Keep sleeping in later than we thought we would. The bed is cozy and the room is dark , cool, and quiet so why not? Another wonderful breakfast and we are armed with maps and cameras today. Jane is our tour guide, she did a ton of research on Prague and has mapped out our touring as well as research on restaurants. She hasn't steered us wrong yet!
We walked the Jewish Quarter today. The Pinkas Synagogue has an astoundingly hand painted interior, golds & reds with every square inch of design. Hitler had many synagogues torn down and contents stored in the remaining few like the Pinkas. Photographs show piles of pew & books. His plan was to use these remaining synagogues to exhibit how he exterminated the Jews. Luckily, he never made it and the synagogues are now a shrine to the past, with lovely collections of silver and tapestries. Many of the tapestries are embroidered with metal, very thin wire where we would normally use thread. I'm sure they were heavy, but they also lasted. There were also heartbreaking drawings made by children that depicted life in the Terezin Concentration camp. Following WW2, the names of all 77,297 Czech Jews that perished in concentration camps were painted on the walls. Being in the midst of all those names reminded me of how I felt standing in front of the Vietnam Memorial in DC - very emotional and overwhelmed. What a waste of human life. The best I can do as a visitor is honor those listed and pray we stop killing our fellow human beings.
The Jewish cemetery is the oldest surviving Jewish burial ground, dating back to the 15th century. The tiny graveyard is crammed with 12,000 visible tombstones and thousands more bodies stacked up 12-15 layers below ground. The local laws prohibited the Jews from burying outside their ghetto. It's an amazing & somber sight, the tombstones are so close together, most leaning into one another, that you would not be able to walk between them. Visitors walk along the outside path and you can see where trees have also grown up over the centuries disturbing even more of the giant slabs.
Clearly a cleansing and cheering up of our collective moods were in order after the somber sights of the morning. That means only one thing - FOOD! We eventually found a lovely outdoor cafe in the shade with a lovely breeze. Check out my Facebook page for a photo. Pam & Jane decided to do some shopping, and Frank & I headed to the Alfonse Mucha Museum. Lovely little museum with large originals of both many posters as well as the working drawings. We bought a nice poster of one of his Art Nuveau designs with the name of the museum on the top. We stopped at the McDonalds for a coke and were actually served a soda with ice! Cold drinks abound here, but not usually with ice. A worker yelled at me for photographing the menu inside! I thought it was fun to see the Czech wording, but apparently they have no sense of humor about such things!
For dinner, Jane took us to a wonderful restaurant down a winding set of stairs, in what looked to be an old wine cellar. Called "The Architect" it was nestled among a modern art design school or museum couldn't tell which. Best meal we've had- I had what looked like pot stickers, but we're more like pasta and they were filled with salmon, with a very light cream sauce. Jane had dumplings & Pam had snitchel. They also had a wonderful dark beer that was excellent.
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