prague photos
Monday, December 10th, 2007
This pretty Christmas market was right where I got off the metro and got on the tram my first evening in town.
The entire facade of this building is an advent calendar!!
The Christmas market in Old Town Square.
View of somewhere (including Prague Castle) from somewhere.
Old Town Square the next morning.
This might be a church–darned if I remember.
This definitely is a church, complete with a great story about a statue of the Virgin Mary, a miracle, and a thief’s hand.
Just another old church hundreds of years old…
Franz Kafka.
The Old-New Synagogue (I think).
Prague Castle + St. Vitus Cathedral + menorah.
Atlas holding up the world.
Okay, so I really really should’ve asked about this.
On the crowded Charles Bridge.
The Lennon Wall. After Lennon’s death, someone wrote something like “give peace a chance” or “all you need is love” on this wall. The next day, of course, the communists had erased it. It was back again the next morning. And the next. Now it’s legal to tag this wall, and they put that mask of Lennon up there to remind folks that he’s what it’s about, ’cause at this point it’s kinda hard to find him and his message under a lot of the tags…
Walking up the stairs towards Prague Castle.
The view from the top.
Look at those shadows! I think it wasn’t even 2:30 in the afternoon…
St. Vitus Cathedral.
Back at the Christmas market in Old Town Square.
Totally my favorite thing about Prague. YUM YUM YUM.
The crowd waiting to watch the Astonomical Clock strike the hour.
The Astronomical Clock–not striking the hour, though.
Prague Castle at night, from Charles Bridge.
I did go see a black light theatre performance that evening, called Aspects of Alice, and very (very) vaguely based on Alice in Wonderland (I chose it ’cause Rick Steves recommended it and ’cause, hey, Alice in Wonderland). It was kind of cool but once the novelty wore off I wished for less clowning and more dancing. There wasn’t really any dancing at all, which was a pity, because the potential for dance that the kind of illusions they were creating had was (I thought) enormous. There was this one kinda titillating scene in which Alice was awakened to her sexuality by her mirror self, and they were definitely both topless on stage. Also a lot of mess with an apple and the Adam and Eve thing. Also it was very obviously a tourist thing. They didn’t bother announcing the top of the show and the intermission and such in Czech–just English and Spanish. What they did had so much potential!! They just didn’t rise to it, ’cause they didn’t need to, I guess.
The next day I went to the Mucha Museum and then a couple sites in the Jewish Quarter, namely Pinkas Synagogue–the walls of which have been painstakingly covered with the handwritten names of every Jewish Czech victim of the Holocaust, and which includes a display of drawings by children staying at the nearby Terezin concentration camp–and the cemetary–which was for a very long time the only place in the city where Jews could bury their dead, so that some 90,000 graves are stacked on top of one another.
I also walked to Prague’s Gehry building, nicknamed “Fred and Ginger”–
I meant to be alone and do all these things by myself, but a woefully undereducated (or probably just not very bright) guy I met at my hostel chose to attach himself to me for most of the day. I managed to see the things I meant to see anyway (and maybe even saw more so as to avoid having to make conversation), but I was thinking dark thoughts much of the day. I don’t know how to deal with that kind of thing. In the evening I sat by myself in the hostel bar journaling and drinking a huge glass of Czech beer (Pilsner). Then I went to bed. Then I came to Vienna.