Tante Franzi

I got an email yesterday telling me that my Great-Aunt has died at the age of 96. She lived in Paris, so I only met her once, in 1992. She welcomed me into her home then as if she'd always been waiting for my arrival.


Tante Franzi & me, in 1992 (she was 83, I was 20) in her Paris apartment. She was warm, welcoming, and supremely grandmotherly toward me - a truly kind soul.

Limoncello

Chris & I went to a limoncello-making class last night at the home of the bundle of energy known as Lucia Galizia (the heart of the Portland Italian community). For the next week, we're agitating our container of grain alcohol and lemon peels once a day, and then we'll add the water and sugar mixture that will actually make it palatable. Lucia let us sample the stuff she had in the freezer, made from the same recipe, and it was scrumptious - almost syrupy in texture, a lovely tart (but not too tart) lemony flavor, and refreshingly ice-cold.

Many people at the class last night were thinking they'd give away small bottles of the stuff for Christmas. Personally, I'm looking forward to making up a batch of limoncello gelato to see if I can get anywhere near the Mio Gelato version.

Before the class, we went to a quick dinner at Tabla with two friends who were also going to the class. Because we only had an hour, we didn't have a chance to really savor the food like we might have wanted to, but the meal did make me want to return to Tabla soon. The highlight was the Pappardelle with Rabbit Ragu - the sauce was absolutely out-of-this-world delicious. Everything was fabulous, but that was everyone's favorite dish. Chris' comment: "Y'know, rabbits are really cute and all - it's too bad they're so damned tasty."

Teabag Tag

God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers.
- Jewish Proverb

Death of a Blog

So perhaps "death" is a stronger word than I should use... A blog I love has ended - at least in its current incarnation - and I am terribly sad about the whole thing. It can't continue, I know that - Conor's finished his round-the-world trip, so his round-the-world blog has nowhere else to go. All of this is perfectly clear to me. And yet...

I'm going to leave the link to his fabulous blog up on the sidebar, because the posts will always be blissfully funny - whether they're current or not. And if his loyal readers successfully badger him into starting a new non-travel blog, I'll be sure to let you know.

Finally! The Trip Report!

Okay, I'm done. I mean, I could probably edit this thing to death (it's what I do), but I have my public to consider, right? (Yeah, right. All three of you.) At any rate, I've posted the daily entries from the trip. I've posted them with the date on which the events happened, and seeing as how that's a couple weeks ago now, I'm also providing this handy reference to all the posts - in one post! Consider this the table of contents, if you will.

A word of warning - while I do like to edit, that doesn't generally mean that these entries are short. It means they've been gone over with a wide-toothed comb, but that's all. Editing is in my blood (you can blame my mother for that), but so is being wordy. I simply cannot help myself.

8 September - Arriving in Germany
9 September - Sightseeing in Munich
10 September - A Daytrip to Dachau
11 September - Afternoon in Salzburg (and a comment on wireless connections, plus bonus Munich pictures and some observations on Germany)
12 September - From Munich to Prague
13 September - Prague's Beauty and Challenges
14 September - Castles and Synagogues
15 September - The Czech Bone Church (and bonus Prague pictures)
16 September - From Prague to Berlin (and a comment from the hotel computer)
17 September - Oktoberfest (in Berlin?)
18 September - The Legacy of the Wall
19 September - Returning Home, and My Deep Thoughts

Enjoy.

Weekend Pictures

A couple pictures from our mostly lazy weekend...

On Saturday morning we went to an informational session about studying Italian in Italy (we're more interested in doing that for our next vacation after hearing the presentation - and most excited about the option of doing a homestay!). The session was near the East side of the river, so after we were done we walked over to look at our beautiful city. There was some kind of kayak/canoe event going on - the area near the parking lot was covered with kayaks and canoes of all shapes and sizes, and they were carried down one by one to the dock in the picture below. It was a wonderful brisk day - a perfect day to be outdoors.



And here's a shot of the soup I made yesterday. Autumn is my favorite season for many reasons, including the food. Even though most of the veggies in this soup are from cans, it's the idea of a warm bowl of soup and some crusty white bread that just seems so much like fall-weather-food to me. I made a huge pot of this stuff, so I've frozen about half of it for later in the year.

Scarf & Sunglasses

So... I'm almost done with the travel posts (you may have noticed that I've removed the ones I'd posted before - partly to edit them further, partly to add pictures), which I'll post all at once when I'm done with them. I'll also post one umbrella post with links to all the others. Just trying to be helpful...

Having a very lazy weekend, which is really refreshing. We enjoyed the bounty at the farmer's market yesterday, walking away with bagsful of fresh veggies. It was a beautiful yet brisk day - perfect for a scarf and sunglasses. I celebrated the start of the season by making my favorite veggie soup today. I love autumn.

A "Come One, Come All" Meme

From James Tata, I bring you "a blog meme you don't have to be invited to. Just jump in:"

1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

Here's mine - my consolation is that it was part of a larger, more philosophical, post.

In that split second of a moment in which we all do this, I decided that the woman was the little girl's grandmother, and the person who was the generation between these two was in the bike race.

Sheryl Crow & Teabag Tag

Maybe the announcement came out while we were gone, maybe we just weren't paying attention. Either way, we didn't realize Sheryl Crow's limited-engagement tour for her new album would be coming through Portland at all - let alone next month - until I got an email this morning. Tickets are still available, so we just got ours. It should be really interesting - she's doing this limited number of shows with a full orchestra, and then will reportedly go on the road for a longer period of time with just her regular band. I never thought Portland would be a stop on the orchestra tour, but it is - and now we'll get to see it!

And this morning's teabag tag says:

"Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper."
Francis Bacon

Party at Mom's House

My mom hosted a summer shindig at her house at the end of August, and I didn't get around to posting anything about it before our trip. So, here are a few shots for your viewing pleasure - I'm working on the trip posts, really!


Enclosed in these foil packets are countless (well, okay, not countless, but I didn't count them) loaves of buttered bread and filets of salmon ready for the grill (left) and then getting cooked (right).


Mom's makeshift barbecue pit over the firepit Chris built for her several years ago - every summer party has the same menu, and it's foolproof: salmon, corn on the cob, and garlic bread. Good eats, indeed.

