4 days in Prague

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Hi all,

Well we have finished our 4 days in Prague and are now in a lovely little town surrounded by a river and medievel buildings called Ceske Krumlov, about 3 hours south of Prague. The bummer is we have hit an unseasonably cold patch, and it has been about 7 degrees and raining off and on. The place is still beautiful and we are having a really nice time relaxing after the hustle and bustle of Prague. We will be here until the 4th, when we head off to Vienna for 2 nights for our wedding anniversary (very exciting!).

Anyway onto Prague....
As Paul said in his last blog the first day we were there was pretty full on with all the tourists (and not even high season), but in hindsight it was really good to get the two major tourist things over and done with on the first day ( the Prague Castle and Charles bridge) this left us free to pursue less obvious excursions for the other three days...
I think that we both feel that the most amazing thing we experinced was the contemporary art that we saw while we were there. Two places that stood out were the Veletrinzi Palace and the Kampa Museum. The Palace has contempary Czech art (paintings, installations and glass) and some french art- including a section with some lovely Picassos, Monets and Gaugans. The Kampa is focussed mainly on works by Kampa (a czech modern artist) and other a few other modern artists. the work was donated by an american woman who collected it during the communst era and stored it in the US for safe keeping as non government artisits (think pictures of happy peasents poughing fields) had a very hard time. Both buildings were stunning arcitecturally, the Kampa especially, being right beside the river in an old mill. I think we have both been quite suprised that it is the modern/new czech (20th century) that we have enjoyed the most. The buildings and historical stuff is great, but the new Czech art is fabulous.

Another fantastic thing we did was go to the museum of communisim. It is very small, and qutie old school, you know the type with hundreds of props and dusty old models, but it was the only experince we had of how Prague was before the velvet revolution in '89 (when the communist system was overthrown in a period of 10 days of mass protests), and it gave really great context for the changes that have happened since. To tell the truth if we had not gone here, and read about the stuggles that the modern Czech artists faced during the communist era I think it would be entirely possible to go to Prgaue and not even be aware that until very recently it was a county paralysed by fear where all freedom of though was totally controlled. The money that must come in from the tourist dollar must be so fabulous for them, but we do wonder if in the rush to get away from what must have been such a repressed society, that visitors are not encouraged to become educated in the context of Czech society, though this is just as much the responsablity of the visitors.

Onto the food - we spent a lot of time seeking out epicurian adventures and the food was great, the coffee very variable, I suspect this may have had something to do with my inability to explain what I want. A lot of the time we were assumed to be american so got great huge cups of "kaffa americano"- yuk. I have not had too much trouble avoiding red meat, and had some really yummy duck, and vegetarian dishes. It is so reasonably priced too. A quite flash meal out cost us about NZ $30-40, so we are living like kings. I suspect Vienna will be a bit of a shock to the system!

We are both really getting into the swing of things, and spend a lot of our time planning new trips and other voyages- the travel bug has well and truly hit. Neither of us is worrying about what will happen when we get back to the UK, and are just hoping jobs and flats will present themselves when required (fingers crossed).

It is lovely to hear from everyone, and doing the blog does make us feel a lot less homesick. Actually the hostel we are staying at the moment is run by a woman who is a musician and when she heard we were from NZ she put on a NZ music complilation CD she was given by an Australian (our hopes were not high!) however, we were really pleased to here the soulful and distintcly NZ sounds of Fat Freddys, Phoenix Foundation and the Black Seeds!

Anyway that is all for now- Paul is being laundry boy while I type this, tomorrow we are hoping for some better weather. Paul will write and tell you about Ceske Krumlov

Jess

PS apologies for typos and bad spelling, no spell check and strange keyboards!

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