Day Twelve: Getaway Day

Hello! After a more-than-three-week absence, I am continuing with Winter Vacation!  With only a couple weeks left in France, I might be posting a lot less as I spend as much time as I can actually living, and what posts I do make will be current, real-time posts instead of recounting my vacations.  But since there are only a couple days left of my Winter Vacation, I will try to finish that one, at least. Once my contract ends, I will continue recounting my vacations here, as I think those vacations still have stories to tell that can't be recounted in pictures alone.  So, in conclusion, stay tuned!  It's gonna be a hodge-podge couple of weeks!  And without further ado, here's Day Twelve.

No.  Food.  Stolen.  It’s a miracle. Go buy lotto tickets or something, ‘cause this might never happen again.

After packing, getting my deposit back, and leaving my backpack in an oh-so-secure dark storage room without a lock, I hurried over to Old Town Square and the meeting point for my free (!) tour with a local guide that the receptionist had recommended last night.  Much of what we covered on this tour I have already incorporated into my other posts, so I’ll try to keep those parts to a minimum and focus on what I have heretofore neglected.  But first of all, the tour group itself was incredibly international.  The guide, of course, was a Czech girl named Jan, and she was talking with a couple from Finland when I walked up, then a couple made up of a Mexican guy and a German girl studying in Munich walked up, followed by a couple of friends teaching in Berlin but from Poland and the States respectively, a Brazilian guy, and a family from Canada.  You’d think the family would be a single nationality, but nope!  Mom is originally from Germany but married a Greek man, and they moved to Canada and had their son, who could speak Greek, German, French, and English.  And his girlfriend was of Asian descent.

Whew.

So of course we started off in Old Town Square with a view of Our Lady of Týn Church, Old Town Hall, and the clock, where we saw the end of a marriage ceremony!  So cute!  She also explained how to read the astronomical clock, but with her strange accent and manner of speaking (speechies, she talked like really bad high school Radio performers), I could only understand what I’ve already told you.

Aw!

From Old Town Square, we walked to the old foreign merchants’ market where foreign merchants paid to be able to sell their wares.  It’s also where Jan told us the ghost story of the Turk and a blonde barmaid — one I hadn’t read in the Ghosts and Legends Museum.  In short, there was a Turkish man who fell in love with a white barmaid with long blonde hair, and they made a secret arrangement to get married, but he had to go back to Turkey, and so made her promise to be faithful, and he would marry her when he came back.  Of course, he took forever coming back, and a girl can’t wait around forever, and so she got married.  The day he came back.  He, being beyond pissed, asked if he could just talk to her a moment before the ceremony to give her his best wishes.  And she was never seen alive again.  A year later, the barkeep asked another barmaid to go down into the basement for some supplies, and she screamed.  The barkeep rushed down and nearly fainted.  There, sticking up out of the ground, was a skull with long, blonde hair.

Yeah, I didn’t think it was that scary either.

St. Jilji Church was our next stop, and I think it was my favorite of the entire tour.  Huddled outside of a rather unimpressive building, Jan told us yet another ghost story, but this time, it was entirely worth it.  On some day of note, people would put necklaces of silver or gold around the neck of the church’s Mary statue.  A man, poor and down on his luck, thought to steal these necklaces to change his fortune, so he broke into the church late at night, but when he went to reach out for the necklaces, the statue grabbed his forearm so tightly that he couldn’t move.  He tried to extricate himself to no effect, and he had to wait until morning for the priests to free him.  But even they couldn’t.  As a last resort, they chopped off his hand, and the statue let go of his arm.  They church hung up the bodiless hand as a testimony to what happens when you try to steal from the church.

And the hand is still there.

Besides the freaking awesome story (and evidence!), the church interior almost floored me.  After seeing probably around 50 churches or cathedrals in my lifetime, including the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Basilica, I can honestly say that this church was the best decorated.  Decked out in all different types and colors of marble, gold filigree, lively and flowing Baroque paintings, and frescoes on the ceiling, it risked being just as ostentatious as Budapest’s St. Stephen’s Basilica, but somehow it worked here.  Maybe it was because they didn’t make you donate at the door, or the fact that we were the only tourists in the church at the time, but I would describe the décor more as unassumingly elegant than overwhelmingly opulent.

Interior of the church.

Infamous Mary statue!

Church's organ.

That's the hand!  (Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew.)

 

I admittedly zoned out during the Powder Gate and Municipal House part of the tour, but when we reached the Museum of Communism (again), Jan told us a great story about her life under communism.  Although she seemed barely older than I am, she was around 11 when the Velvet Revolution happened, and one of her most vivid memories of her childhood years was around Christmas time, her entire family would go grocery shopping together.  The state heavily regulated imports and exports, but around Christmastime, they allowed each family to buy one kilo of bananas, so Jan’s mother would divide up her family throughout the line and give them each pocket money so they could buy their kilos, and they would all reconvene at home with their bananas!  I can’t imagine no one else in communist Europe didn’t think of this scheme, so they probably weren’t the only ones scamming the stores.

Insert Wenceslas Square, which was only notable because I asked why Czechoslovakia separated into the Czech Republic and Slovakia if, like everyone had been saying our entire visit, the split was amicable and left no hard feelings on either side.  She answered that while the cultures were and still are very similar, they had different goals in mind.  The bigger reason, however, was that the Czechs were tired of carrying the Slovaks economically, and the Slovaks wanted to try out life as a Big Kid for themselves.  And so the countries split.  But if you ask who broke up with whom, the Czechs blame the Slovaks, and the Slovaks blame the Czechs.  Of course.