Fighting the Gunk

I'm happy to report that I'm feeling much better today than I thought I would. I'm back at work (and swamped), and can breathe through my nose again. I can't tell you the bliss that is...

I'm getting closer to having the trip reports ready, but they're not quite there yet. In the meantime, I've found a new song that has completely captivated me. Fans of the show "Six Feet Under" will have heard it already (my understanding is that it was over the end credits to the show's finale), but as I've never seen the show I ended up hearing a snippet of it during an interview with the show's creator on NPR. I can't quite describe how amazing I think this song is, and the lyrics here are only a very small part of what makes it so enchanting, so haunting. It has to be heard to be believed.

"Breathe me"
by Sia

Help, I have done it again
I have been here many times before
Hurt myself again today
And, the worst part is there's no-one else to blame

Be my friend
Hold me, wrap me up
Unfold me
I am small
I'm needy
Warm me up
And breathe me

Ouch I have lost myself again
Lost myself and I am nowhere to be found,
Yeah I think that I might break
I've lost myself again and I feel unsafe

Be my friend
Hold me, wrap me up
Unfold me
I am small
I'm needy
Warm me up
And breathe me

Jiggety-Jog

I'm home now, in more than one way. First, in the sense that we arrived back at our humble abode on Monday night around 9pm, the cats were happy and there were clean sheets in the dryer waiting for us. (Did I mention that we have the best house-sitter ever?)

Second, I'm home today with a nasty head-cold. I starting feeling the ick midway through Monday's travels, so I can't imagine that I picked it up from that awful airplane air. My science-geek friend is now calling me a vector for having brought home a nasty German virus. To me, "vector" just sounds like a good band name.

Anyway, I went to work for a few hours yesterday to clean out my email inbox (800+ emails and four hours later...), and figured I'd go in today to start chipping away at the list of things to do. I slept better than I thought I would last night, but going to work is not an option for me today - I'm unable to breathe properly, and my voice is shot. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe.

And since today is the perfect day for a cup of tea, here's today's tebag tag:

Our patience will achieve more than our force.
- Edmund Burke

So, yes - patience would be the wisest thing to muster right now, knowing that all head-colds eventually run their course and leave. But lemme tellya - not being able to breathe through one's nose makes for more panic than patience. I'll see what I can do.

Oh, and I'm going to take this opportunity to attempt to finish the diary entries from our trip, which I will then post in rapid succession. I know you're looking forward to that...

Thoughts After Coming Home

Chris has often remarked that any travel day that doesn’t start at dawn is a wasted day. You never want to start something meaningful, or go somewhere too far away, for fear you might not get back in time for your actual travel to begin. Whenever we leave Portland we leave at dawn (except when Chris goes to Asia – those are late-afternoon flights), and it used to be the same when we’d leave Europe – simply because there were so many transfers between home and wherever we were. In the last few years, however, there are more and more direct flights between Portland and the East Coast of the U.S., meaning we can get to Europe in two flights, meaning our trips home don’t start in the dark. Our flight from Berlin on Monday didn’t leave until after 10am, so we got to eat breakfast at a normal hour in the hotel’s restaurant. It’s a small thing, perhaps, but it felt like luxury.

Berlin’s Tegel airport is close to the area of the city where we were staying. Because of the East-West split, there are multiple airports in Berlin, many of which are only five minutes from anywhere downtown. That’s a sharp contrast to airports in most large cities, where they are built miles outside the city center to keep residents from having to deal with airplane noise. If I lived in Berlin under a flight path, I’m sure I’d be really annoyed by the location of the airports – but as a tourist, a quick trip from airport to hotel is great news. The night before, Gerrit said they’re currently building a giant international airport outside Berlin and will likely close some of the other smaller airports. I suppose that makes sense in the big-picture sense of the world, but I’ll miss the short commute.

The Tegel airport is also tiny. You check in at the same terminal where you fly from, instead of taking a bus or train to another terminal in another county. Not only that, when you go through security, it’s a security gate specifically for your gate – you walk through the metal detector right into the waiting area for your individual gate. That’s fantastic stuff, unless you’re expecting to be able to blow through those last few Euros in your pocket. (Personally, I was hoping to stock up on Cassis-flavored Mentos, which are unavailable at my local mini-mart.) Chris wanted a newspaper, and we both wanted some water. The only store on offer at our little gate, however, was a little “Duty Free” shop selling mostly giant bottles of alcohol and packets of cigarettes – neither of which we wanted. So we're saving our Euros for next time.

The flights home were long, but uneventful. The only bad news is that I must have picked up something in the last few days of the trip, because I started feeling a head cold midway through the first flight – a head cold which will probably hang around for at least a week, and kept me from work for two days more than I was supposed to be. But we arrived home to three very happy cats, and a clean house and fresh sheets for our bed. We have the best house-sitter in the whole world, and I implore the higher-ups at her college to fail her in this, her senior year, so that she won’t move away and not be available to house-sit for us in the future…

At any rate, I've been doing some thinking about this trip, because it left me with a funny feeling. I didn't bliss through the days abroad with my normal wide-eyed wonder, and I was honestly happy to get on the plane to be done with vacation (which I tend to consider a sign of illness). Germany had been a blank slate for me, I hadn't known what to expect - or prepare for. And Prague, while a highlight 13 years ago, could never have lived up to my memory. So while I would never say the trip was disappointing, it was with a decidedly different feeling that I stepped onto the plane in Berlin.

This trip was unlike the ones we normally take in several ways. We didn't know where we were going this year, only that we'd be traveling in September and that it'd be wherever Chris' work took him - so there wasn't the usual "I have to see this" attitude. I barely did any reading about the destinations beforehand - I just wasn't prepared for Germany at all, I guess, and I wasn't prepared for how different Prague would be.

I can't help but wonder if it isn't my fault - if I didn't have my hackles up about visiting Germany, a country my father's family was forced to flee, and therefore never gave it the shot it deserves today. I don't suppose I'll ever know (without therapy, anyway). I can only say I believe that I tried to give it a fair shake, and that the history I thought I could downplay is absolutely impossible to ignore.

