Subject: :D
Hoi zaeme!
Wow! I feel so LOVED!!!! First a letter from Dad on Tuesday (6 days, Dad, based on the postmark) :) with some great articles, then on Thursday, letters from Anne Marie AND Matt, THEN today, a PACKAGE from Bren! With an AbsolutePenn tshirt! Not to mention ALL the emails I've gotten from everyone in the past few days!
THANK YOU SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH!! :D
I'm so glad to know everyone's doing well! Shell, I've taken about 15 rolls of film already- (there's no way I could POSSIBLY let all these incredible places go by without capturing them on film, in sketches, everything!) :) Taryn, I am saving these emails, and Mom is too. Nora, vielen Dank fuer deine gute Nachrichten aus Budapest! Ich werde dich SOFORT anrufen, wenn ich nach Ungarn reise! Und zwischen jetzt und Juli ist das ja eine Moeglichkeit! Warum nicht? (Genau!!!!) ;D
Ok, maybe I should finish telling you about Praha (that's Prague, Prag in Czech). There is SO MUCH culture there, not just beautiful sights- and it's so incredibly accessible!
The first night we went to see Don Carlos at the State Opera House- we had standing room tickets (50Kc- about US$1.50) but ended up sitting in about the 7th row, and could see everything beautifully. It was the first time I had ever seen an opera, and I really enjoyed it, even though it was sung in Italian with Czech overtitiles, which meant I couldn't undertand it at all! (understanding "si" and "ascolta" doesn't count as following the Italian!) :) The music was beautiful, and the theater was amazing- it kind of reminded me of the Semperoper, but I think I liked this one even better! (an tough thing to say) I think when I get back to a country where I speak the language I'm going to buy a CD of this opera (with the lyrics written out in the little booklet) so I can understand what happened!
..side note- I think it's kind of cool that I can say "in a country where I speak the language," not just "in the US," or "in an English-speaking country!" :D .....ok, back to my story....
The next night (Wed) we went to a classical concert in a baroque church just on east side of the Charles Bridge. We had reserved seats in the pews and listened to an organ, violin, and a flute from a balcony on the right hand side, between us and the altar. The music was beautiful, and I pulled out my baby charette to capture the back wall behind the altlar. I felt like I could have stayed there forever- there is such an overpowering feeling I get when I listen to music like that, especially in a setting as fittingly beautiful as this cathedral- I feel so much a part of the whole experience, as though it swallows me entirely!
On Thursday night we decided to see a marionette theater, since apparently they are famous in Prague. (I didn't know that either, but marionettes were for sale in virtually every store, and there were advertisements everywhere for performances.) We found one on Karlova street- Orpheus.
This could be pretty good, we thought, a marionette interpretation of a Greek myth? We started to wonder, though, when there were only 6 of us waiting at teh door at performance time. A man came and opened the door and led us up a narrow stairway above the Greek restaurant we had just eaten dinner at, and into what looked like an attic with bleacher seats.
In front of us was the marionette stage, with its little red curtains and a little "vorstage?" (sorry- complete brain lapse- I can't think of what this would be called- it's like a little extension of the stage, about where the orchestra pit would be in a theater) Anyway it was made of three planes- plywood?- propped up against each other like presentation boards for a science fair project. I was hoping nothing would be happening in this little stage extension, because we'd all be able to see the puppetteer there, because of how the seating was arranged. The whole set up did not look very professional at all, and I kept telling myself that the performance would compensate for the outward appearance. ...Hah! When a man climbed out from under the main stage to the little front part, waving his big shiny black cape so that we "wouldn't see him," and when he starting swaying back and forth with a big papier-mache mask-on-a-stick to the canned harp music, we all put our heads in our hands, and just hoped the marionette part would be better. But then when he "vanished" under the stage with a sickly attempt at theater smoke, and the curtains opened to reveal a very clumsy attempt at a puppet, which flailed its arms in the air in a poor attempt to strum the harp floating in the air in front of him, we all realized that it was going to be a LONG hour! (I think I could've put on a better performance BY MYSELF when I was in 4th grade, than these FIVE people sold us for about ten bucks!) I was kind of hoping for something more along the quality of The Sound of Music, or something....
Oh well, so we had one dud. But out of all the stuff we tried, that's not too bad. AND we laughed about it for the rest of the week! So hard our stomachs hurt, and tears were streaming down our faces! (The winning quote belongs to Chris: "That was
SPE-SEE-AL..........DIAPERS smell SPE-SEE-AL!")
