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Published: July 31st 2006
Dejvicka
Waiting for the metro at our stationToday we got to sleep in before making our way to the Jewish Quarter. First we went to lunch in Old Town...pizza again (we have a hard time deciding what we want to eat). We wandered around Old Town Square again.
We finally got to the Jewish Quarter. We bought a ticket that got us into four synagogues, a cemetery, and another building. Maxine served as a wonderful tour guide through the museums in the Synagogues, letting us know what everything was and saving us the trouble of reading the displays (luckily, there was some English).
The first synagogue was the Pinkas Synagogue. It had the names of every Czech person who died in the Holocaust. The names had to be written three times, re-written once because of the Communists and once because of flooding. There were 80,000 names written on the walls. The synagogue also had an exhibit featuring art made by the children in Terezin. This exhibit really shed more light on Terezin as the "model" concentration camp, shown off to the Red Cross as a center of Jewish culture, etc.
Next we went to the Old Jewish Cemetery. From 1439-1787, it was the only place
Old Town
Enjoying ice cream in Old Town Square that Jews were allowed to be buried. For this reason, and because according to Jewish tradition, once a body is buried it is not supposed to be moved, there were graves everywhere. There are about 12,000 tombstones there, but even more people than that are buried there.
After that we went to three more synagogues with exhibits on Jewish traditions, culture, and history, as well as a ceremonial hall. This was when Maxine did the most tour guiding, which was really helpful.
After seeing all the sights in the Jewish Quarter, we went shopping for a bit. For once, I didn't buy anything 😊 We went back to the dorms to relax for a bit, and then went back out for dinner. We ended up back in Old Town, looking for a restaurant that no longer existed. We ended up in yet another Italian restaurant, and, as usual, I ordered the least expensive thing on the menu, which was really good.
On an unrelated note, the most annoying thing in Prague is not the occasional creepy European man or the people that do not believe in deodorant, but rather the "purple name tag people." These people showed
up in Prague on Thursday and have been lurking behind every corner ever since. We learned today that it is a group of Jehovah's witnesses from all over the world. Their nametags say something like "Deliverance at hand" in a bunch of different languages. (I don't know how well this is going to work out for these purple nametag people, seeing as the Czech Republic is one of the most atheist nations in the world.) Anyway, they are EVERYWHERE, running around the city, congregating in restaurants and in our dorm, and pretty much annoying me. (Note to family: they have definitely earned plenty of "stickers"). I will be very happy when they finally leave.
OH, and I had my first "Sedlacek" spotting today, in a reading for my class. I was pretty excited about it.
More photos from today are up on facebook. Here's the link, same as always:
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Dave
non-member comment
Adventures
Sounds like some adventures. It's been almost two weeks since we've made direct contact. It seems like you've had all sorts of crazy adventures. We'll have to swap stories when we both get back into Mizzou. The best story from the states, of course, is our Cubs' four game sweep of you Cardinals. Enjoy your last few days abroad, and drink a beer in my honor. Hope to talk to you soon!