When we've been to France, to Italy, etc. "history" has meant "ancient" - Roman, or at least Renaissance - I'm sure there's the same kind of thing in Germany, but the history that's most palpable is, of course, World War II. It's surreal to look around at "history" I remember seeing happen on television, or at least that my parents were alive to witness. And it's difficult to think about that history without thinking of my own family's place in it. I can't blame the country of today for what happened in the 1930s, but I also can't forget it when it's all over - you're reminded in nearly every sight you stop to see. Even if it's not related to World War II, there are photographs of the bomb damage every building suffered during the war.

In a way, I knew before we left home that Prague would make me sad. I knew that nothing could duplicate the magical time I spent there with my cousin, in a city that was still relatively quiet (it's about as "undiscovered" as I'm likely to find anything). It's a bustling, beautiful city today, and the old town is overflowing with tourists and tour guides. I can't be indignant, because I was one of those tourists. I just couldn't help being a little nostalgic for a time gone by, a time I won't ever have again.

Another difference - a positive difference - about this trip is that usually we're "just" tourists. The only natives we generally interact with are shop owners and hotel staff. Meeting the Germans we spent time with on this trip added a completely different element to being a tourist. Each of them was completely hospitable (especially considering they didn't know us at all), taking time out of their busy lives to entertain us for an evening. They were all fabulous company, and we hope to stay in touch with them. It's odd - my stereotypes of Germans involved them being more withdrawn and cold, and the people we met up with couldn't have been more warm and inviting. So neither the country nor its people were what I expected - in the case of the latter, it was a very pleasant surprise, indeed.

I'm glad we began an exploration of Germany with this trip, and the next time we go I'd like to spend more time with our new friends and less time being a tourist. Spending time with people who love where they live makes that place come alive in a way that guidebooks can never do.

So, that's it. The trip's done now. I've got to get photos in an album, but we're back to normal life again. As per our previous trips, we spent a good part of the flight home brainstorming where we’ll go next. Oddly enough, Germany made us pine for Italy - perhaps because we felt so helpless with our lack of language skills, perhaps because our systems were tired of sausage and sauerkraut. We'll see. For now, I'm happy to be home - in a place I love - and I hope our new friends come to visit so we can return the favor.

Berlin: The Wall

I am not a morning person. I never have been. I'm especially this way when I'm faced with a morning person. When I woke up at 10am, Chris had already been awake for awhile – he said he’d gotten up about 8:30, and was feeling “surprisingly good.” That made one of us.

We just planned to take things very slowly, taking the U-Bahn to the Potsdamer Platz and planning to hop on and off the trains all day long rather than walk. We walked to the nearby train stop and were surprised to find a completely empty station – there wasn’t a soul waiting for a train on either side of the tracks. We briefly questioned whether the trains were even running, but then saw a countdown clock to the next train and figured we were okay. We bought two all-day tickets and got on the next train.

Potsdamer Platz had been taken over by a children’s fair, so we didn’t linger. We walked toward the Reichstag (Germany’s capitol building), noticing along the way that there was an odd double-row of bricks running along the pavement. I say “odd” because it didn’t follow a straight, reasonable line. It didn’t take long to realize that it was marking out the footprint of the former Berlin Wall. It’s so strange to think of this wall haphazardly placed down the center of streets, through the center of buildings. But more on the wall later. En route to the Reichstag we came upon the rather new Holocaust Memorial about which I’d seen a program on Frontline earlier in the year. There was some controversy about its design, as well as the creation of a memorial in the first place. I don’t think any other country has erected a memorial to a genocide its government had a hand in – there’s certainly no memorial to dead slaves or Native Americans in Washington DC – and this one is within sight of the Reichstag.


The double-brick line that runs through the city, showing the footprint of the wall.

The memorial itself is quite large – a huge field of large concrete blocks of varying heights placed at perfect intervals. From the corner we first approached, it looks like only the height of the blocks varies, but when you begin to wander into the memorial you quickly notice that the floor itself drops away in places, meaning that people disappear completely as they walk toward the center. In addition to the field of blocks, there is also an underground portion that I think is an interpretive and informative center – the line was too long, so we didn’t go downstairs. We learned later that some of the motivations behind the design of the memorial included making the distance between the blocks small enough that it’s not possible to walk side-by-side, only alone; and that each block is of a different height to represent the individual stories of the people who died in the Holocaust. Whatever the motivations, the field reminded both Chris and I of the cemetery in Prague – particularly the unevenness of it.



Many views of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

After our stroll through the memorial, we continued on to the Reichstag, pausing briefly to look at the backside of the Brandenburg Gate (the Berlin Wall butted right up against it on the West side, making it an ironic gate to nowhere from the East). The streets all around the Reichstag were blocked off because of the election and there were countless television satellite trucks lining the surrounding roads. The Reichstag has an expansive lawn out in front of it which we think was the setting for more than a few political rallies over the past few weeks. Sunday, however, was election day – and there were only a few television crews set up on the green by that point of the morning. There was a line for tours going into the building itself (apparently the glass dome has some fabulous views of the city), and you’d never have known it was a special day if not for the blocked-off streets and the press.


The backside of the Brandenburg Gate - this is the side that backed up to the wall. It's hard to see, but in the foreground in the middle of the street is the double-brick line showing where the wall was.


The Reichstag, and the satellite trucks camped out next to it.

A brief aside here as I recall the 1992 U.S. Presidential election. I was studying abroad in the U.K. at the time, and I (like most of my American classmates) had arranged for an absentee ballot and voted by mail. Many of the Americans stayed up late into election night watching the BBC coverage of the results. Because it was so late, our U.K. cohorts weren’t watching with us – but the next day the news was all over not only the international papers but the locals as well. It had never occurred to me that the rest of the world would care, frankly, who was the President of the United States – because I had not heard much about the leaders of other countries. It wasn’t until that election that I realized what an impact the leader of a powerful country can have on the people far beyond his or her borders.

