Cenral Europe Trip, Day Three

I forgot to mention that we also visited the Mucha Museum briefly on Day 2. On the way we saw some great examples of Art Nouveau including the Municipal House. Here is an example of a Mucha, one of Paul's favorites:

Day 3, Last day in Prague
I thought Day 2 was busy, but this day proves to be the longest day of all so far. First we visited the Jewish Quarter, including a few synagogues and the Old Jewish Cemetery. It was interesting to visit the practicing Synagogue and Paul wore a paper Yarmulke for the occasion. These pictures are of the outside of the buildings as we were not able to take pictures inside and of the cemetery.It was in use from the early 15th century until 1787. The numbers of grave stones and numbers of people buried there are uncertain, because there are layers of tombs. However, it has been estimated that there are approximately 12,000 tombstones presently visible, and there may be as many as 100,000 burials in all. The most important personalities buried in the Old Jewish Cemetery are Yehuda ben Bezalel known as the Maharal Rabbi Löw (d. 1609), Mordechai Maisel (d. 1601), David Gans (d. 1613) and David Oppenheim (d. 1736).
After a lunch of Czech street food in the Old Town and some free time to sight-see and shop we visited the Franz Kafka Museum. This fountain art was created by David Cerny and installed in 2004. The artist explains, "The project is a sculpture of two bronze naked men. They have swivel hips and, facing each other, they urinate into a pool shaped like the Czech map, writing famous Czech sayings in the water. One is by Kafka: ‘Prague is beautiful but it has claws.’

“There’s a Czech idiom about ‘peeing over somebody,’ which I guess translated into English would be to ‘get one over on somebody.’ That’s what the peeing men mean. It’s the way our country behaves,” he said.

Needless to say, the students enjoyed the Kodak moment...:) I'm glad Mr. Plank kept his photo decent.



The Kafka Museum was very interesting and different from any other museum I've been to. I have not personally read any Kafka, but Paul is an avid reader so he really enjoyed the museum and thought it was well-done, though perhaps some of the installations done by modern artists interpreting Kafka were misleading, according to Paul. Paul wrote about it on his blog... http://apieceofwork2.blogspot.com/
Our tour guide recognized that we were all tired, jet-lagged and hot, so we stopped in a park and took a rest. While there, some of us decided to go on an impromptu boat tour down the Vltava.
This is one of my favorite scenic shots, taken from the boat.





Paul with the Charles Bridge in the background.






I put this link here because it is one of my favorite pieces of music and was inspired by the River Vltava. The best-known of the classical Czech composer Bedřich Smetana's set of six symphonic poems Má vlast ("My Motherland") is called Vltava (or The Moldau), and is a musical depiction of the river's course through Bohemia.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdtLuyWuPDs


We saw a lot of street musicians in Prague and many street artists. They played everything from Smetana to Jazz and it was fun to stop and listen. The artists were mainly doing caricature portraits and watercolors or drawings.
The Bridge Band sounded like they were playing in New Orleans!



Nadia then took us on another walk to see the Memorial to the victims of Communism. It is a series of statues in Prague commemorating the victims of the Communist era between 1948-1989. It shows seven bronze figures descending a flight of stairs. The statues appear more "decayed" the further away they are from you - losing limbs and their bodies breaking open. It is supposed to symbolise how political prisoners were affected by Communism.


On our way out of town to have dinner at the hotel, we glimpsed The Dancing House by Frank Gehry and Croatian-Czech architect Vlado Milunić. It is also nicknamed the Fred and Ginger House as it shows two buildings almost dancing. It's formal name is the Nationale-Nederlanden building and it currently houses a French restaurant and multinational firms. Kind of a startk contrast to the rest of Prague!