While we were in Prague, we ate really well, too! And very internationally! One night we went to a French restaurant, where I had RABBIT (it was delicious- very tender, very sweet- definitely a first for me!) We went to a Greek restaurant the next night- sorry Inachos and Taryn, I have NO idea what I had- the menu didn't have a good translation- just "Greek specialty"- but that was also very good. And of COURSE we ate Czech food! From what I can tell, they eat a lot of pork and dumplings, with gravy, and sometimes sauerkraut (substitute spaetzle for these dumplings and it tasted just like a good cold-weather Gramma meal from home! Yummy!) We ate so MUCH, too! Soup &/or salad with the meal everynight, and sometimes an appetizer or dessert! After being almost veggie in Zuerich bec meat's so expensive there, the very meat-based meals in Prague tasted very good! (And by the end of the week I felt like I must have gained 5 pounds!)
So what else about Prague? I told you about Old Town Square, OH! The Castle! On the other side of the river is a big hill, completely covered in a dense mass of buildings, with a huge cathedral in the middle, at the top. You can't miss it. This is Prague Castle, which has historic significance, and is also the seat of the Czech government. You can go up the bell tower of the castle and get an incredible view of the city, and that is a must-see. It took us a few days to actually get there- Tuesday it was kind of rainy- more like it was spitting- and Wednesday we got there just before it was about to close. On Thursday we finally made it, and spent several hours wandering around the area.
THe cathedral looks a lot like the Koelner Dom (Cologne cathedral) with a huge growth of a bell tower stuck to the south side. There's a big plaza on the south side, but the whole thing is completely surrounded by a wall of buildings, kind of like the ones in Old Town Square, but with no arcades or anything- much more of a solid wall. There is a beautiful mosaic on the side of the bell tower, 13th century with glass tesserae (pieces) that it mostly covered on scaffolding. Most of what is exposed of it doesn't look all that impressive- frosty white, not much else. But through the mesh and scaffolding I could see a bit that was already restored, and the colors are brilliant! I tried to take a picture of it, but I don't know that it will come out that well. Inside the cathedral there was an explanation of what was going on. There was something wrong with the glass when it was first installed. (Sorry, but I don't remember what it was.) At first it was a brilliant mosaic, known all over. But over the years (way back- long before Industrial Revolution pollution even existed) it started to cloud over with the weather. Several attempts were made to restore it, but they were usually more damamging than helpful. In the past few years there was a big study done- I think MIT had a big part in it- to figure out HOW to restore it the "right way." They came up with something, delicate cleaners, a coating to put on it to protect it from further weathering, and now are working on the actual restoration. Ok, so that wasn't a very informative explanation! :S
The inside of the cathedral itself was spectacular. (Ok Nora, this is coming from am American who hasn't seen ALL that many European cathedrals in real life yet!) :) The colors of the stained glass were very rich- deep reds and blues, I think some of my favorite that I've seen so far!
We went down to the crypt, where there were......a bunch of dead guys! No really, kings were buried here- Charles (of Charles Bridge and several other things in the City), Wenceslas- good king Wenceslas (of the Christmas carol!) and several others (mostly II's and III's and IV's)
So Good King Wenceslas was a real king, in Prague! I always wondered. (In Czech his name was Vaclav.) Now I'll think about Prague whenever I hear the Christmas carol! Cool!
After walking around the cathedral for a bit Chris and I headed up the bell tower. This was a crazy, seemingly endless circular staircase, very narrow, and not many windows for points of reference. It seemed to take a lot longer to get up this tower than the Siegesaeule in Berlin!
But when we got to the top there was a big area to walk around and get spectacular views of the city! It was a square-shaped ring, with an extra protrusion off each of the corners, so there was more space to look out from. And at each corner there was a map, actually a sketch, of what we could actually see, with a crazy warped perspective, so that the horizon formed a circle, and the tower was at the center. It worked very well for describing what we saw, and it was so detailed! I've seen a few of these since I've been in Europe- there are some good curved drawings like this in Switzerland that describe the mountains on the horizon- and I think it's a really great idea!
We spent I don't know how long walking around and around the tower, just looking. We could see all of the city so well, with all its red roofs, and spires. Oh, that's another thing I noticed in Prague: a lot of the towers here are rectangular, and the sides of the roof all slope with the same steep pitch, (say 75 degrees), so that rather than coming to a point, they come to a line at the top, with TWO points! it looks kind of neat!
