A Little Bit of Prague

We did so many exciting things in Prague, that I can't chronicle them all, so what I will do is include a few pictures of places we went.

Students started each morning with breakfast at the Hostel Santini.

 
You can tell it was a little cold and rainy, but the students were real troopers!

On our first evening after we had eaten in the nice restaurant, we wandered around the square where the big castle is. To get up to the restaurant and square there of course we had to climb.

But it was well worth it!

The square is huge compared to most of the squares we are accustomed to in Salzburg.

You can also get a really nice view of the lower city from the parapet.

 One of the first places we went together as a group was the Lobkowicz Palace. (Image courtesy of Wikipedia).

 

We had read about (all the) defenestration(s) of Prague, but of course what is so interesting, is that the Catholic emissaries were hidden by Princess Polyxena Lobkowicz in this palace after they had been thrown out of the Prague Castle window. Here is a painting comemorating the event that we saw in the palace.

There were lots of images of all the Habsburgs we had been studying and other important people and of course beautiful art by Brueghel, and Velázquez.

 

 And there was furniture and objets d'art and weapons.

And you could see wonderful views of the town below from the balconies.

Like this:

I think they enjoyed this!

 

We also visited the Cathedral, which was so big you couldn't get it into a single shot.

We also got a little time to ourselves to explore.

On our "free time," Pia and I went to a wonderful decco cafe near the Astronomical clock called the Municipal House Cafe. It is so named, because it is housed in the art nouveau Municipal House.

 

In contrast to the elegant restaurant we visited the first night, we chose a working person's cafeteria for our second dinner meal.

 

Here we got to eat like the locals.

We had a traditional honey cake dessert or chocolate cake as well as dumplings and a goulash stew.

A very cool thing was the students taking me to see the John Lennon memorial wall.  I am a huge fan and I found it quite moving.

One of the best things was just walking around the streets of Prague.

 

Of course everyone went to see the famous Charles bridge. (And as you can see the weather eventually got better and a bit warmer, but only very  gradually.)

In the morning of our last day in Prague we visited the Jewish quarter and large Jewish cemetery. We were able to drop our luggage off at the bus and then head to this section of town we had not yet explored.

We got to see this really interesting memorial to Franz Kafka. One of our German majors wanted her picture taken with this great German/Czech/Jewish writer.

We gathered at the Jewish Museum and then took a walking tour of the nearby Synagogues.

 

The cemetery was especially memorable, since the Jewish community had been forced to limit space, there were so many graves and markers pressed up against each other. Sadly, it was only preserved because Hitler had wanted to save this area as a testament to his destruction of the Jews and what he hoped would become an exterminated people.

 

 

And then once again it was time to go home. As we headed back to the bus the sun had finally decided to come out, so we said goodbye to the Prague castle in its full glory.

 
Here is the last shot I took of Prague as the bus headed across the river. It had been an unforgettable experience forus all.