Having said all of that, I can very nearly guarantee that Germany’s elections weren’t on American radar screens. All we’d been seeing on the news for the past couple of weeks was about Hurricane Katrina – even the trampling death of nearly 1,000 Iraqis had been relegated to CNN’s ticker. In Germany, however, the CNN we were getting was European – so the German elections were the top story. I’m still a little fuzzy about how the whole German government works, but after talking politics with our new friends in Munich and Berlin we had some interesting insights. The press analysts were all predicting that the conservative party would take the Chancellorship from the Social Democrats, thereby electing the country’s first woman Chancellor in Angela Merkel. But to a person, no one we talked to thought Merkel would actually win. They all thought her party would win a majority, but that the current Chancellor Gerhardt Schröder would retain his seat. It was noticeable only for the stark difference between what the news folks were saying and what the voters we talked to were saying. (And a week after the election, the results were so close that both Merkel and Schröder were claiming rights to the Chancellorship. It's reminiscent of the 2000 election in the U.S. - an unfortunate mess.)

Anyway, we walked around the outside of the Reichstag building – it was a glorious, sunny day and it’s a beautiful building – an interesting mix of old and new. The building itself has gone through a fair amount of trauma, and there are stone patches where bullets hit it during the Second World War. The glass dome is to the Reichstag what the glass pyramid is to the Louvre – a modern addition to what looks like an otherwise old building (it was rebuilt in the late 1990’s). The line leading into the building soured us on the idea of going inside, so we contented ourselves with the view from the lawn.


Just behind the Reichstag is this building - I think it's an area called "Museum Island," and we liked this building because it looked see-through with the sky reflected in the glass.


The front of the Brandenburg Gate, facing toward the East and the Unter den Linden.

We eventually meandered around the back of the building toward the front of the Brandenburg Gate. The Unter den Linden stretches into what was East Berlin from the front side of the Gate, and prior to WWII it was one of Europe’s grand boulevards. When the Wall went up, it became a deserted “cul de sac” (those are Rick Steves’ words, not mine, but they’re good). In the last 15 years, the street has reclaimed its former glory – it’s reminiscent of the Champs-Elysees, a big open avenue flanked on both sides by streetside cafes and nice shops, and a tree-lined median makes you feel more like you’re taking a walk in a suburban neighborhood than walking down a major street in one of Europe’s biggest cities.

Mainly, the street is the sight here, so we didn’t hurry. The one stop along the Unter den Linden is the Bebelplatz (across from Humboldt University, where Albert Einstein once was a professor), where I had heard there was a subtle and moving memorial to a Nazi book-burning which took place in 1933. The memorial consists of a glass plate in the center of the square that looks down onto empty white bookcases. Unfortunately, the glass has been scratched and is clouded to the point that you can’t see the bookcases unless you’re really looking for them – and even then it’s difficult. We kind of assume they replace the glass now and again, like you would a car’s windshield, and I hope they replace the glass there soon – it’s a really well-done memorial.

We backtracked along the Unter den Linden a bit and turned off toward Checkpoint Charlie (we were feeling good enough that we opted to walk in the sunshine rather than hop back on the train). The checkpoint itself has been rebuilt to look something like it did during the East-West days, but mostly it’s a crossroads for trinket-selling booths (and most of the trinkets are Soviet in nature). It’s interesting, to be sure, especially to see pictures of the area when the Wall was up, but the best part of that intersection is the House at Checkpoint Charlie.


At Checkpoint Charlie, there's an interesting display - this small billboard shows a young American soldier facing from the West into the East (left), and a young Soviet soldier facing from the East into the West (right). The rebuilt "Checkpoint" building is in the lower left of the left-hand picture.

The Wall went up in 1961 (earlier versions of the Wall consisted of “only” barbed wire, and therefore saw many more escapes), and the people who started the museum had the foresight to set it up in 1962. Certainly, it has evolved over the past 30+ years, but to think that there were many years when you could visit the museum and look out a top-storey window into the East is pretty remarkable. The various creative and dangerous (and sometimes deadly) methods people used to try to escape are all documented – including the many places you can hide a person in a car and how flexible people can be as they squeezed into speaker cabinets. It’s hard to imagine today, just 15 years later, the conditions people in the East lived under – and almost more remarkable is the 180-degree turnaround the East has undergone since the Wall came down.

The Jewish Museum is a short walk from Checkpoint Charlie, but we made it a bit longer than it needed to be. We were trying to find the nearby piece of the Wall that’s still standing in its original place. What’s most interesting about it to me is that it’s not as tall as I would have thought. Obviously, during the years the Wall was not a tourist attraction, there were guards with guns posted every 10 meters or so on the East side, which would have made it seem a tad more intimidating… But on the West side, even during the Soviet years, people could walk right up to it. We found out later that there were points along the Wall where there were sort of “lookout” points – places where the earth had been piled up high enough that you could walk to the top of a small hill and look down into the East side. It must have been hard enough on people in the East to be able to hear life on the West side of the wall, but then to have residents in the West looking down at you as if you were some kind of zoo exhibit must have been doubly awful. And yet I can understand why young Westerners did it – it was a curiosity, and no one was stopping them.


Old section of the wall a few blocks from Checkpoint Charlie - this is the East side, where the counterweights extended much further than on the West.

We eventually walked to the Jewish Museum Berlin, proudly displaying “Two-Millennia of German Jewish History,” which is relatively new and housed in a very interesting building designed by Daniel Libeskind (who has been working on the controversial redesign of New York’s World Trade Center site). It’s a zig-zag of a building that seems completely arbitrary (and perhaps it is), and includes some interesting architectural touches inside as well. We had about 90 minutes before we were scheduled to meet with Chris’ friend Alex (the driver/security guy who had picked me up at the airport the previous week), and though Alex had told us we’d need at least two hours we managed to hit the high points (I think).

When you enter the museum, you’re first directed down a flight of stairs to an underground passageway that is three hallways which intersect at various points. They are called the Axis of Holocaust, the Axis of Exile and the Axis of Continuity. The Axis of Holocaust has the names of concentration camps written on the walls and leads to the dark and cold Holocaust Tower, where there’s a shred of daylight in one upper corner and you can hear the sounds of life outside, but life outside is neither visible nor accessible. The Axis of Exile has the names of foreign cities written on the walls and leads to a slanty outdoor garden of sorts, comprised of 49 concrete pillars filled with earth which have olive willow trees growing out of them, creating a canopy. The Axis of Continuity leads to the long flight of stairs and the museum itself. Like the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., the Jewish Museum is organized so that you begin on the top floor and work your way down.


