April trilogy part 2: Prague Blog

The second week of April brought me relief in two important ways. First, the weather suddenly sprang from icy winter to cheery summer within the same week, and second my good friend Don arrived in Magdeburg for a visit. Hanging out with Don is generally a fun time anyway, but having someone around who has known me for nearly a decade (as opposed to all of my friends here, who have known me for six months at most) was really a treat.

As our Easter celebration, Don and I, speaking no more than three words of Czech, and carrying one backpack between the two of us, hopped on a night bus to Prague. Don made for an excellent traveling companion. He didn't get us (very) lost when it was his turn to navigate, wasn't demanding about which sites we saw or at what times, shared the burden of the backpack equally with me, and wasn't picky about food.

The six hour ride featured free sweet tea and an extremely strange Czech movie about a prankster family. We arrived at the Prague bus station at about 4am, which is not the most opportune time to turn up in a foreign city. At first the city seemed unfriendly or even seedy in the pre-dawn gloom. The escalators descending from the station to the subway were dizzying, and I felt that Virgil might meet me at the bottom to lead me on my journey. Eventually though, the sun rose over what proved to be a gorgeous city and we made our way to the old castle to watch this display (Photos are posted on my Myspace page: myspace.com/suzakerman). To enter the castle district (even at 7am) we walked past guards in the vein of Buckingham Palace's, and strolled through the cobble-stone streets, which were nearly deserted in the early morning.

We visited the famous palace itself, the basilica of St.George, and the former home of Franz Kafka while we waited for the coffee shops to open and provide us with caffeine and sustenance. When we did finally sit down to a fruit and yogurt concoction and lattes, the streets of Prague were filling with hundreds of people; apparently Prague is the "it" place to vacation this Spring. We had no idea.

Along with the swelling crowds the glowing sun seemed to expand and blaze brighter than I'd seen in half a year. We were well-equipped with sneakers, a city map, and a lot of Czech currency (well, it seemed like a lot once we converted our Euros to Crowns). Next on our adgend was, well, nothing, so we spent some of the afternoon wandering the city, taking pictures of the Vltava river and the fascades of century-old buildings. Much of Prague was untouched by the World Wars in Europe (Prague was hit with an Ally air-raid only once, apparently accidentally), leaving the historic sites and elegant architechture in tact, and we wandered all the way across the city before we stopped for a late snack of spinach and garlic bread and checked into our hotel.

In many ways Prague is also a very modern city, and McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, The Body Shop, and other big business conglomerates occupied space in the historic buildings. In opposition to these franchises, the Czech Easter markets were in full-swing for the weekend. These markets are along the lines of the German Christmas markets, looking somehow like little settlements of tiny houses that had popped up in the middle of the squares all over the city. Traditional Czech snacks baked at these markets included fresh crepes, grilled meats of many varieties, and rings of crispy dough covered in cinnamon and sugar.

Our centrally located hotel provided a respite for an afternoon nap (the drawback of taking a night bus is that one must then attempt to sleep on a bus), and the hotel personel even spoke some English. So many tourists choose Prague as a vacation destination that English is practically ubiquitous in the city. Don speaks very little German, and even less Czech, so we were hoping to get by relying on a combination of my German and our English, but we didn't have to resort to German once during the weekend. The hotel clerks, the waiters and waitresses, the vendors at the Easter market, and nearly every other tourist in city spoke English. We overheard English conversations where participants spoke with German accents, Italian accents, Polish accents, Swedish accents, Russian accents, Turkish accents and probably more that we couldn't place.

Before sunset we managed to squeeze in a visit to the theater district and the "Dancing House," a marvelous piece of architechture constructed in an hour-glass sort of shape, giving the distinct impresseion that this building is dancing with the neighboring one. After another stroll along the river, it was definitely time for dinner, and we found a rustic looking place with a small non-smoking room. Food in Prague is cheap and beer is cheaper, we discovered. One famous traditional Czech meal is roasted pork knuckle or knee, which Don was brave enough to try. I was going to try the rabbit, but decided on chicken in honor of the poor Easter bunny who was out working so hard that evening. I had been warned that sometimes in European restaurants, waiters will seat complete strangers together, just so everyone has space. This had never happened to me in six months in Germany, but our first day in Prague, the waiter at the restaurant seated a Dutch couple at our table just as we were finishing off our beers. Of course, they spoke English. After a few minutes of chatting, we bid them good evening (we had already sat in the restaurant for nearly two hours) and headed back to the hotel.

The next day was Easter Sunday, but Prague didn't seem to notice. Everything was as bustling as the day before and the sun shone just as brightly. We started our day with a bus ride to the Prague zoo. Because of the zoo's combination of very old exhibitry and very new remodeled exhibitry, the trip was interesting (at least it was from a zookeeper's point of view). My favorite exhibit was one built for Ibex (a type of mountain goat) into the side of a huge hill. Rather than level the monstrous hillside, the zoo constructed an exhibit using the escarpment, which was probably five stories high at it's peak. It was amazing, but probably hell for keepers who must have needed climbing ropes and grappling hooks to clean it.

Our agenda for the day also included a trip to the Museum of Communism, a grass-roots sort of place on the second floor of an old building above a McDonald's. The posters advertising the museum featured a Russian nesting-doll with fangs. The musuem was full of old relics from the days of communist Czechoslovakia and painted a bleak picture of soviet Russian rule there. We went to the Jewish sector of the city after our experience with Marxism, and looked at a couple of synagogues and the Jewish cemetary. We seemingly followed in the tracks of the Obama family, who had visited Prague only one week earlier, as we discovered painted onto the window of one of the Jewish wine-shops a quote along the lines of, "What a delightful place! I will be sure to return here on my next trip to Prague--Michelle Obama."

For our dinner we chose a restaurant we had passed the day before, but had been too full of pork knuckle and chicken-kebab to try. We ate late (garlic soup and mixed veggie salad) and stayed a long time because our bus out of the city didn't leave until midnight. As our last stop we sat in a tiny bar along the main drag, watching the late-night crowd of Prague, listening to the radio play American music, and drinking a strange Czech alcohol called "Becherovka" that tasted spicy, like gingerbread and Christmas.

When we stepped off the bus in Magdeburg at 6am on Easter Monday, it felt like it had been ages since we'd left. The sun was just rising; our feet were heavy, but our hearts were light as we walked back to my apartment to get some well-earned rest.