last day in prg!

I am a little behind and still have a couple more Prague postings to make, but for the sake of historical accuracy, today is my last day in Prague! 

Overall, I am ready to leave. Six weeks is a funny amount of time to be somewhere. It is long enough to make it feel like home for a bit, but it is too short to get everything done (when you have lots of reading and schoolwork to do as well). After the first couple weeks, which were packed with tours and such, it was nice just to get into a routine and have down time. But then, all of a sudden, it's time to go and I realize there were things I didn't get to do yet! We packed most of it in this week. For the rest, maybe I'll return someday. But for now I'm ready for the next adventure.

Tomorrow I am meeting my lovely mother in Scotland (she has been traveling there with some C'ville friends) and will proceed to crash their UK vacation. More pictures and posts to follow!

Everyday Prague

Just around the corner from our apartment is the Old Town Square. So here's a bit of my everyday sights. 

This is the church of St. Nicholas. I think the statues around the top look like lurking demons, especially at night.  

The guy on the left is Jan Hus who criticized the Catholic church saying that it should be giving money to the poor instead of building huge churches and being all extravagant and corrupt with the tithes. He started his own church, was then excommunicated, and later burnt at the stake. 

Old Town Hall Tower & Astronomical Clock

This clock tells the time, the date, and the astronomical sign. Also tells whether it is light or dark out. ;) And, on the hour, the two windows on the top open and you can see the 12 apostles file past inside. But in order to get a picture of that you have to get a good place in the big crowd that gathers at a quarter till the hour. 

Pretty buildings that look like a Disney World set...but they are real I promise. 

Church of Our Lady Before Tyn. If I am lost in the neighborhood I can usually see the towers and find my way back. It's easy to get lost because the streets are very winding. There's no grid system or conveniently numbered streets like back home. The stage and screen in front are for the on-going Eurofest Futbol parties that happen every night. 

Around the corner in the same building as our apartment is what appears to be a medieval weapons shop. ???

the crib

This is where I live! On the left is the bakery with the best chocolate croissants. On the right a store that I haven't been to. The black door is ours and makes a very old squeaky noise. The open windows on the top right is our apartment.

Our room, taken by my roommate Kelly. It looks so clean because we had yet to set our stuff down. 

Our IKEA'd out kitchen. Super cute! Bathroom on the left, but who really needs to see that. It's cute too though and each week we have a new color of TP. 

Auschwitz - Birkenau

Auschwitz. I don't really know how to sum this one up. It was intense and horrible. We learn about it in history, but is a whole other thing to stand where they stood, on the rail platform, in the barracks, the work fields, even the gas chambers. It is a whole other thing to see the evidence and all the little details. 

I didn't take a lot of pictures. This one was taken from the memorial steps, and shows the end of the train tracks and in the very far distance you can see the a large brick building which is the entrance to the camp. Somewhere inbetween is the loading platform, where after getting off the train the people were split into two lines...and you probably know the rest. 

It was a huge reminder of the broken world we live in. Horrible things are still happening and will continue to happen as long as we are in this world. I seem to go through phases of getting caught up in it and then ignoring it for awhile. But I think we are supposed to live in the tension, between joy and suffering, experiencing both. 

Upon returning to Prague I got an email newsletter from my dear friends Josh and Robin who are serving the poor in Romania. This part sort of sums up my thoughts:

"I believe we are called...to weep in places of suffering, to grieve in places of death, to pray and cry out to God for His peace, and to be present with ourselves and with those who are suffering. I believe we are to sincerely know we have a God who has known great suffering and who knows suffering still."

(Please read the rest of their letter here if you are interested, it is good stuff)

So I wept and grieved and prayed at Auschwitz. I realize that my emotional response is not significant in the big picture- but it reminded me of the big picture and the hope that we have in Christ. "For in this world you will have trouble, but take heart! I have overcome the world"

 

Krakow, Poland

We spent Thursday through Sunday in Poland. Krakow was a pretty interesting town and I could have easily spent another day or two there, as most of our days were pretty booked. Krakow is definitely more rustic than Prague and has not had as much renovation, but there was construction and renovation all over the place. 

Kazimierz Jewish Quarter was home to a very large Orthodox Jewish community, and the site of the events for which the film Schinlder's List was based. This is the wall to the cemetery that was built out of broken tombstones. All of the Jews in Krakow were sent to concentration camps. Our guide said that since they were such a large and close knit community, people knew nobody on the outside that could help them hide. For me it was sort of a reminder that no matter how different we are, isolating ourselves with our own kind is not a healthy way to live. Today the Jewish population in Krakow is nonexistent. 

Cloth Hall market "world's oldest shopping mall" built in 1555. I don't think the florescent lights are original. 

               

Wawel Cathedral from inside the Royal Castle walls.

