the first week, continued
Wednesday night
After leaving the brewery, Roya and I walked up the Mala Strana (loosely, the 'Lesser Side,' talking about Andy Warhol. We passed this really interesting monument to Czechs affected by Communism; essentially it's a series of steps going up a hill, and on each step there is a figure of the same human, but as the steps move upward, more and more of the figure is removed and by the final step all that's left is a foot. At the bottom there is a plaque listing the number of Czechs who were executed, imprisoned, forced to emigrate, etc. It's really moving and apparently controversial; shortly after it opened someone tried to blow it up.
We were trying to find a place to eat, but we had moved into the super-touristy area, which is a bit depressing. Here are all these magnificently preserved buildings lining narrow cobblestone streets, and the street level is full of cheesy t-shirt shops and expensive pizza restaurants. Crossing the Charles Bridge, however, is amazing. It's lined with elaborate religious statues, and you get an amazing view of the river, the Old Town, and Prague Castle in all directions. Granted it's jammed with tourists, but the sun was just dropping out of sight and the beauty of the whole thing was enough to let me forget that for a moment.
I had to eat ham in the restaurant we stopped in because the girl brought us the wrong pizza and we didn't feel like explaining to her that we'd ordered the vegetarian one. This happens. Oh well. The bathrooms at this place were interesting as well--you have to walk through this vaguely Chuck E. Cheese-type place with big plastic slides and little coin-operated trains and rocket ships, and then the doors were only labeled with single letters, 'M' and 'Z'. Of course we learned what these letters meant the next day, but I had to figure out which was which by peeking in and looking for urinals. Oh well.
Thursday
Not a whole lot going on today--more Czech class, more orientation. We got the names, addresses and a little bit of info about our host families, but I'll wait to describe them until after I meet them. I had to take a nap in the afternoon; lingering jet-lag and tons of walking around makes the 7 hours of sleep a night I'm getting not quite enough. Went back to this restaurant called Doba with Roya, Nisha, and Rachel and ate a plate-sized potato pancake with a ridiculous amount of cheese. After that (I think--my memory is getting hazy) we met up with the rest of our group for drinks. It's not the easiest thing to find a cool place to drink around here, and tramping around with a group of loud American girls garners us a fair share of odd looks. Czechs, apparently, tend to be quieter and travel in pairs or trios. We found a really fancy cocktail bar and all of us ordered beer. We were the last ones to leave; Czech bars close pretty early. I zoned out and watched Czech television the whole time. Through careful deduction it was proclaimed that beer commercials are the same everywhere (although, to be fair, these were not as offensive as those fucking Coors Light ads--no twins, for example). Sleep was desperately needed afterward.
Friday
After our third language class and lunch in the restaurant in the basement of the building where SIT's office is located (I had a glass of red wine for the first time here--it was nice, considering I just asked for a 'víno červený' and not anything special) we took our last excursion of orientation week, a tour of the Jewish Quarter. It's a pretty fascinating place--given to the Jews in the 13th or 14th century (memory fails me again) because it's in an area prone to flooding (there was a unexpected and massive flood only two years ago), the original settlement was torn down, except for the synagogues and cemetary, and some 20 to 30 meters of soil placed over it around the beginning of the 20th century. There's an incredible amount of well-preserved Jewish artifacts in the area because Hitler decided to turn the Czech lands into a "Museum of the Extinct Race" and thus ordered his troops to collect and save everything. In his more cynical moments, our tour guide said, he thinks Hitler got his wish--the Nazis were pretty efficient in their destruction of Jewish history everywhere else in Europe.
