Thank you Urshi and Gunther!

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We were ignoring all of the gorgeous baroque and gothic buildlings, churches, and castle crammed into Prague for the moment. Our eyes were only searching out our friends. Gunther and Urshi, the farmers from the Austrian WWOOF f\228rm that we worked on back in August, were driving up to meet us. We were to meet at noon \239n front of St. Nicholas cathedral. Finally we saw them running across the square heading for the OTHER St. Nicholas cathedral on the opposite side of town. We caught up with them and spent a terrific day together. As always they were full of crazy stories and we shared some of our travel adventures.

Only after they left that evening did we soak in the environment around us. Prague has an amazing number of old buildings (thanks to Charles IV -- Hasburg Holy Roman Empire -- who tried to make his city the center of Europe). The city avoided bombing during the world wars so one can still get the feeling of the charm of turn-of-the-century life. Well, you sort of have to close off your ears and avoid looking at certain tourists to really get that feeling, but it is there. Praguećs main square, Valclavske Nanesti, has a real sense of recent history with tributes to protesters who demonstrated there during the revolts of Prague Spring of '69 and the Velvet Revolution in '89. In fact, there were supposed to be more protests that week against the NATO Summit hosted by Prague. I never read anything about it afterwards but our news intake is pretty sporadic. (We found about about the Bali bombing from an Italian newspaper and just heard last night that Sharon is out of leadership.) English language newspapers can be hard to come by.