From the southeast end ofthe square, we were a short walk from Statni Opera, the Czech Republic's State Opera House. We bought tickets to Puccini's Tosca which we'll see tomorrow on 5/30. The interior looks amazing from some photos we've seen and is fashioned in Neo-Classical style decor. Stay tuned for our thoughts on the Opera.A couple of blocks from the Opera, we saw a building that looked alot like a train station, and decided we'd go check it out. We didn't have our train tickets for Vienna yet, and thought we might look into locking those down. After a few difficult conversations in broken english and Czech, we have tickets, and think we know the drill for Saturday morning. It should be a scenic 4 hr trip getting us to Vienna (Wien) by noon on Sat.
Next, we headed to the Jewish Quarter called Josefov. When American's think of European Jewish Quarters, we immediately think to the WWII era, but this area dates back long before that. This quarter is a combination of two distinct jewish communities that settled in the area in the Mid 1400s. The West Jews settling around the Old-New Synagogue to the west, and the East Jews of the Byzantine Empire settling around the Old Shul where the current Spanish Synagogue resides on the east. The entire area is about the size of 8-10 city blocks, and isn't that big.
We first toured the Pinkas Synagogue which has been created as a memorial to the 77k+ jews lost during the Holocaust. Of the 100k jews in Prague when Germany invaded, about 80k of them were sent of to a concentration camp called Terezin located about 60 miles NE of Prague. Here many of them stayed before being sent off to Death Camps such as Auschwitz. Only 3k of the jews survivced to return to Prague after the war. In the Pinkas Synagoue on the walls is the inscription of all 77K+ jews lost. Really a shocking and touching memorial.
From there, we went to the Old Jewish Cemetary, which during the period of 1400-1600 was the only place Jews could be buried in Prague. From the photo below, you can see that the tombstones are densely packed, and in most places, the dead are burried 8-12 people deep due to lack of space.
We toured several ornate synagoues marking different periods and times in the quarter, and had a good time exploring save for the fact that things were a bit pricing, and photography was not permitted in any of the sites.
Next we grabbed lunch at Kafka Cafe named after famed Czech writier Franz Kafka sipping beer and enjoying people watching from our street side table.
From here, we decided to hoof it back home but do the Charles Bridge on our way back up the Vltava River. Charles Bridge is Prague most familiar monument connecting the Old Town with the Little Quarter which sits below Prague Castle. Until 1741, the bridge was the only crossing over the river. The bridge was commissioned by Charles IV in 1357. The bridge is pedestrian only, and is lined with statues of various Saints of Bohemia.
For dinner, we went to the raucus establishment next to our hotel called U Fleku which is pretty much a fun beer garten. Accordian players and tuba totting festively dressed guys play sing songy drinking songs and encouraged the folks sitting in the outside tables to get involved. There is only one type of beer available, and they walk around with it on trays for you to flag down when you're ready. They just keep a sheet of paper on your table with your tally that the "guy with the money" totals up for you on you way out. My tally reached 5 last night, mostly because I wanted to see if they would give me another mark at beer number 5, or would use the cross mark in typicaly tally style. They didn't do a cross. We had brats and a greek salad that were outstanding.
More stuff to do tomorrow, but am not sure I'll be able to blog it before we leave early on Sat morning to head to Vienna, and don't know if I'll have access to computers there.
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