Our tour guide was an interesting guy--an American who's been in Prague for three years now and is the only Conservative/Reform rabbi in the whole country. On our tour we saw, including him, three of the five rabbis in the Czech Republic. Unfortunately he was quite the talker, and I started fading about halfway through. I'd go into more detail about the things we saw except my memory of them is foggy (the theme of the week, apparently). The Pinkas synagogue was interesting--it's been converted into a memorial to all the Czech Jews killed by the Nazis (their artifacts were preserved, but the Jews themselves were not so fortunate. The names and dates of all 70,000 Jews exterminated by the Germans, according to their records, are written on the walls, covering pretty much every readable inch. Outside the synagogue was the cemetary, in use from the beginning of Jewish residence in Prague until the end of the 18th century--some 800+ years--and containing a huge jumble of ancient headstones. Because the Jews weren't allowed to buy more land, but the cemetary was full, they had to pull up the headstones, put down some more dirt, bury the recently dead, and mix all the headstones together on top. It's an intense place to visit, although rather peaceful in a way--the clutter of the headstones underneath a canopy of big leafy trees gives a sense of a community forced into claustrophobic conditions that you just won't find in other cemetaries. Our tour got cut short because it took us a long time to get through just a few locations and we didn't get to visit the Old New Synagogue, which is apparently a really beautiful building dating back to the 13th (?) century. Eva and the tour guide recommended we visit it sometime.
For dinner, a bunch of us visited Meduza, on Maggie's recommendation. The pierogies were amazing! Probably the best food I've had in Prague--imagine the dumplings you get in a Chinese restaurant but filled with potatoes and cheese, topped with carmelized onions, and a big glob of creamed spinach in the middle. The guy behind the bar spoke excellent English and sent us to this bar called The Three Pigs (I forget the Czech name) which turned out to be more of a regular restaurant, so we had a drink and then went back to Radost FX, which, as I guessed, was the trendy place to be on a Friday night, thanks to the dance club downstairs. It was pretty cool, although pretty much exactly what you'd imagine a trendy European bar/club to be. The record store/video rental place that they run out front is great though--I was browsing through the music, which is mostly foreign (i.e. American/Western European) and I spotted a bunch of David Lynch soundtracks (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, Wild at Heart) most of which I've never been able to find back home, especially used.
Anyway, at the bar I spilled a German guy's drink and then got into a big conversation about perceptions of America in Europe and Germany. It was interesting, but he was one of those obviously lonely, pretty nerdy guys who go to trendy places by themselves. I liked hearing what he thought about America though (I'm not getting into politics right now).
And that's pretty much it. Today we meet our host families, so I'll have lots more to say later, I'm sure.
After leaving the brewery, Roya and I walked up the Mala Strana (loosely, the 'Lesser Side,' talking about Andy Warhol. We passed this really interesting monument to Czechs affected by Communism; essentially it's a series of steps going up a hill, and on each step there is a figure of the same human, but as the steps move upward, more and more of the figure is removed and by the final step all that's left is a foot. At the bottom there is a plaque listing the number of Czechs who were executed, imprisoned, forced to emigrate, etc. It's really moving and apparently controversial; shortly after it opened someone tried to blow it up.
We were trying to find a place to eat, but we had moved into the super-touristy area, which is a bit depressing. Here are all these magnificently preserved buildings lining narrow cobblestone streets, and the street level is full of cheesy t-shirt shops and expensive pizza restaurants. Crossing the Charles Bridge, however, is amazing. It's lined with elaborate religious statues, and you get an amazing view of the river, the Old Town, and Prague Castle in all directions. Granted it's jammed with tourists, but the sun was just dropping out of sight and the beauty of the whole thing was enough to let me forget that for a moment.
I had to eat ham in the restaurant we stopped in because the girl brought us the wrong pizza and we didn't feel like explaining to her that we'd ordered the vegetarian one. This happens. Oh well. The bathrooms at this place were interesting as well--you have to walk through this vaguely Chuck E. Cheese-type place with big plastic slides and little coin-operated trains and rocket ships, and then the doors were only labeled with single letters, 'M' and 'Z'. Of course we learned what these letters meant the next day, but I had to figure out which was which by peeking in and looking for urinals. Oh well.
