s flight left at 6am so we stayed up and used the rest of our risotto to make nutella banana risotto – a true shmorges board dessert – and at 3am he took his bus to the airport and at 6am left for Israel.

My flight left at 9pm so I had the entire day to spend doing any last thing I felt like. I decided to go to the Kafka museum since Alison told me it was bizarre but cool, and indeed those were two perfect words to describe it. I hadn’t read Kafka, but now I have “The Trial” on my Kindle and thus will soon be reading it. After the Kafka museum I bought some bread and cheese to make lunch, then walked up a giant hill to sit in the sunshine and watch the city. It was a little sad sitting alone, but that didn’t make the day less beautiful. Afterwards I went to the rest of the synagogues and saw all of the museums before I made it to the apartment in time to be indoors for the thunderstorm. I sat in bed and read for awhile and finally when it came time I packed my things and took the metro to the bus and the bus to the airport to fly back to Paris for my final twelve days before coming here, to Le Chemin du Pain. 

Cubist Café

Sunset from the park (see Prague Castle?)

Lennon Wall

Mati with a ridiculous mustache in front of the Lennon Wall

Park with lilacs where we practice yoga headstands

Sitting in the park - about to do headstands

Prague Castle

At Prague Castle (Mati lost the mustache - thank God)

View from Prague Castle

Sheltering from the rain near some swans - not that Prague's romantic or anything

Lokal cuisine (left to right: vegetable soup, fried cheese, bread dumplings, chicken and mashed potatoes, steamed cabbage, massive beer)

Kafka Museum

View from the park during lunch on my last day in Prague.