We have two hard-and-fast rules when we are traveling in Europe – you will waste time, and you will waste money. Sometimes things do not go as expected, and you have to swing with it. One of the little joys we have had while traveling has been to go to English-speaking church services on Sundays when it is possible; it requires us to be in-country on a Sunday and to be in a big enough city to support a church that speaks English. Prague qualifies as both, so we found a church near our hostel that had a service at 10:30, and we dutifully arrived at 10:00 to find the doors of the building locked. Since the church met in a commercial building on one of the floors, we thought we might need to buzz in, but we could not find a buzzer. We stood there for a few minutes before we went to a cafe to get on the internet (and have a muffin).

I brought up the church website, and under the worship section it mentioned they now meet at 4:00 pm. Huh. I know I didn’t make up that 10:30 am time out of nowhere. Mer asked to see the computer, and she went to the church homepage, where it said, “Change in worship time June 23rd – 10:30 am”, which I took to mean, “Starting June 23rd, we will be meeting at 10:30, for summer hours.” It turns out they meant, “On June 23rd only, we are worshiping at 10:30 am.” I’m not sure why the June 23rd notice was still online on July 14th, but it meant we missed church – we were too late to get to any of the other services on time, so we went back to the hostel. It was about eighty-five minutes of wasted effort, but you will waste time when traveling.

We headed out to the airport to pick up the rental car. Prague is an amazing city, and we did not see anywhere near enough of it, so I am happy we will be back at the end of the trip for a day. We did the tram-subway-subway-bus trip out to the airport, where we picked up our bright green Skoda Fabia, which is the same make of car we had on our Croatia trip three years ago. Skoda is a Czech company, so we are playing to the hometown team.

My brilliant idea, with which I was very pleased, was to get the car out at the airport (as opposed to in the city) so that I could avoid city driving while getting used to a strange car, and a manual shift one at that. I also brought along our GPS with the additional map on it, which promptly told me to take a right. To the city center. Sigh. I’m not sure where the Hertz office is in the city, but at least the route I did take did not take me too far into downtown before getting me back on a highway.

We had an uneventful two-hour drive to our next destination, the town of Jicin, population sixteen thousand. Although that is a bigger number than I would have guessed, the main part of the town where our hotel is located is very small and walkable. We got checked in to the hotel by a very nice clerk who said we were the first Americans he himself had ever checked in. He had a preference for sixties and seventies American rock music, so we did not mind the check-in process at all while we listened to his playlist.

Once settled, we popped next door to a cafe for a snack, based solely on the fact the cafe sign had a cat logo, and there were painted cat paw prints showing the way to the door. We also ran into the first people with whom we’ve interacted in Czechia who spoke no English. Happily, there was one other customer there, and she spoke English, so she helped us, although we did end up with two orders of an excellent hot chocolate instead of one. I did not mind.

We wandered the center of the town, which is very cute, with colorful buildings and a tower. I saw people walking around up at the top of the tower, so I decided we should do that. I think it cost about $2.50 to go up – it’s not all bad being out of Prague. Near the top of the stairs, the tower opened up to a room which was filled with puppets who seemed to be performing for a king puppet. It was a little odd, as there was no explanation, which we could not have read anyway.

At the top, we paid the admission fee; the clever locals let you climb up to the top before charging you. Are you going to say no at that point? The views from the top were excellent, or so Meredith tells me. I was terrified of the height, and it was all I could do to make it around the perimeter of the tower and take a few photos of Mer before retreating back to the safety of inside the tower, where I happily looked out over the landscape through a window. It was excellent. Mer stayed out for two full circuits of the tower.

We had been told of a tree-lined alley that we could walk along that ended at a loggia (huge covered porch) that had been built by Waldstein of the Waldstein gardens and palace in Prague. It seems as if he built this and several castles around in the area. So we walked out. And walked. And walked. It turns out the path was about 1.3 miles long, but it did end in the loggia. As we approached, we heard music being played, so we popped up onto the porch to investigate, and there was a small Renaissance-style band playing, with a lute, and recorders, and a cello, and even a hand-pumped organ. We sat and listened to the free concert for about thirty minutes; it was completely unexpected. Just like the huge wind storm that blew in with driving rain. When we were over a mile and a half from our coats and umbrellas. So we waited the rain out, admiring the double rainbow that was produced, and then as I proclaimed we could just about go, we got a boom of thunder and some more rain, but mostly on the town side of the loggia. It was a very tight cloud, it seems. The rain finally stopped, and we headed back to town, dry.