Thursday
Not a whole lot going on today--more Czech class, more orientation. We got the names, addresses and a little bit of info about our host families, but I'll wait to describe them until after I meet them. I had to take a nap in the afternoon; lingering jet-lag and tons of walking around makes the 7 hours of sleep a night I'm getting not quite enough. Went back to this restaurant called Doba with Roya, Nisha, and Rachel and ate a plate-sized potato pancake with a ridiculous amount of cheese. After that (I think--my memory is getting hazy) we met up with the rest of our group for drinks. It's not the easiest thing to find a cool place to drink around here, and tramping around with a group of loud American girls garners us a fair share of odd looks. Czechs, apparently, tend to be quieter and travel in pairs or trios. We found a really fancy cocktail bar and all of us ordered beer. We were the last ones to leave; Czech bars close pretty early. I zoned out and watched Czech television the whole time. Through careful deduction it was proclaimed that beer commercials are the same everywhere (although, to be fair, these were not as offensive as those fucking Coors Light ads--no twins, for example). Sleep was desperately needed afterward.
Friday
After our third language class and lunch in the restaurant in the basement of the building where SIT's office is located (I had a glass of red wine for the first time here--it was nice, considering I just asked for a 'víno červený' and not anything special) we took our last excursion of orientation week, a tour of the Jewish Quarter. It's a pretty fascinating place--given to the Jews in the 13th or 14th century (memory fails me again) because it's in an area prone to flooding (there was a unexpected and massive flood only two years ago), the original settlement was torn down, except for the synagogues and cemetary, and some 20 to 30 meters of soil placed over it around the beginning of the 20th century. There's an incredible amount of well-preserved Jewish artifacts in the area because Hitler decided to turn the Czech lands into a "Museum of the Extinct Race" and thus ordered his troops to collect and save everything. In his more cynical moments, our tour guide said, he thinks Hitler got his wish--the Nazis were pretty efficient in their destruction of Jewish history everywhere else in Europe.
Our tour guide was an interesting guy--an American who's been in Prague for three years now and is the only Conservative/Reform rabbi in the whole country. On our tour we saw, including him, three of the five rabbis in the Czech Republic. Unfortunately he was quite the talker, and I started fading about halfway through. I'd go into more detail about the things we saw except my memory of them is foggy (the theme of the week, apparently). The Pinkas synagogue was interesting--it's been converted into a memorial to all the Czech Jews killed by the Nazis (their artifacts were preserved, but the Jews themselves were not so fortunate. The names and dates of all 70,000 Jews exterminated by the Germans, according to their records, are written on the walls, covering pretty much every readable inch. Outside the synagogue was the cemetary, in use from the beginning of Jewish residence in Prague until the end of the 18th century--some 800+ years--and containing a huge jumble of ancient headstones. Because the Jews weren't allowed to buy more land, but the cemetary was full, they had to pull up the headstones, put down some more dirt, bury the recently dead, and mix all the headstones together on top. It's an intense place to visit, although rather peaceful in a way--the clutter of the headstones underneath a canopy of big leafy trees gives a sense of a community forced into claustrophobic conditions that you just won't find in other cemetaries. Our tour got cut short because it took us a long time to get through just a few locations and we didn't get to visit the Old New Synagogue, which is apparently a really beautiful building dating back to the 13th (?) century. Eva and the tour guide recommended we visit it sometime.
For dinner, a bunch of us visited Meduza, on Maggie's recommendation. The pierogies were amazing! Probably the best food I've had in Prague--imagine the dumplings you get in a Chinese restaurant but filled with potatoes and cheese, topped with carmelized onions, and a big glob of creamed spinach in the middle. The guy behind the bar spoke excellent English and sent us to this bar called The Three Pigs (I forget the Czech name) which turned out to be more of a regular restaurant, so we had a drink and then went back to Radost FX, which, as I guessed, was the trendy place to be on a Friday night, thanks to the dance club downstairs. It was pretty cool, although pretty much exactly what you'd imagine a trendy European bar/club to be. The record store/video rental place that they run out front is great though--I was browsing through the music, which is mostly foreign (i.e. American/Western European) and I spotted a bunch of David Lynch soundtracks (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, Wild at Heart) most of which I've never been able to find back home, especially used.
Anyway, at the bar I spilled a German guy's drink and then got into a big conversation about perceptions of America in Europe and Germany. It was interesting, but he was one of those obviously lonely, pretty nerdy guys who go to trendy places by themselves. I liked hearing what he thought about America though (I'm not getting into politics right now).
And that's pretty much it. Today we meet our host families, so I'll have lots more to say later, I'm sure.
posted by anonymous listener at 5:33 AM
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