Gotta love golf cart tourism! Unfortunately not included in our program fee. 

Hot air balloon outside Basilica of the Virgin Mary. This is a huge Gothic style cathedral that is still very well used, as like 75% of Poles are practicing Catholics. The hot air balloons were part of some festivities in the old square that also included a motorcycle parade and a high school jazz band concert. Random but fun!

Loren, Kelly, & Katy show off our jug & mugs of very good wine at a traditional 17th century Polish restaurant. We had a great time at this place. I ordered salmon, and while I am not sure that is 17th century Polish food, it was great. Kelly is my roommate and Loren & Katy are in my social work classes. 

Our last stop before heading back to CZ was Wieliczka Salt Mine. This place was pretty amazing believe it or not...Hundreds of caverns and passages and even cathedrals carved out of salt hundreds of feet below the ground. Here is our group in the largest cathedral (taken by one of the professors with a fish-eye lens). Even that chandelier is made out of salt. 

And here is my obligatory licking the wall photo. Yes it was very salty. 

Auschwitz post coming soon...

Hiking & Rafting!

Cesky Krumlov is very close to the Austrian border, where the Iron Curtain divided Europe into two parts from 1945ish to 1989ish. The Western Europe countries being mostly democratic, and the Eastern Europe countries being mostly communist members of the Soviet Union. 

So on Saturday we were bused into the Sudetenlands, the area of southwest Czechoslovakia that they repeatedly invited Germans to inhabit, only to drive them out. The history really is quite interesting...but other than cut and pasting from Wikipedia I really can't describe it well. :) 

It was pretty much the middle of nowhere. Several villages were built and destroyed at various points throughout history, the last being in 1951 to create a no-man's land border for the Iron Curtain. We took a hike to visit the (very sparse) remains of a church, cemetery, and other buildings. The land is now protected and part of a green belt that stretches through Europe. It also seems to be a popular mountain biking area. 

Can you spot the house?

On Sunday, the only way Eva (our Czech program director/tour guide/translator extrodinaire) could convince us to leave Cesky Krumlov was by the distraction of river rafting. We hopped in the rafts on one side of town, rafted through it and on towards Prague. Apparently it would take about a week to raft to Prague though, so we stopped after 3 or 4 hours and the bus picked us up and took us the rest of the way. 

It was such a beautiful day. In many places the the scenery was not unlike my native Sugar Creek, and it made me a bit nostalgic for a lazy kayak trip. But the river was more exciting, and there were 3 dams with built in raft chutes. So instead of portaging, we just got a little white water! 

If the whole social work thing doesn't work out, I think I am moving to Cesky Krumlov to become a river raft guide. :)

Cesky Krumlov

Our 3 days in Cesky Krumlov have been my favorite part of this program so far. It is a town of about 10,000 people (and a million tourists who pass through in the summer). The oldest part of the town was built on a meandering river and is surrounded by it on three sides. The town is also home to the second largest castle in the Czech Republic (but I would choose it over the Prague castle any day). Field trips and other adventures kept us pretty busy, but we still got to do some good eating, wandering, and relaxing by the river. 

Part of the castle, taken from the banks of the river in front of our place. I love how it is built into the rock.

Another castle shot. The part on the left is the Baroque Theatre we toured. Sadly no pictures allowed inside the theatre or castle.  One of the entrances to town is through the arch on the very bottom. My pictures don't do any of this justice, but I bought lots of postcards. 

 

View of the town  and river from on top of the arches in the previous picture. 

We stayed at "Penzions" which are like bed & breakfasts, just a few hotel rooms above a restaurant. I was super excited about the free breakfast (w/ nutella!), and loved starting each morning out here on the back deck over the canal.

The view from bedroom window #1

And bedroom window #2 

Amazing!! It was great to have fresh air and wake up to the sounds of the river.

Prison Camp & Brewery

Last Thursday we left on a road trip to Cesky Krumlov and made a few stops along the way. The first was Pribram Hard Labor Camp Memorial, where in the 1950's the communist government sent anyone who was politically active and against communism, in order to "reeducate" them. The living conditions were horrid and the prisoners were forced to mine uranium in the nearby mines, a pretty hard core job, especially for the artists, preachers, politicians and teachers who had no mining knowledge or experience. Here you can see the double barbed wire fence, watchtower, and the carts for uranium. The prisoners had fill up 8 of these things as their daily mining quota. 

The work camp was sort of intense, so our next stop was a brewery. The Platan Brewery is a family owned operation that has been in business since 1598. We got free samples of course which were pretty good, however I have yet to see this type of beer served in any restaurant or bar.

 

Shiney beer brewer thing.

Lots of bottles in action. Sort of reminded me of Sesame Street when they'd show how crayons were made or whatnot. :)