The Garden of Exile.

What’s really wonderful about the Jewish Museum is that the focus is on Jewish life rather than Jewish death. Certainly, the Holocaust (and other examples of Jewish persecution throughout history) has a place in the Museum, but it’s not overwhelming. All facets of Jewish customs are explained, and there are mini-biographies of many important German Jews throughout history – nearly all of whom I’d never heard of. It’s a very interactive museum, with lots of kid-friendly hands-on displays – there are drawers and doors to open, levers to pull, and (my favorite) you can even find out what your name is in Hebrew letters. Mine is: גסיקה (read from right to left).


Some of the actual cloth from which the "Jude" badges were cut.


This was a highlight - if you look closely, you'll see several very personalized yarmulkes in this display, including one with the Cookie Monster, a big smiley face and (my personal favorite) a "Gore/Lieberman" one.

The building’s architecture is only noticeable in a few areas – mostly you just notice that you’re wandering in what seems like an aimless direction (but is, of course, completely calculated). There are 5 “voids” in the building which you get glimpses of through windows along the walls of the exhibits. The museum’s own literature says this:

“The structure is traversed by a straight line across its main access: an empty space reaching from the basement to the roof. Strictly separated from the building’s remaining space, this 'void' – the term is Libeskind’s – is visible to, but cut off from, the viewer. In its continuous unfolding, the void is meant to structure the building like a backbone, furnishing its unfolding curves with a central axis. Beyond this, through its inaccessibility, the void points toward that which is absent, has vanished – but that still must be made present. In this manner, it architecturally embodies something quintessential to German-Jewish history and culture. In order to move from one area of the museum to another, the visitor crosses more than 30 void-bridges; these offer a view of the empty spaces.”

In the basement there is also an art installment at the bottom of one of the voids, called the “Memory Void” – it’s called “Fallen Leaves,” and was one of the more powerful elements of the entire visit. I’m not one for modern art, and (generally speaking) especially not interactive art. This installment, however, was remarkable. The space itself is an odd angular shape – if pressed, I might describe it as triangular. The walls are concrete, dark and gray, and it’s probably three stories tall. The only light comes from a window near the top of the room (and one near the entrance of the installation), so the whole thing looks like it’s in black and white. There’s only one way in and out of the space, and when you move toward the back wall you’re completely enveloped in shadow.

The dramatic part, however, is the floor. The entire floor space is covered by faces cut out of iron, one or two deep. They’re simple in design, just circles with eyes, a nose and a large open mouth crudely cut out of them. Every one, despite the common elements, seems individual. And you’re meant to walk on them. In that high, concrete space, the iron hitting iron under your feet echoes loudly up the walls. It’s uneven footing, so you’re forced to look down as you walk – in other words, you’re forced to face the faces you’re stepping on. It’s incredibly powerful stuff. From the museum’s website: “While these serve as an architectural expression of the irretrievable loss of the Jews murdered in Europe, [artist] Menashe Kadishman’s sculptures filling them evoke painful recollections of the innocent victims of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”



It's hard to not see the message in this beautifully conceived and executed piece.

Really, the entire museum is really interesting and well worth a visit – whether one is Jewish or not. It’s an especially good stop if you’re including concentration camps on your tour, as it provides a nice counterbalance to the most talked-about aspect of being Jewish. There’s much more to German Judaism than dying, and this museum does a brilliant job of telling the rest of the story.

After our visit to the museum we met up with Alex for coffee. He’s a really interesting guy, with an interesting job – he does driving and security work. For Chris, he was doing the driving portion of things; but we think more of his work is actually on the security end. And we didn’t ask many questions, as we figured it’s something that’s probably (ahem) secure. On the list of things we did talk about, however, was Croatia. He was born in Croatia, and moved to Germany with his family when he was about five, but still has plenty of family “back home” – he waxes poetic about Croatia, a place I’d never thought about vacationing before talking to him. According to Alex, the cleanest and most beautiful water is there, in addition to the best of Italian and Greek architecture. His business partner is also Croatian, and Alex offered the tourism services of the both of them if we ever decide to take a trip there. Honestly, one of the benefits of watching European CNN is the travel advertising – there were ads for Croatia (can you imagine seeing that on American TV?) that made it look spectacular. We’re planning to get a guidebook and start looking into it. Next year, perhaps?

We finally connected with my aunt's friend Gerrit, who met us at the coffee house with Alex. The four of us sat for a bit before we said goodbye to Alex and went with Gerrit to an Italian restaurant in Kreuzberg, a neighborhood in Berlin, where his girlfriend Nana was waiting for us. They’re both delightful, and we had a great time talking with them. He spent a year on an exchange in the U.S. in a small farming community in Kansas (I cannot imagine going from living in a huge metropolitan city like Berlin to any town in Kansas), and his English is spectacular. Hers is also fantastic, though she seems more unsure of herself than he does. It was a great meal – for us, it was especially blissful as we could understand parts of the non-English menu for the first time since arriving in Germany, because it was in Italian! We’d love to have them both visit us here, and tried to tempt them with the wonderful things Oregon has to offer – turns out they’re both skiers, so we were quick to point out Mt. Hood’s year-round skiing opportunities… We’ll see how tempted they really were!

After a nice evening with Gerrit and Nana, Gerrit dropped us off at our hotel so we could finish packing - and with that, our trip was coming to an end.

Berlin: Oktoberfest Smoke

Despite an early night, I didn’t sleep well. I tossed and turned, suffering through a night with one of Chris’ fabled “sucky German pillows.” (At about 4am I resolved to ask for a supplementary pillow the next day.)

Since the Ku’damm is a popular shopping area and it was mere blocks from our hotel, we stayed close to “home” on Saturday, shopping and browsing. There were plenty of shoe stores (Torsten had recommended one in particular to Chris, who had been admiring his shoes the week before), and we looked in nearly all of them. Chris ended up buying one pair of shoes, but despite the selection I didn’t find anything that really called to me that was also within a reasonable price range. The dollar sucks right now against the Euro, and I knew that before we left Oregon – but the prices I was seeing were just enough beyond what I would have been comfortable spending at home that it made it not as fun to think about buying.

