Bohemia

Old Town Square
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So I began the first part of my trip in Prague with my friend Caroline, who I met in Paris. We had found a free ticket from Bratislava to Paris and decided that it would be worth it to see a few things on the way to Bratislava. Traveling with Caroline was definitely interesting... she's funny but a little high strung. Although, she was the more experienced traveler between us and I'm not sure the trip would have been as successful without her "expertise".. just throwing that out there.

I have to say that Prague was absolutely beautiful and it wasn't destroyed in WWII so it has preserved some amazing bits of history. I think winter is the best time of year to go too. It was really cold but everything was covered in lights and there were all these charming little Christmas markets everywhere. My favorite part was probably the astronomical clock in Old Town Square. It had three different hands and when it struck the hour these skeleton guys moved across the windows (naturally we missed that part like every time). I still love anything astronomical and in the middle ages Prague intellectuals broke away from the Catholic church and started doing their own thing, so there is a lot of cool astronomy stuff. This is interesting because the church was obsessed with turning Prague Catholic again so every building is covered in Baroque facade. It's quite bizarre; it makes it seem like a little village out of disney world.

Astronomical clock
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The Charles Bridge was pretty cool too and you could see the CASTLE from across the river. I think what I mistook every time for the castle was actually the church next to it, but it just looked so gothic. I was expecting Rapunzel to be dangling out of the highest tower. We also walked around Josefov, the perfectly preserved Jewish ghetto. I saw the oldest synagogue in all of Europe there. The Jews in Prague were historically very rich because one of the Czeck kings liked to do business with them. Therefore during the war someone convinced Hitler not to bomb the quarter because it would make a good "museum of an extinct race". pretty horrible. There have been no Jews in Prague since they were all taken to concentration camps in the 40's.

Charles Bridge/castle
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It's hard to say what the Czeck people think about all this. They really have a very closed culture. They're friendly to tourists because they really want Prague to become the cultural capital of Europe, but for such a small town they really don't mingle much with tourists. They also seem kind of apethetic on several issues. Interestingly, the country is the only one in Europe that is 90% atheist. I did, however, see Wenceslas square where the Velvet Revolution took place. This was the only successful peaceful revolution against Communism, which I think is pretty cool. (It is also where King Wenceslas from the Christmas song comes from - he was a Czeck king.)

Charles Bridge
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Prague was actually not as cheap as I thought it would be (although you have to convert from Koruna and I suck at math). Beer was pretty cheap though and we saw an opera for about 20 bucks at this beautiful old opera house! We actually saw Madame Butterfly, though, only the most depressing opera ever. Luckily the subtitles weren't working so we had no idea what was going on most of the time. Prague was really a cool city though overall, especially if you are a classical music fan or a history buff. I wouldn't say I'm either, but I still had a great time.