We traversed some back streets, and I had no idea where I was until we ended up outside a pharmacy and a Don Giovanni statue that I had found creepy the night before, and I knew we were mere blocks from Old Town Square.  Jan showed us Charles University, in specific its only remaining original building (a chapel) from the 14^th century, which they now use for ceremonial purposes.  She also sang the Czechoslovakian national anthem, which was split up equally during the divorce because it naturally had two distinct parts.  It’s like it was fate or something.

Charles University Chapel.  One of these things is not like the other...

Instead of heading back into Old Town Square, we circled around it and stopped at the Clementinum, the largest complex of buildings in the Czech Republic besides Prague Castle.  Back in the day, it used to be an extremely rich monastery until one of the Pope Clements disbanded it and took away its right to the gold.  The monks were pissed and also clearly unchristian as they promptly buried the gold so that no one else could have it.  Jan said that no one has found it to this day, which makes me believe that it didn’t happen.  (Really?  Like the state isn’t gonna try to dig that crap up during a recession?  Gimme a break.)  Now it’s the national library and a concert hall.

One building in the Clementinum complex.

 

Jan finished our tour in the Jewish quarter with the Pinkas Synagogue, the biggest synagogue and one that Madeleine Albright visited when she was the U.S. Secretary of State.  She also told us a second theory of why the Old-New Synagogue is named as such: apparently, some Jewish pilgrims brought back stones from the Holy Land, and they were used in the construction, hence giving a new purpose to the old stones.  Shrug.  I don’t know which story is more believable.  And we finished-finished at the Spanish Synagogue, so named because it’s in a Spanish style, and Jan told us just how proud the Czechs are of Kafka and all that he wrote. 

Old Jewish Cemetery.  It's above street level because the bodies are, like, ten people deep.

Old-New Jewish Synagogue.

 

Overall, she was a pretty decent tour guide — once you got over the strange vocal pattern — and she was extremely solicitous, asking each person on the tour different questions about what they’d visited so far, what they did outside of touristing, etc.  So I voluntarily gave her 200 CZK/€8/$10 for the tour (as it’s free, tips are the only way they make money) and set off to meet Verity in Old Town Square; she had visited the Franz Kafka Museum and was just walking back towards the hostel when I texted her.  After vacillating over whether or not to buy a souvenir t-shirt that I couldn’t get over that said “Czech Me Out,” I said eff it and bought it, thinking that if I was eventually worried about the weight of my backpack, I could wear it as a sixth layer on our plane ride back to France.

We gathered our luggage and headed back to the train station to await our train to Bratislava with enough time to spare.  That time multiplied like bunnies: a 50 minute delay in all.  We amused ourselves by people (and dog) watching.

Our train was a true European compartment train with six people per compartment.  I was with first two older ladies and then when one of them got off, two university-aged girls filed in.  The older lady volunteered to translate for me when she saw that I didn’t speak any languages the train conductor was trying to speak: she saw my Carte 12-25 and asked if I spoke English and was extremely nice from that point on.  (No idea why the train conductor didn’t come to the same conclusion, but whatever.)

Funny side note: while waiting inside the train to leave Prague, Verity saw the same family she sat with on the way to Prague, the same ones that stepped on her toes for about six hours.  Luckily, they did not share her compartment.

With the delay, it was entirely too dark and entirely too late (and we were entirely too tired) to do anything but find our way to the hostel and collapse into a hopefully welcoming bed.  Only all those ‘too’s aforementioned, plus some slightly confusing directions, contributed to making finding that hostel entirely too difficult.  We managed to waste 10 minutes looking for a bus ticket machine, piss off the bus driver trying to get on the bust at the wrong area, and get lost two times before finally finding our way and checking into Hostel Blues Bratislava — which did in fact look as comfortable as promised.  However, it was too late to try to find a real Slovak restaurant let alone eat in one, and so we resorted to, gag, McDonald’s in order to finally eat and plan our two-day Bratislava adventure.  But believe me, we ate those hamburgers extremely reluctantly.  Our faces were angry and everything.

So we would hit as much as we could the next day and save Devín Castle for our second full day in the city, like we did in every other castle this trip.  I, of course, wanted to throw in a city tour somewhere in there, but we’ll see what time allows.  Since we didn’t see anything today, our plans were thrown off a little, and since it was the end of the vacation, we really didn’t care.  We could finally take this city at a slower, more relaxing pace than GOGOGOGO breakneck SPEED.  What, did we think we were on vacation or something?

However, transportation had to throw one more monkey wrench at me.  I only realized when we got back to the hostel and we started unpacking for the night that I’d left my bag with my Prague t-shirt, extra food from lunch, and Jewish Nutella on the train.  NO!  I’m pretty sure the epiphany occurred in slow motion, with me rending my clothes, crying sackcloth and ashes, the whole nine.  Ugh!  I was beyond angry at myself!  How many of those stupid announcements do they make about making sure you take everything with you before you leave the train?! In my defense, all those announcements hadn’t been in English, but still!

Oh well.  Someone is now sitting pretty in a rockin’ Prague shirt and chowing down on chips and Nutella.  I hope he gets food poisoning.