Once we got past the tower, I wanted to see a small park to the left, so we went that way. As we got into the park, we heard music, so we delayed supper and went to investigate. It turned out to be a woman singing with her small guitar band. She was singing Irish songs that we knew, in Czech-accented lyrics, with (presumably) explanations to the audience as to what the songs were about. Probably. Did I mention we don’t speak Czech? We listened for two and a half songs, and then she wrapped up – we had caught the end of the concert, but it still was a delight.

After supper at an Italian restaurant, we went back to the hotel. We missed church and did not miss the city center, but we also stumbled into two unlooked-for concerts. Sometimes things do not go as expected, and that can be a very good thing.

Touring Europe allows you to see great art, history, architecture; experience new cultures and try new foods; hear new music and speak new languages; gain a greater understanding of the human condition. Then you hand the guidebook over to Matthew….

Today was the first day of the Czechia trip on which I was in charge of what we got to do; Mer and I split up vacation days so that we each take turns planning things (or winging things, in my case). My first day on the job was made happily harder in that it was supposed to rain, and it didn’t (other than a brief shower as we walked from a tram stop to a church). Good problem to have, but it required some midday modifications to the itinerary, which had been indoor-intensive.

We took a new (to us) tram to the Little Quarter, which is the area right below the castle. As we got off the tram, it started to rain, so we headed for the Church of St. Nicholas to tour the inside out of the weather. It was on my rainy-day list anyway, and it was a good stop. The inside of the church is as Baroque as I have seen anywhere. The Baroque era was (roughly) from 1600 to 1750, and involved elaborate, over-the-top decorations. In the case of St. Nicholas, it meant almost every surface was covered with decoration – it was almost hard to take in. My brochure from the church had a great line in it that made us laugh out loud, even as we tried to be quiet in a church – “The elemental lack of restraint in the individual elements is typical of the architect.” Quite so.

We looked around the church for a time and discovered we could go up to the gallery, where we could see the higher decorations more easily, as well as ten large paintings from the life of Christ. Mer loved the viewpoint, but I could not get near the edge to see things well. As we were about to leave, I asked the man at the door if the crypt was open. He looked confused and asked if I knew German. Since I did not, I left, much to the disappointment of Mer, who wanted to see me mime “crypt.”

By this time, it had stopped raining, so we walked down toward the river, going down and under the Charles Bridge, onto Kampa Island, which is full of shops and restaurants and is quite pretty once you get away from the bridge area, and it even includes a large working waterwheel. As we were walking through the park on the island, we heard marching band music – a full band arrangement of the pop song “Happy.” Of course, we had to investigate. It turned out to be the Copenhagen Show Band, touring around and playing in the park today. They did not march, but they did have a few dancers, and the band was very active in playing (swaying or waving instruments around), and they seemed to be having a great time. We stayed until they stopped playing, which was about ten minutes (which included a Disney-movie medley). It was a “happy” stroke of travel luck to stumble on them.

We headed over to the river to get yet another perspective on the city, and we noticed the river lock guide was decorated by a dozen yellow light-up penguins. As one has, of course. We struck up a friendly conversation with an older couple from Scotland, and the husband had been in the United States a few times, including Maine. He said he had the best blueberry pie he had ever had there. That pleased me very much – a little hometown pride.

From Kampa, we walked toward the castle hill, with my having the idea to take the funicular up the hill to save walking. But there was a huge line for the ride, so instead we went to look at the Monument to Victims of Communism. It is made of a series of statues on stairs; men who get progressively thinner and lose limbs as they get higher up the stairs, until there is nothing left. It is well done.

After lunch, we walked and took a tram up to the Wallenstein Garden and Palace. Wallenstein was a man who made a ton of money in the Thirty Years’ War in the 1600s, and he build this huge estate where the Czech Senate now meets. The grounds are open for free, and today part of the palace was as well. There are fountains and shrub-lined paths, and peacocks roam freely. There is a large artificial grotto wall that is kind of creepy looking with dripping rock formations, and an owlery. The palace main hall is huge, only topped in size by the Prague Palace hall, and it is now used for concerts and lectures. A few other rooms were open as well, but the hall was the main showpiece.