Anyway, we could really see from there that Prague is a city of spires and bridges- there are so many brides going across the river! At least 7 or 8, I think. And I'm trying to think of the name of the river- it's very different in Czech (and hence on the maps) than in English. Vtlava in Czech, and Moldau in English, I think?
Tbe river is pretty defining in this city. It goes north and then makes a sharp turn to the east (or maybe in the other direction? I don't know which way the water flows.) Anyway, in this elbow is the main chunk of the historic city. This is where Old Town Square is, among other things, pretty much plop in the middle of the elbow.
If you go west from Old Town Square you get to a bridge of 16 arches, Charles Bridge.
This is a pedestrian bridge, built of stone and very wide. There are big stone walls on either side, perfect height for leaning on to look down at the river or sitting on. There is a little protrusion where this wall juts our a bit, over each of the piers, and there is a big stone statue on each of these protrusions.
There are always "throngs of tourists" (to quote the guide book) on this bridge, which is cool, but it made it hard to take night photos from here (which is so incredibly tempting!) because you need a really long exposure time, and people end up as streaks moving across the film. (I tried to take a ton of night shots from here anyway!)
OK, if you go back to this elbow picture, if you cross to the west side of the river across the Charles Bridge, and then head north, the land starts to slope dramatically. This is where the Prague Castle is. And further s outh on the river, about 2 bridges down and on the east side, is the new Frank Gehry building- the one that's supposed to look like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing! We walked down there one day, spent a few minutes looking at it, but we couldn't go inside- it was Saturday, and it was closed. It was kind of neat, very much a Gehry sculptural building (although the first I'd ever seen in real life) but I didn't really have any desire to stay there longer.
On Friday we decided to make a day trip to Karlstejn, which is a little town abour 30 minutes away from Prague. It's big attraction is the huge castle up on the hill, overlooking the town.
When we got there it struck me as what I'd always pictured a little eastern European countryside town as looking like, although I'd never seen one before, so I really didn't know. We got off the train at a quiet little train station, tried to read the map, which had been sitting out in the weather for a few years too long and so was no longer legible, and then just started walking down the dusty gravel road. There were trees along the road, and fields on either side of us, and to the left there was a stream- little river- about the size of Schoharie Creek- a road, an then the land sloped up steeply, almost a cliff, to form a relatively low mountain (or tall hill?). Up ahead of us was a steel tube bridge crossing the creek, fairly sleek- just a simple arch above the road, definitely built within this century, but nothing spectacular about it.
When we turned to cross the bridge and right up to the cliff, I really felt like I had been dropped in Fort Ann or Whitehall. (Little podunk towns in the middle of nowhere between New York and Vermont.) We got to the other side of the bridge, and kept walking, hoping we were going in the right direction (but we really had no idea- we couldn't read the signs!), when suddenly the castle appeared on the next hill, just around the corner!
The guidebook said it had the appearance of the stereotypical (quintessential? is that the right word?) Bohemian Gothic castle, which it did. It was sitting up on top of foreboding cliffs, with big stone fortress walls around it, and had reddish dark brown half-timbered walls (against off-white). And it was just sitting there, looking down on all of the village below, making its overpowering presence known.
Chris and I walked up the road, which was one continuous tourist trap- so many little shops with tshirts, trinkets of Bohemian crystal, general kitch. But the houses themselves were very quaint- all half-timbered, with sloped shingled roofs. We got up to the castle, but just at closing time, so we couldn't get in. (We left Prague after lunch, so didn't know what to expect as far as time was concerned.)
But that was ok, we'd heard the outside was much more impressive than the inside anyway!
We took our time walking back down the hill, Chris kept laughing at me for how many pictures I was taking (but for someone who has only taken 36 pictures in his entire LIFE that doesn't take much!).
We got back down to the bridge just around sunset, and the water was incredibly calm, and the hills and trees and houses all reflected in it beautifully.
It all had a very misty-painting-feel to it.
So we sat down on the side of the bridge and watched the sunset, which was spectacular.
Such vivid reds, oranges, salmon-color, and little clouds, a mackerel sky floating by in various shades of blues and greys.
I really felt like I was sitting in the middle of a painting!- Hudson River School, or something. I loved it!
So that's pretty much my trip to Prague. We left first thing Sunday morning to head back to Zuerich. It's an incredible city, that I could definitely go back to someday. And one that I would recommend to anyone! (Just don't see Orpheus!) :)
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