In the clothing stores, there were some places that had nice things that were within my price range, but the sizes are completely different – at least with shoes, I know my European size and can shop rather easily. I’ve not spent enough time shopping in European clothing stores to know what size I am, which makes it more of a trial-and-error expedition (at least the first couple of times) – something I was really not in the mood for on so little sleep. So, mostly Chris looked and shopped, and I took lots of opportunities to sit down as he tried things on.

Our one touristy stop of the day was at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which is closed on Sundays (and is right on the Ku’damm). It was a church that was nearly destroyed by World War II bombs, which left only the highest steeple and the area right underneath it standing. Instead of rebuilding the church to its original grandeur, the ruin was left as a reminder of the area’s history. A new tower was built right next to the ruin, and a “chapel of peace” on the other side. The mosaics left on the inside of what’s left of the church are really beautiful, and in many ways it’s a shame the church was destroyed. I appreciate that they didn’t rebuild it, though, hoping the message of “if we don’t learn from history, we’re doomed to repeat it” is loud and clear amidst the rubble.


The Kaiser Wilhelm Church spire, and the modern tower next to it.

We lunched again at the KaDeWe, having sushi this time. The whole meal tasted so good – it tasted fresh (despite the fact that it wasn’t) and so different compared to the meat and starchy things we’d been eating. After a stop at the pastry counter for some take-away treats, we headed back to the hotel to rest for a bit before our Oktoberfest evening. I actually slept for nearly an hour – thank goodness! – before Lena was scheduled to pick us up.

Lena and her boyfriend Heiko arrived, and decided to take us on a brief driving tour of Berlin before heading to dinner. They drove us around Siegassäule with what Lena called “Berlin’s golden lady” on top, and Chris was thrilled – it’s the column upon which the angel sits in Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire” as he surveys the city. He loves that movie, and had wanted to see the tower, so he was pleased. Then they drove us by the Ostbahnhof, which they’d told us has a huge piece of the old Berlin wall in front of it. (Lena, Silke and Torsten had been shocked we didn’t see it when we left the train station the day before, since they said it’s right in front of the doors. We felt like morons, until we saw it again with Lena from the car – it was a bit further down the block, and the opposite direction from where we went. So, not so stupid after all.)

At any rate, it’s a really huge span of the wall, the formerly blank East side of which has been painted with a new art installation. It stretched for quite a distance, and we were surprised it was still up. Lena said when she was little and they’d come into East Berlin she’d say, “Daddy, what’s on the other side of that wall?” to which he’d reply, “Nothing.” (We later learned that the expanse of wall outside the Ostbahnhof may, in fact, be just an art installation and not the original placement of the wall. It’s likely to be original pieces of the wall, just in the wrong place. Still, it gave us more of a real-life sense of what it would have been like to exist with the wall cutting the city in half.)

We parked the car near a local mall, met up with Lena’s mother Margitta and headed to dinner at what felt like the German equivalent of a pub. Lena pointed out the “typical Berlin food” on the menu, which was great – we’d learned that what we’ve always thought of as “German food” is more accurately called “Bavarian food,” so we were then curious about what the rest of the country ate! Turns out the food we got that night wasn’t too different from the Bavarian stuff – at least the dish that Lena recommended and Chris ate. It was basically the “pork knuckle” thing that he’d had in Munich, only this time it wasn’t crisped rock-hard on the outside but rather stewed so that the skin was gorged with liquid. Frankly, it looked rather unappetizing from the outside. The pork underneath was really moist and flavorful, though, so as long as you could get past the outer layers you were doing pretty well. I opted for something advertised as a “fried meatball,” mainly because it said it came with “various vegetables” and I was still craving something vegetable-like.

With my meal, Lena had ordered for me what she called a “black beer” – I told her I liked the sweet wheat beers in Munich, and she said this was also sweet. It wasn’t as good as the stuff I loved in Munich, but much sweeter and easier to drink than the stuff at home. I think I’ll only ever drink beer in Germany…

Then it was back to the car and off to the Oktoberfest tent. It was just a big white tent pitched in a field next to a car park, and as we walked up to it we could hear the music blaring. As soon as we got up to the end where the main door was, I knew it was going to be a long night… The smoke was so thick and heavy inside the tent – because it had nowhere to go – it looked like a thick fog had settled in a cove. Only this one smelled horrible and was impossible to breathe. The rest of the atmosphere inside the tent looked like a basic party – a loud band, people drinking beer (albeit from liter containers) and standing on benches singing and dancing. We wandered until we found a table with some available space (it’s all long wooden picnic-style tables and benches and people sitting community-style) and squeezed ourselves in. That half beer/half lemon soda concoction I had been introduced to in Munich wasn’t on the menu, but Lena took charge – “They have Sprite, so they can make you one,” she yelled over the din. I planned to nurse it the entire time we were there, so as not to have to order a second. (I'm the textbook definition of a "lightweight," and didn't relish the idea of overindulging with only overflowing porta-potties within sight, thankyouverymuch.)


The inside of the Oktoberfest tent - the band is in the distance on the right.

Apparently, at Oktoberfest every song ends up being a sing-along, though most of them are in German (there’s a small percentage in Italian or Spanish as well). There was the occasional English song, including Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life,” which Chris and I were able to sing along with. Then came, as promised by our new friends in Munich, the Oktoberfest staple – John Denver’s “Country Roads” (the drunken crowd even reprised it on their own long after the band had gone home). It still makes absolutely no sense to us why a song about West Virginia would have anything to do with Oktoberfest, or frankly why hoardes of German people would want to sing along with it at any time of the year. My only assumption is that they either don’t understand the words they’re singing, or they’re too drunk to care. Either way, Chris scored big points with everyone around – including the people sitting next to me, who we’d gotten chatty with – by telling them his mother was born and raised in West Virginia. I can’t wait to tell her she's a German celebrity now.

Lena sang along with everything – and I mean everything – regardless of the language. She knew at least the chorus to every song. Several of them have dances associated with them, many of which are dances specifically designed for sitting in long rows on long benches. For instance, there are many songs for which the “dance” consists entirely of linking elbows and leaning back and forth in something close to time with the music. The first time my neighbor grabbed my arm it was completely unexpected and surprising – after that, it was just funny. He and his wife were sitting directly across from Chris, who struck up a conversation with them. He grew up in the East, and so was made to learn Russian in school – his English was certainly better than my German, but it was shaky and he wasn’t confident with it. His wife was better able to converse in English, and we had Lena to translate as necessary.