We used the subway to get back to Wenceslas Square, where we headed toward the Mucha Museum. As we got close, of course I veered into the Senses Museum instead. The museum is small, but fun, full of displays that trick your senses and mess with your head, including a spinning tunnel that makes you think a stationary walkway is moving, and a forced-perspective room that makes one of you look much bigger than normal. It was a good time, if not exactly high-brow culture.

When we came out, the day continued to be nice, so I improvised and took the subway back to the gardens area, where we then walked and walked and walked over the river and past the Charles Bridge and all the way over close to the National Theater. Later, Mer gently pointed out that we took the subway to a far point to walk back to a point that was only about ten minutes from where we had started. Oooops.

But we did get on the Vltava River. We rented a paddleboat for an hour, and we circled Strelecky Ostrov island and then sat quietly on the river looking at the Charles Bridge and surrounding area. We do like to see cities from the water when we can, even if it involves some unnecessary walking.

Having learned my lesson, we walked back the direct way, grabbing supper along the way. We got back to the square around 7:30, in time to buy tickets for the 8:00 showing of Srnec Theater’s black light show. Black light shows are a Prague art form in which black lights are used to highlight props that are then “magically” moved about by stagehands dressed in black. The founder of the Srnec Theater came up with the idea in the 1960s, and the show tonight was comprised of a series of ten-minute long skits involving lots of things floating and flying. There was a western-based one with a trotting horse, and a magician causing things to zoom about, and a woman hanging laundry that moved, and a fish that became a mermaid and back again, and other shows. It was brilliant fun – the skits were clever and funny, and the illusion was almost perfect (you could occasionally see a black-covered hand or arm if it got too close to the normal light). It may not have been the ballet, but it was a great time all the same.

We headed back home for the evening having put in our last full day in Prague for this trip. Tomorrow we head out into the rest of the country, which will hopefully be a different kind of museum of the senses.

We in the United States do not have a great sense of long history; it has not sunk down and become part of who we are. We celebrate historic buildings built in 1901 and put up “History happened here!” signs celebrating the dedication of a “History happened here!” sign in 1965, and these are fine – I find them interesting.

Then you hit Europe. Where the oldest operating synagogue in all of Europe, built around 1290, is known as (really), “the Old New Synagogue.” Since there was an even older synagogue around when the newer one was built, it became the New Synagogue. Then, after a few hundred years, it became the Old New Synagogue. When your “new” synagogue is over seven hundred years old, you have some history behind you.

After a too-early wake-up alarm around 7:15 am, on day two of jet lag, we had breakfast and then went to the old city, to the old Jewish quarter, where we met up with a Jewish tour guide and three other Americans for a three-plus-hour walk through the remains of the Jewish neighborhood of Prague.

I say “what remains” because in the 1860s, Jews were granted full citizenship rights by the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a larger part of concessions to minority groups to help quell rebellions. Since Jews were no longer required to live in a segregated neighborhood, the wealthy families moved out into the larger city, leaving the area to the Jewish poor, and later the poor in general. By 1900, the area was a slum, and the city razed most of it to make way for new buildings. They did leave a few synagogues and the old Jewish cemetery behind, as well as a few other important buildings.

We started at the Old New Synagogue, which is an Orthodox congregation. That means, in part, that women are segregated from the men who sit in a rectangle around the cantor who chants the service. The women watch and listen through small windows in the interior walls. I was surprised at how small the main room is – about the size of a large school classroom. It is also a reminder of how much time has passed that to get into the synagogue, you need to go down four or five steps; the synagogue was build at street level, meaning that the surrounding area has been built up that much over seven hundred years. And yet as recently as 2002, the building and environs were flooded by the Vltava River up to three or four feet deep.

We next visited Maisel Synagogue, which is no longer an active place of worship, but instead is a museum that tells the story of Jews in the Czech region. Many of the objects were given to the Prague Jewish community for safekeeping ahead of serious persecution during World War II. There was an excellent computer-animated movie of how the old Jewish quarter looked in the 1880s; a librarian made an accurate 3-D paper model of the city of Prague at the time, and remarkably, the model still survives, and became the basis for this short film.

We went on to Pinkas Synagogue, which is also no longer active. Instead, it has been turned into a very moving memorial to the almost eighty thousand Czech Jews who were murdered in camps by the Nazis. The name of every known victim is neatly handwritten on the walls of the building, while recorded voices quietly read the names of the dead over speakers. In addition, there was a small room filled with artwork drawn by children at a holding camp called Terezin. The children were allowed to have an art class, and some of the teachers hid the work safely away. It is hard to imagine the life the children led that brought them to draw things like being thrown out of school, or drawing a hanging of a Jewish man, or drawing pictures of the trains that took people away. It was at this synagogue that we learned that the Nazis required local Jewish leaders to pick which Jews would be rounded up; the Nazis asked for a certain number, and then the local council had to provide that many Jews. It was chillingly cruel.

