Here's a photo from the top of the town hall in Old Town Square in Prague.
And here's one of a zillion photos I took at the Jewish cemetery, which is near several incredibly old synagogues that are mostly not in use but make up the Jewish Museum here. It is a huge tourist attraction. The cemetery, I should add, is also home to the grave of Rabbi Low, who, as the fable goes, creaed the Golem (or monster) to protect the Jewish community from persecution. We bought Devin a children's book about the Golem.
Here's a picture of me and Devin fooling around by the Vltava River on our first day in Prague, the sunniest and warmest day of the four we were there.
Devin on a pony after taking the funicular railway up the hill on the other side of the Vltava.
Crossing the famous Charles Bridge we ran into these fantastic Czech blues musicians -- the one with the horn plays his harmonica into it -- I was in heaven!
Prague is an incredibly beautiful city, but it is besieged by tourists, ourselves included. I've always wanted to go to Prague, since reading Milan Kundera in college, and I'd like to go back some day to explore some more, but maybe we'll stay at a place more off the beaten bath (like we seem to have found in Budapest) and see the city from a different perspective.
Stay tuned for the next installment of our 10-day European tour: Dresden.
2 comments:
A clarification on the Jewish Quarter: You comment that there are a lot of unused synagogues that make up the Jewish Museum. Those synagogues are the "Jewish Museum" only because the Jewish Quarter of Prague was preserved by Hitler to be a museum to an extinct race. As we know, almost all the Jews of Prague were killed, and there are not many left to go to synagogue, yet they were preserved by the Nazis to be a "Jewish Museum."
Thanks, Elizabeth, for making that point.
I've been meaning to post a much longer, intense post about the markers of the Holocaust we've come across almost everywhere we've been -- Budapest, Dresden, Prague and Berlin. Not just in the museums but in the actual landscapes of each city.
Oddly enough, we weren't clued in to the fact that there is a Holocaust Museum a couple of tram stops from our flat here in Budapest. We went last week -- it's a remarkable museum, and makes you feel in the pit of your stomach what it meant that 700,000 (one in 10 of the Jews who died in the Holocaust were Hungarian) were removed from the city and sent to their deaths in Auschwitz and other camps.
I learned today on another tour that only 200,000 Hungarian Jews survived and that there are only 100,000 Jews in Budapest today.
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