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June 14th 2005

Published: June 14th 2005

First, to finish off Prague. We visited the Jewish quarter, which is the City's second major tourist attraction, after Prague Castle. It was once the center of Jewish life in the city, and its beautiful synagogues have become a museum. We took a tour through the same company that took us to Terezin, and I knew I was in the right place when I started talking to a fellow tourist, a guy from New Jersey about my Dad's age.

He looked at my block-M hat. "Hey, did you go to Michigan?" I nodded. "At my children's high school, which is in , anyone with a 1200 or higher on the SAT can go to Michigan." His tone made his thoughts on people with a 1200 or higher on the SAT pretty obvious. In case you were wondering, his kids went to Penn. Besides that, he was a really nice guy, and it was a basically good tour group.

The Prague Jewish community today consists of 1,500 people, but before World War II it was a major center of Jewish life. Even though most Jews had abandoned the Jewish quarter after emancipation (when Jews recieved citizenship rights) in the 18th century, it remained one of the centers of the community. It survived the war because there was never any fighting in Prague, since the Czechs could hardly defend themselves after France and the U.K. sold them out in Munich. One of the most bizzare facets of the Nazi regime is that different elements in the German government competed to be the "hosts" of museums of the defeated peoples. Prague's ancient Jewish quarter was to be the host of the Museum of the Extinct Jewish people. It was to be followed up with museums of freemasons, gypsies, and evantually, the entire Vatican would have become a Museum of the extinct idea of religion. Since it was supposed to be the big museum, the Germans, in their typical efficient fashion, sent Jewish artifacts from the rest of Europe to Prague for cataloging and storing. That exhibit was on display in one of the synagogues, a major show of Jewish silverware -- torah scrolls, pointers, etc. Nothing I found too interesting.

Another of the synagogues (all of which are no longer in use, and part of the Jewish Museum) hosted an exhibit on the Prague Jewish community, which was one of the most prosperous in Europe. By the time the Nazis rolled into town, the Prague community was entirely Reform and almost completely ignorant of Judaism. Observance was very low, and assimilation was extremely high. Our guide (who was a non-Jewish Jewish Studies Major at a local University who knew more about Judaism and Jewish history than anyone I saw in three weeks of Yeshiva in Jerusalem -- when asked why he took Jewish Studies, he wistfully responded "The Rabbi's Niece," and when pressed he revealed the she married someone else, and moved to America) commented that "What Prague Jews knew about Judaism, they learned from Polish Jews in Auschwitz." One of the synagogues contained an exhibit of the 77,297 names of Jews from Bohemia and Morovia who died in the Holocaust. Interestingly, the names were inscribed over four years in the 1950s. When Israel emerged triumphant from the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the communist government closed the synagogues and painted over the exhibit. It was reopened and reinscribed after the fall of communism.

The quarter had some really neat things, like the former Jewish Town Hall (from when the Jewish Quarter was an autonomous Borough with its own mayor, before Prague was unified) with a Hebrew Clock that counts backwards (the Hebrew alphabet is read right to left, so the hands moved backwards).

We then took a cab to Prague castle. The cabbie's meter ran insanely fast and we ended up getting screwed, AGAIN. I have rededicated myself to public transport; cabbies have stolen my lunch money too many times. It really ruins your day when a cabbie walks off with all of your money. The castle itself was really nice, although it had exhibits like exhumed medieval graves which I thought were in poor taste (do we really need to look at some poor guy's skeleton? Give me a break.) We watched a brief film on the castle. I call it brief because it was forty minutes but we left after five -- it went into great detail about the stained glass windows and other things that put me to sleep faster than one of this year's NBA Final Games). As nice as it was, though, the Sultan in Istanbul had a nicer castle. I'd live in either of them -- they are both nicer than the Castle on Long Lake and Middlebelt.

On the subject of the finals, how awful are the Pistons? It is enough to make me tell people I am from Windsor, not Detroit -- oh wait, we've been doing that all along on this trip! Locals tend to give you a dirty look when you say you are American, but a friendly nod if you claim to be from our neighbor to the north. In another aside, Prague food is great -- lots of McDonald's, Burger King's, TGI Friday's and American style Italian resturants. As for the national cuisine, its the typical meat-meat-meat diet that they seem to favor in this part of the world.

We left Prague early in the morning to get to Rome, which for some reason we connected to through Warsaw. Warsaw had an okay airport, but the resturants were awful -- get a McDonald's in there, please. We flew Polish Airlines, and our initial plane from Prague to Warsaw was a twin propellor deal -- kind of nerve-racking, but the nun who was a fellow passenger had her prayers answered and we made it safely. The flight attendants were all tall and insanely gorgeous, which seems to be par for the course for girls of Polish descent.
We made it to Rome safely, and our hotel is very adequate. This is our first hotel with a remote control in the room, which is a major step up from some of the places we have stayed. Alas, this may be the ultimate accomodation of our trip, because it is hostel class from here on out. We will be left pining for the days of two star hotels!