Pinkas exits though the old Jewish cemetery from around 1400 to1700. There are something like twelve thousand headstones, but an estimated forty thousand people are buried there, as people were buried on top of older graves because of space constraints. Somehow, this cemetery was left alone by both the Nazis and the Communists.

The last synagogue we visited was Klausen Synagogue, which now houses a museum explaining Jewish holidays and traditions. I know a fair amount about Jewish holidays and customs from the Bible, but there are a lot of extra-Biblical traditions that exist. For instance, I had no idea there was a “Days of Sorrow” centered on remembering the destroyed temple from 70 AD and the one before that in 570 BC. It would be an interesting place to visit when we have more time someday.

We finished the now-almost-four-hour tour by walking to a statue commemorating Franz Kafka, and then on to seeing the outside of the Spanish Synagogue, which is under renovation for almost two years. Our guide showed us pictures from inside, and it is beautiful – heavily decorated in the Moorish style of geometrical shapes with bright colors.

The tour was very good, and our guide was very patient with all of our questions. It was a morning well spent, even on only a few hours’ sleep.

Since it was almost 2:00, we walked over to near the Charles Bridge, where we had lunch in a small coffee shop. Refreshed by food and rest, we walked back to the bridge, where we climbed the tower on the Old Town side of the bridge. It is a solid climb up about 150 stairs, but the views of the old town, the bridge, and Prague Castle were all worth it. In addition, I’m usually terrified of heights, but the windows that looked out from the ramparts were high enough that I felt safe.

The forecast had called for rain all day today, but we had only been rained on for short periods during our walking tour. It began to rain as we crossed the bridge to the castle-side tower, where we climbed up that one as well. That tower was much less crowded than the twin across the bridge; I’m not sure if it was because of the rain or because the crowds seem to hang out on the Old Town side of the bridge. Either way, it made for a pleasant viewing platform, even in the light rain. We retreated inside the tower for a few minutes when I saw some nearby lightning, but that passed, so we went back outside.

We walked back across the bridge and headed back into the Old Town. It rained hard for a few minutes along the way, but then stopped for the rest of the evening. Having a total of about twenty minutes of rain in a whole day of touring was a real blessing when we thought it was going to rain all day.

We jumped on the number 22 tram to take a scenic ride up to the castle area. Sitting while touring was a welcome change. We got off near the top of the hill to wander in a quiet neighborhood area, where we only saw four or five people, none of whom seemed to be tourists.

We took the same tram back to the center, where we ate a quick meal at a sandwich shop on the main shopping drag. It was not quaint, but it was getting late, and it seemed like a good idea to get back to our hostel to try to get a full night’s sleep – I’m in charge tomorrow, and of course I only have vague ideas of what we might do. I’ll need to sleep on it.

In the past, I have left as early as twelve hours before a flight was scheduled to take off – five hours to get to Toronto, three hours before an international flight, and then I left four hours of “squishy” time for traffic, food stops, border crossing, etc. After getting to the airport ridiculously early several times, I tried to aim for eleven hours, but we left late, so we actually left ten hours before takeoff. We skipped food (because of the early evening flight, we were just going to have lunch in the airport), breezed through the border, and hit no real traffic. As such, we were sitting at the gate three full hours before the flight took off. Which was then delayed twenty minutes. Meredith is pushing for nine hours for the next Toronto-based trip. She likes to live wildly.

The flight was uneventful, but the trip from the airport to our hostel was not so easy. Mer waited until we were waiting for the bus to tell me we needed to take the bus to a certain stop to transfer to the Metro. Fair enough. That we would take to a stop to transfer to another line. Okay. Which would take us to a stop where we would go up to street level, to catch a tram. In a city in which we had not traveled before, with signs in Czech, while jet-lagged. What could go wrong?

It actually was not too bad – we did struggle a bit with trying to figure out which direction of tram we should take, but Mer saw a famous church spire that got us fixed on the map, and we headed away from it toward our hostel. Never mind that it turned out to be the wrong church – it still worked. We also wandered a bit on the far end trying to find the right street, but it all worked out so that we were checking in around 9:30 am. Sadly, our room would not be ready until 3:00ish, so we stored our bags and headed out to explore the city – the jet-lag-breaking nap would have to wait.

