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Sigh, a second year in a row that I miss Canada Day in Ottawa.
But that’s ok.
Today I enjoyed the ability to sleep in for once (yay for 2 nights in a hotel!) and then I headed out to Kutna Hora, an hour east of Prague.
I went to the bus station first to confirm my ticket to Frankfurt for tomorrow night (minor detail considering I have a flight later that day), and then I trekked back to the train station. Again, for an area that sees a considerable amount of tourists, I’m surprised no one I came across understood any English. Maybe I’m just lucky that way… but anyway, “Kutna Hora” is easy enough to say and I had no problem getting the ticket.
The ride there was interesting; I shared my compartment with a couple and their kid - the guy was a giant, easily over 7”. Obviously I could hear them talking to each other, turns out he’s a basketball player in Denmark. I got to hear all the lovely juicy gossip about the team members, and girlfriends, and wives, etc.
Arriving in Kutna Hora, I followed a band of English speaking tourists
hoping they knew where to go haha. Thankfully they did. (I did, however, take care to note how to get BACK to the train station for afterwards. Always good to know.) It was about a 15-20min walk into town which was mostly nice, except for the fact it was incredibly hot outside and I made the mistake of wearing long pants today. Oh well.
I finally made it to the Ossuary - or the Bone Church. It was absolutely creepy, yet oddly neat at the same time. Essentially, it’s a chapel that is completely decorated in human bones (mostly from victims of the Plague and the Hussite Wars). It’s estimated that over 40, 000 skeletons were used, and I believe it! You walk in and there are stacks of skulls climbing the walls. In the lower section, each corner has a huge stack of bones in decorative piles, there’s a coat of arms, the ceiling has banner-like bone decorations. The masterpiece, however is the massive chandelier - it contains at least one of every bone in the human body. Quite the feat.
On the way back I went to the Cistercian Monastery/Church of the Assumption of Our Lady
in Sedlec (quite the name!) for a quick look. There were tons of great statues inside the Church, and great pieces of art. I was quite disappointed to learn the building/office part of the Church is now the Headquarters for some Czech tobacco company… how crappy.
I managed to find the train station w/o any problems. Buying my ticket back to Prague was even easy - the lady didn’t speak a word of English, but again saying “Praha” is simple enough to get the point across.
Upon arriving back in Prague, I popped into the Old Town to make sure I knew where to go tomorrow morning for my tour. On the way I passed the “Sex Machine Museum” and just couldn’t resist. I didn’t expect much, and really, there wasn’t much… but it was absolutely hilarious. It was mostly a lot of weird sex toy/fetish things, but the 1920’s porn clip was so bad it was funny. There happened to be 3 other girls in there at the same time as me, and the 4 of us couldn’t stop giggling.
Ah, the joys of Prague.
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Irene
non-member comment
church of bones
Cool! Maybe we can blow up the pictures and use them to decorate for Halloween! How odd that the monks would think to do that...isn't it a tad disrespectful? But very creative!