Prague
6/10/00

Our last day in Prague, and we'd hoped to go out to Kutna Hora to see the Bone church, but the activities of the day before kept us from checking the bus schedule, and when we got to the bus station, we were five minutes late! We planned to take the next bus, and decided instead to go shopping in Prague. We'd seen some cool shoe stores the day before, so we wanted to check those out. We shopped, bought some great shoes, and went back to Richard's place, where we discovered that we'd misread the train schedule and wouldn't have a chance to go out to Kutna Hora. We were very disappointed...

Instead, we repacked, and I photographed Richard and his apartment. He just got a very short hair-cut, because he says, his Czech hairdresser didn't seem to understand his instructions. He said this is a very typical Czech haircut.

More of Richard and his apartment.

These are views from his front room windows, and from the balcony at the back of the building.

More views of the garden behind Richard's apartment building. I would have liked to have gone out there, but he doesn't have the key.

The floor of the stairwell landing was even pretty, although it's also pretty dirty! We decided to head out to Vysehrad hill, a gothic fortification and complex of churches and castles, which is walking distance from Richard's apartment. We actually wandered outside the walls for a while, and found these exciting tunnels!

Donya thought some super-gothic photos by the wall would be amusing. I should have set the camera to B&W! then we headed back inside, in search of a bathroom, food, and more sights.

We were not disappointed, as we discovered that the restaurant is right outside a beautiful gothic church; we had a nice meal and took photos of the church while we sat and eased our very blistered and aching feet.

We had no idea when we walked in that this is the national cemetery where important Czechs are buried! It was beautiful, and had the most beautiful and unusual headstones and markers in it! I can't begin to caption these all, as I don't know who is buried in most of them, but they are so amazing. Clearly, artists created these stones. My favorite one of all is the spider web over the gothic arch pictured twice near the bottom of the page, but really, they were all so amazing - cubist, classical, modern, religions stones all mixed up together. I didn't know until after I left that Dvorak and Smetana are interred here!

If anyone knows what these hands on the wheel mean, please let me know. I saw this on two different markers. Outside the cemetery, we found these huge statues, which feature characters from important Czech / Bohemian folk tales. The 4th image is the statue of Libuse and Premysl.

I don't know who is featured in the other 3 statues, unfortunately. We walked around the top of the walled fortifications, looked down over the Vltava, and finally found a small green spikey gothling just as my camera was about to run out of power! We were running out of time anyway, so we walked down the path and returned to Richard's apartment to gather our things and begin the very long journey by train, tram, plane, and taxi back home. the rest of the trip was marred only by the large group of college-age German boys who accosted us on the train from Dresden to Leipzig, calling us Grufties and being generally irritating.

Retreat