Two or three times Lena, who happened to be sitting on my other side, leaped up onto the bench in order to dance. She dragged me up each time, and I just kept hoping the bench would hold. I wasn’t nearly drunk, so the whole thing seemed more silly to me than anything else; but, as Chris pointed out, we were probably the only Americans in the tent – and it was certainly experience we wouldn’t forget. Thankfully I saw other people snapping digital pictures, so I handed the camera to Chris so he could get some shots of the room and the crowd. He also took a few of us dancing on the bench, and of our new friends – we got an email address for them which we hope is right (he was pretty drunk when he wrote it) so we can send them copies of the pictures. They were effusively nice, saying the next time we were in Berlin we were welcome to stay with them – it was all very hospitable and sweet, her telling me the offer wasn’t like in Britain where they say those things just to be polite. I had a great time, and it was completely outside my normal everyday life, but I’m not even sure they’d remember us – or that night… I’ll send them the photos, to be sure, and we’ll see what happens from there.



Top row: Our new friends Heidi & Tomi, me, and Lena dancing on a bench that I just prayed would hold (it was sagging pretty badly); Tomi, me and Lena dancing s'more.
Bottom row: Me with Lena; the whole gang - Heidi, Tomi, me, Lena, Heiko, Margitta, & Chris.

When the band finally stopped playing (I have no idea what time it was – maybe midnight? Maybe later?), only about 1/3 of the crowd actually left. I wasn’t paying attention to the bar, but I don’t think it closed at that point. We eventually left, and I guess I foolishly thought the night was over and we’d be dropped off at our hotel. That’s when Lena said, “Now we’ll go to my mother’s apartment – she has a bar!” So, the drunk were apparently going to get drunker, and I was going to watch.

We arrived at the apartment building and Heiko dropped Lena, her mother and me off and took Chris off to the store to buy – what else? – more beer. And in addition to the beer they brought back, there was whisky, cognac, grappa and wine on offer. Lena took great pride in producing beautiful and ornate bottles from behind the bar, saying she’d given this or that bottle to her father. And what is a proper bar without cigars, right? Lena found a box from the Dominican Republic (also something she’d given to her father), and I don’t think any of them had been smoked. She offered them to Chris and Heiko, who each had to bite the ends off as there was no cigar-cutter around. Poor Chris ended up with flakes of cigar paper in his teeth and on his lips for the entire time he was smoking the damned thing. Cigars smell so terrible – smoke in general is bad, but cigars are particularly noxious. And if it hadn’t been for the couple of hours I’d already spent sitting in a smoke-filled tent, which served to deaden my sense of smell, I’d have really hated the smell of those two cigars.

Honestly, between the two cigars and the countless cigarettes that Lena, Heiko and Margitta smoked, my nose – and stomach – had pretty much had it. I refused all offers of alcohol and stuck with water – Lena even offered me some kind of cigarette, which I also refused. I was tired – really tired – and couldn’t imagine ingesting any more alcohol. I was already feeling a tad queasy from all the smoke.

There are different kinds of drunks – belligerent, repetitive, sappy, etc. Thankfully, of the four who over-imbibed no one was the first kind. Lena and her mother tended more toward the sappy end of the scale (nearly everything was bringing them to tears); Lena and Chris were also repeating themselves quite a bit. I had flashbacks to my college days when I was the only tee-totaller at a party, and realized that I still don’t like being the only sober person in the room. It was the first time in the nine-plus years we’ve been together that I saw Chris drunk, and while he wasn’t a sloppy drunk, it’s also not something I want to see repeatedly.

I pulled myself away from the smokestacks for another trip to the loo just to get some cleaner air, and thankfully when I came back I was awarded the opening I wanted – Lena asked if I was okay, so I said I hadn’t slept well and was very, very tired. Chris kindly suggested we should call a taxi, which they did. So, while it was a very fun and non-standard night, it was too long and there was too much alcohol and cigarette smoke for my taste. We got back to the hotel after 2am, and I had to take a long, hot shower to get rid of the smoke smell. I think we got to sleep around 3am, and I set the alarm for 10am – and that was as much of an early start as I was going to be getting.

Almost Home

This was oroginally posted from Berlin mid-afternoon on Saturday the 17th.

Hey, folks - sorry about the posting drought. I shouldn't have been so flippant about the slow dial-up in Prague, because it never worked again. And now we're in Berlin and there's no wireless or dial-up. (That'll teach me.)

Anyway, I'm on the hotel's free computer, and the keyboard is driving me batty (it's taking much longer than it should to type this), so the next time I post I'll be home. I've kept track of everything, and have lots of pictures to share, so you have so much to look forward to - really. Sorry I wasn't able to post more from the road, but that's how it goes, I guess!

Oh, one fun thing - tomorrow's the big election here in Germany, so we may run into a political rally or two. Could be interesting. And tonight we're going with Chris' friends from the hotel to a mini-Oktoberfest. So, only a day and a half left, and still so much to do!

We'll fly home Monday, so I suppose I'll be comatose until Wednesday or so...

Transition: Prague to Berlin

We were up at 7am so we could take advantage of breakfast before heading to the train station – we knew we had just about enough for taxi fare to the station, so not enough to get snacks prior to boarding! We asked the hotel to call us a taxi, and it was a nice enough car and a young guy dressed in a shirt and tie – but nowhere on the car did it say anything resembling the word “taxi.” He had a placard near his gearshift that said the name of our hotel, so perhaps he was the driver for the hotel guests? Who knows. We got to the train station about 35 minutes before our train was supposed to leave, and the board showing what track each train is on is only updated about 20 minutes before the train is to leave, so we stood around – along with everyone else – staring at the board expectantly. After paying the “taxi” we had exactly 100Kč left to our names… And Chris bought the International Herald Tribune, costing precisely that. What a way to end the stay. (At first I was a little disappointed to not have any Czech money left over at all to give to the kids, since the Czech Republic will be changing to the Euro in the coming years – and then as we were packing to come home from Berlin Chris found a few coins in his pocket, so they’ll get a nice keepsake after all.)

