And the rest of the voyage, since I won’t leave you with just that vignette:

Shoshana, I feel I should explain, is a friend who lived next door to me our freshman year, and then pledged the same sorority as me, so we went from neighbors to sisters, and have walked each other through every stressful Greek event ever since. She’s studying in Israel this semester, and so we decided to meet somewhere not exactly halfway (the Czech Republic) for our simultaneous spring breaks.

Prague is divided into four sections, which translated into English are Lesser Town, Old Town, New Town, and the Jewish Quarter. Prague Castle is on a hill on the edge of town, which is where we hung out the first day, wandering through Wenceslas Square in New Town to the astronomic clock with its skeletal representation of Death that rings the bell every hour across the Vltava River via the Charles Bridge to Lesser Town, where we drank Bitter Lemons. Or at least I did– the first day we were there was the last day of Passover, so Shosh shared her kosher chocolate cake with me, and we waited until post-sunset to eat, the grumbling in our stomach squelched by the extra matzo (matzoh?) she had in her bag. But then we got dinner at a tiny "traditional Czech" restaurant, sitting on the terrace next to the bustling Charles Bridge, a haven of quiet after our busy wanderings of the day. The river breeze blew through the trees above us, and we ate Czech food, which resembles German more than Russian: heavy dumplings, lots of sauerkraut, meat in everything, and more beer than I knew existed (which is saying a lot, considering I lived on Frat Row for a whole year). The dumplings were... amazing. Shoshana’s verdict was that they were like uncooked dough, which wasn’t untrue, but they came in the shape of polenta, sliced and smooth and round, heavy and chewy– nothing like American dumplings that come with chicken.

We stayed with a friend studying in Prague for the rest of the week, which was awesome– every morning we went to "Rembrandt Doughnuts," a doughnut shop that, ironically, doesn’t serve doughnuts, on the corner of her street by the tram stop. We went up to the castle quarter one day, where we saw the window that the guy was thrown out of in the Defenestration of Prague and climbed a tower with 287 steps winding in such tight circles that I almost lost my balance and fell all the way down several times on the way up. We saw the changing of the guard (BUT WHAT ARE THEY GUARDING? No one seems to know), and learned that the Czech military dress uniform was designed not even ten years ago by the costume designer for the movie Amadeus. No joke. The country decided they wanted something that looked older than their country, so they hired this guy to make their uniforms. A Hollywood costume designer. Am I the only one that thinks that is weird?

(This is why I am good at Trivial Pursuit/Balderdash and bad at history tests: general concepts elude me, but I can give you every fascinating tidbit from the history of Prague. You should come visit me in Paris and hear my tour of this city. I’ve given it enough times that I have perfected it; it includes a story I made up about the oldest monument in Paris, a mention of the Statue of Liberty flame with the flowers for Princess Di, and the reason French people call their wine openers "DeGaulles.")

So anyway, we saw the castle and the cathedral used by the royal family back in the day, designed by Mucha, the guy who singlehandedly began the Art Nouveau movement. Beautiful. We had heard that there was a monastery somewhere closeby, so we got ourselves good and lost in the process of trying to find it, but pretty soon we emerged in the middle of the courtyard of a monastery. We let ourselves go for a moment of jubilation at having found it (we searched for close to an hour for the place), then we looked at each other and blurted "Now what?"

Because what do you DO at a monastery (if you aren’t a monk)? We attempted to go into their basilica, and found it was actually unlocked– we walked in to find the monks chanting at the front of the church, an iron gate pulled across the back to keep the rest of the world out of the main part of the sanctuary. But we were allowed in the back, so we stood there and listened to the white robed monks chant in a language we couldn’t understand, until they filed out the north side of the building.

Prague’s goal, as a city, apparently, is to be the eastern European version of Paris– the largest street in the city, where all the fancier stores are, is called (in Czech) Paris Street, and lined with trees just like the Champs-Elysees here. There is also, on a high hill outside town, a "replica" of the Eiffel Tower, which Praguers claim is just as good as the real thing. They claim it’s the same size as the real one, since it’s built on a hill, but the size of the actual THING is... well... petite, to say the least. Everyone kept telling me I "had to see it," since I live in Paris... Maybe I am just cocky now, since I can see the real one from my window less than a ten minute walk away, but the Prague version is nothing like the real one. I mean, if you’re gonna claim it’s a replica, at least MAKE IT A REPLICA. It’s light blue (as opposed to the Paris version’s brown); it has 112 anchor points all the way around it, to the original’s 4; it’s constructed with single steel bars instead of the reinforced (spelling? That’s the French way...) square trusses like the real one; and since it just sits squarely on the ground instead of having pillars, there is a spiral staircase that leads to the top (it’s short enough that there isn’t even an elevator). I’m not saying it’s lame, it was quite pretty. BUT I am saying that, had no one told me it was meant to be the Czech version of the Eiffel Tower, I probably wouldn’t have picked up on it myself.

We went to Josefova, the Jewish Quarter, on our last day in Prague, to see the synagogues, the museum, and the memorial to the Czech Jews killed in the Holocaust. The biggest synagogue in Prague is known as the Spanish Synagogue, and is based on the Alhambra in Granada, Spain (which I thought was a mosque?). It was beautiful, full of all kinds of art that I couldn’t begin to comprehend, all decorated in reds and golds and navy. In the Jewish Museum, the names of every Jew from Prague killed during World War II is listed on the walls. Three rooms are filled from floor to ceiling with names, and that is in Prague alone. The whole neighborhood was pretty much the opposite of the Paris Jewish Quarter (Le Marais), which is in the center of the city, adjacent to and melded with the gay quarter, less historic and more contemporary, with far fewer synagogues and monuments, and many more streetside falafel vendors.

We decided to go on a daytrip out of Prague one day, and chose, as our destination, Plze . Plze (pronounced PILL-zin) is the birthplace of Pilsner beer, and as such is a semi-touristed destination among both studying abroad frat boys and European high school students on school-sponsored trips, which I don’t completely understand. The hour-and-a-half long train ride was 200 Koruna for us together, or about $5/each, through some of the most beautiful countryside I have seen since my last visit to Kentucky. The rolling green hills were full of beaten-up slightly ramshackle houses, but somehow it just romanticized the whole view even more. We arrived in the town and walked to the beer factory just in time to catch the 2pm tour. They walked us through the process of making beer, and at the end they gave us freshly matured beer out of a wooden barrel, which we drank while standing in their cellars over an upturned barrel.
After the beer tour we wandered the town some more, debated jumping into the river that divides it in half (Shoshana: "You’ve jumped off bridges before right? Come on, how bad could it be?" Blair: "Yeah, I’d like to... the problem is that we need a boy to go down there and make sure it’s deep enough first."), and bought gelato from the only vendor we could find.
Actually, we ate a lot of gelato. It’s probably good the two of us didn’t decide to go to Italy together, because we wouldn’t have done anything but look for gelato..
One at a time,
B

P.S. There’s this statue on the Charles Bridge that you are supposed to rub and make a wish, and if you don’t tell anyone the wish, it will come true. As a consequence of this, the entire middle portion of the statue has been rubbed smooth gold where it was once sculpted black. I put the art history student in me aside for the sake of a wish and rubbed it anyway, knowing it’s awful for the statue but justifying it because it’s probably less bad than the acid rain that falls on it every year. Now all that’s left to do is wait for the wish to come true...