We were smart enough to buy three-day passes for all public transportation in Prague, so the tram-to-metro and metro-to-tram riding we did all day was easy to do. We went down to the Old Town, where Mer took me on the start of a Rick Steves walk, starting in Wenceslas Square, which has a museum on one end, and the other end leads further into the Old Town. We ambled though the square in a little bit of a fuzzy-brained fog, but it was exciting to be in a new city (for me – Mer, of course, had been here for a couple days in the 1990s).

We went down a narrow and cool (if commercial) street that ended in a huge square where the Old Town Hall sits on one side and Tyn Church on the other. It is a really beautiful space, with pretty buildings, open space, and a huge monument to a priest who tried to reform the church in the 1400s – Jan Hus. He was excommunicated and then burned at the stake for trying to do so, but he has been a symbol of Czech independence ever since (even as they were dominated by the Habsburgs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire).

The Old Town Hall has a complex and cool clock from the 1400s that tells the time, the zodiac, the amount of daylight, the time of sunrise, and so on. Of course, it is so complicated, I could not figure out how even to read it as a clock. But, on the hour, it gives a small automated performance before sounding the hour, to hundreds of camera-toting tourists. First, Death turns over his hourglass and starts ringing a small bell. Then, two windows open up, and the Twelve Apostles appear at each window. Finally, a rooster crows, and the windows close, and then the hour chimes. It is a remarkable clock, despite seemingly not impressing the teen boy behind us who was being ribbed by his family for having a “we waited ten minutes for THAT?” attitude. He was smiling as they gave him grief. I liked the clock.

It was about noon, so we took the Metro to a quiet neighborhood for lunch. It was a little out of the way, but Mer wanted a quiet lunch away from tourist hordes, and it was lovely. We ate outside next to a small round “square” bordered by five-story apartments.

Back to the main square, we did more of the Rick Steves walk, passing through Ungelt Sqaure (where merchants once stored wares, since there were only two entrances), then peeked into a highly decorated Baroque church which was sadly closed, but had provided windows to look though. We wandered down to the Fruit Market Square, which was fairly small and cozy, and past the Estates Theater that now seems to focus on Mozart operas, and finally ended up at the Powder Tower, which used to be the main gate in the city walls. It is beautiful and imposing.

Next to the Powder Tower is one of the most magnificent buildings I have ever seen – the Municipal House. It is a fabulously decorated homage to Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau was a celebration of new techniques of construction that allowed the architects to incorporate elaborate curved designs into iron decorations and stained glass and tile work and mosaics. The Municipal House is pleasingly decorated inside and out with art everywhere. It is a grand building, and I loved it.

We had managed to get to the early afternoon, so we headed back to the hostel, getting there about 2:30. After an initial protestation from the new desk clerk that we were too early, the original clerk explained things to him and he let us have our keys so we could finally go get a three-hour nap, followed by a shower. We both felt much better after that.

We had supper in the same neighborhood as where we had lunch, in a small beer garden. There may have been a German tourist or two, but we did not hear anyone speaking in English. So, another quiet meal.

We finished the evening off by strolling though the now-lit city to the Charles Bridge, build by Charles IV of the Holy Roman Empire in the 1300s. The bridge is beautiful itself, and the Vltava River is pretty to look at, but on top of all of that, it overlooks the Prague Castle, started by Charles, and it’s one of the largest castles in the world. At the center of the complex is the striking St. Vitus Cathedral. It is a remarkable spot, even if we had to share with hundreds of other tourists.

As an aside, this bridge is shown in Spiderman – Far from Home, and I was able to identify where that scene was shot, which was very cool. But the movie shows the bridge empty of people. I’m here to tell you that is never the case on a good-weather evening; even a quick shower of rain did not dampen the spirits of the crowds on the bridge and in the small square.

We walked the full length of the bridge and back, and then headed home. Mer had figured out which stop to use on the tram to get us really close to the hostel. The only issue is that the tram going TO the city stops there, but the tram coming FROM the city does not. We discovered this the hard way, overshooting our stop by about a mile or so. We decided to wait for the return tram, but it was a little creepy on a deserted bridge in the dark.

And so, having clearly become masters of Prague’s transit system, we wrapped up day one.