I didn't feel great, so I took a nap while Richard explored the city (He didn't make it further than a local Internet cafe, don't worry.) We then went out for dinner. For some reason, Coke is really expensive everywhere here. It was significantly cheaper to get wine with my meal than the carbonated refreshment I craved. It was 5 euro for a can of Coke (meaning no refills) which is about 6 dollars, a ridiculous price. I thought that resturant was a rip-off, but all the stands and other places also charge high prices for Coke. Something needs to be done about this.

We went to the forum this morning, which is visually stunning. Sadly, early Christians destroyed most of what the Romans had built, reducing Rome from a bustling metropolis of 80,000 to a city of 15,000 in a few short years. It was a symbolic smashing of the pagan culture that had ruled this part of the world for thousands of years. The guide kept using the word "recycled," which describes parts of say the Colosseum which now adorn St. Peter's Square. The early Romans had been such good architects and used such good materials that when someone needed Limestone, they just went to the Forum and took some from a building, or took marble from the Colosseum. What is left is still incredibly impressive, but it really pales in comparison to the stuff we build today.

I told Richard that the big difference between the Colosseum and Ford Field is that Ford Field has luxury boxes, and the Colosseum had Lions who always won. I thought that was a pretty good line, so I'm repeating it here.

We saw the ancient Roman Senate, which is one of the few buildings left standing in the Forum. As a Latin student, I really enjoyed translating inscriptions on buildings (translations you would be wrong to trust if you saw my translation grades from Latin) and seeing the place where Romulus founded Rome. I translated that stupid legend so many times that I wanted nothing more than to spit on that sacred spot and curse that damn She-Wolf, but I was on a guided tour and didn't want the other people on the tour to think I was weird.

We then went out to dinner with Richard's uncle and Aunt. Richard's Uncle told me an interesting anecdote about European racism which I thought was revealing. He said that he had a friend with a French mother and a North African father. This man is clearly French; he can claim no other culture. He said that when this guy (with a clearly ethnic name, something like Claude Ibrahim) calls buildings with Apartment vacancies, the manager asks him for his name, and when he responds "Claude Ibrahim" they promptly respond "We have no vacancies" and hang up. The guy who drove us to Terezin, an employee of a Jewish touring company, made an incredibly racist comment about Naomi Campbell. Europe has never been a diverse continent, and it seems like they still don't deal with diversity well.

I have had a request for a story, so I will oblige. When I was in Israel four weeks ago, I became really sick and was diagnosed with dysentery. I don't think I really had it, but that is what my Doctor's bill says. I became really sick one weekend, and it was right before my group went up north to spend an overnight in Safed. The main and only symptom was uncontrollable diarrhea, and it was the most unpleasant time in my life. I seriously thought I was going to die. I couldn't eat a handful of cheerios without running to the bathroom five minutes later. I was too sick to join my group, so I starved myself (a ritual fast!) to be able to make it to the new city of Jerusalem to get some medicine. So I walked, alone, starved, hadn't really digested food in four days, to the new city in search of Pepto. I am still amazed that I didn't die on the way there. Of course, as I'm walking, I pass three Michigan birthright trips and had to have obligatory courtesy conversations (the kind that Larry David hates) in this state of misery. I finally make it to a pharmacy but I'm so out of it that it takes me half an hour to figure out that all medicine in Israel is sold behind the pharmacy counter. I finally get what I came for (not really -- there was only one choice. This isn't the US where you get 14 choices, each with a cheaper generic, when you have an ailment. This was really the incident that just drove home how wealthy we are in America, and how lucky I am to live there.) I make it back and finally start to feel better when everyone comes back from up north. Disaster struck their bus, and two of my friends on the trip -- Neil and Kevin -- come back sick. Kevin had food poisoning, and proceeded to spend all night vomiting in our room. It was a noise that could have woken the dead, and it made you think that he was going to soon join them. When he woke me up at 3 am with this terrible groan I seriously thought that was dying. Luckily, he brought enough medication to start his own African Aid Clinic, and he was able to treat himself. Neil joined me with the solid dysentery diagnosis. This is when being incredibly sick went from awful to a great time. The old saying is true -- misery loves company. The three of us sat in bed for two days (it was a dormitory style room with 10 beds in 5 bunk beds) telling jokes and being really sick. We finally made it to a doctor who gave us an antibiotic, and after that we felt better (although Neil relapsed towards the end of the trip). I can't even describe how sick I was. I personally put three different toilets out of business, and I think I might've closed one of them down for good. Once Neil joined in (and then other people, male and female, came down with dysentary as well -- the ailment reached epidemic proportions), we came close to closing down the entire plumbing capability of our youth hostel. It was a dark, dark time in my life that I never want to repeat. I seriously wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. The only thing that made it bearable was that I was so miserably contagious that I gave it to my friends. Thanks for being there, guys!

Back to my travels, that is pretty much it. The food here in Rome is incredible. The women are gorgeous, but not nearly as much so as Greece (where I saw more beautiful girls in one day than I would see in one year in Ann Arbor, although I guess that isn't really saying anything) and the weather has been really nice. It is definently nice to leave behind gloomy Eastern Europe, with its grey buildings, grey skies, and building after identical building filled with apartments built during Communism that are too small for any respectable capitalist to live in, but somehow inhabit all the prime real estate (this is a real problem). Thank you again for reaching this point and I will be back soon with the rest of Rome and on to Madrid!

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