Our reservations were in a compartment again. We were supposed to arrive at Berlin’s Ostbahnhof station around 2:15, but we had a longer than expected stop in Dresden (I think) and then – somewhere in the middle of a bunch of fields and nowhere near a train station – we were lurching to a very sudden stop. We all had to brace ourselves to not fall out of our seats, and looked around at each other when the train finally stopped. I wondered if perhaps we’d hit a cow crossing the tracks… Shortly after the train stopped, we saw two young men running along the corridor outside the compartments, and then train officials walking back and forth through the whole length of the train. At one point, one of them opened our door and reached up to check the emergency stop. From this, we assume someone pulled the emergency stop cord – whether it was the two kids running through the train or not, we don’t know – but eventually we got moving again, after at least a half-hour.

When we finally reached Berlin, we got a taxi to the hotel, which took forever in the traffic. It was only a bit after 3pm, so it didn’t seem like it should be rush-hour per se, but Chris said that not only does everything shut down on Sundays but things also shut down early on Fridays. So, rush hour it was. We got to the hotel and checked in around 4pm, and were starving – we’d had nothing since breakfast in Prague. We threw our bags in the room, grabbed our jackets (it was raining) and marched over to the KaDeWe store a few blocks away.

Chris had tried to explain KaDeWe to me before my arrival – six floors of shopping, including a gourmet grocery store and the coolest “food court” you’ve ever seen on the 6th floor. It really is something to see, but didn’t turn out to be the fun shopping experience I’d hoped. The food floor is great – the things on offer are from all over, and really interesting. KaDeWe is its own brand – there’s KaDeWe Prosecco, KaDeWe beer, KaDeWe everything. There are different sections for different kinds of food, all laid out beautifully. In each section there’s a corresponding “restaurant” of sorts, with counters set up for people to order and eat right there – and they’re serving food out of the same cases from which you can purchase food to bring home and prepare (and if that’s not good advertising, I dunno what is). So, yes – the food floor is truly interesting and fun. The rest of it, however, is too far beyond my budget to be of any long-term interest. We looked, but only looked.

Back at the hotel, we got a chance to really check out our room – they’d not only set us up with an unbeatable room rate, they’d put us on the top floor in one of the “Executive Suites” which are sometimes converted into conference rooms. It had a big balcony stretching the length of the building (and therefore into other people’s room spaces), a big bathroom and a sitting area, and Chris’ hotel friends had left a welcome-back gift for us of a fruit and cookie plate. Very nice touch.


The balcony and view from our hotel room.

We had a message from Chris’ hotel friends when we returned from our meal, and arranged to meet them in the hotel bar in the lobby for drinks. We met Lena, Silke and Torsten and ended up sitting and talking with them for three hours! Silke and Torsten had to leave after about an hour to meet with some clients who had just arrived, but Lena and Chris and I just talked forever. Lena’s very fluent and comfortable in English, and it was great to talk with her about life in Germany (she grew up in the East – I think the Wall came down when she was 11 or so), German politics (with the elections coming up, it was all over the news), travel (she’s traveled quite a bit, though not to the U.S.) and her diving hobby (she works as an instructor in the Maldives, and has been diving and instructing for many years). Eventually, even Lena had to go back to work, so we made plans to go with her and her boyfriend to the Oktoberfest celebration in her neighborhood in a Berlin suburb the following night.

It was by this point after 9pm, so we went back to our room and called my aunt's friend, who was at a wedding that night but would be free over the weekend. Since we knew that the shopping would all be closed on Sunday and we’d already be out on Saturday night with Lena, we arranged to be in touch with him on Sunday to get together. It was a relatively early night for us, and if I’d known it would be the last one of the trip, I probably would have savored it more.

Prague: Pictures

Before we say farewell to Prague, here are a few last pictures of the city. I can't help thinking that I'll go back again someday - it's a place that's just so fascinating to look at - but I know now that it'll never be quite as magical as it was in 1992. So, it's not true... You can go home, you just shouldn't expect anyone to remember you when you get there.


More of that fabulous menacing architecture I love - towers on the Charles Bridge.


The Astronomical Clock on the Old Town Square is usually quite a tourist draw. At the moment, however, it's swathed in scaffolding and fabric. Ah, well...


You can't see it very well, but at the top of the hill on the other side of this bridge is a huge - for lack of a better understanding of what it might really be - metronome. We watched it tick back and forth, but we have no idea what it really is. It's not keeping seconds or minutes, we know that. Oh, and we think this is where the monstrous 30-meter-high statue of Stalin once stood, looking down over the city.



The architecture is easily my favorite thing about Prague, and these buildings provide you with some idea of why. The bottom one is hardest to see, unfortunately, as it's my favorite painted building. The entire facade is covered with painted designs. I want to do that to my house... I don't think my neighbors would understand...


We saw this statue while wandering around the castle grounds, and have no idea what it's about. Chris calls it, "Getting Screwed by Death." Only his version is slightly more R-Rated.


This is a building on the Old Town Square near the Tyn Church - and the thing I love about it is the little balcony with a mini-tower on it. That is just so cool...


And finally, my favorite building in all of Prague. And y'know? I've still never been inside. It's almost not important to go in - the outside satiates me completely. It's so sinister... I've heard rumblings that they're planning to clean up some of the dirtier buildings in Prague (part of the reason so many buildings are black is pollution), but honestly I hope they leave this one alone - the sinister look is what makes it so fabulous.

Prague: Dem Bones

After breakfast we walked into the Old Town to exchange the only remaining Euros we had in order to buy some of that Becherovka – our promises to our friends eventually having more bearing than any messages we were trying to send to Prague's retailers.

The tour we wanted to take to Kutná Hora didn’t leave until 1:15pm, and we essentially didn’t have anything to do in the meantime (the things we would have liked to do would have cost cash we either didn’t have or were saving for things like the taxi to the train station. We wandered around the Old Town for a bit, but then returned to the hotel frustrated again. I’d have loved to buy gifts for my niece and nephews, friends, family (heck, for me!) – but it was just too frustrating to go near anything that involved money.

It’s interesting – it was an unhappy feeling, knowing we had money at our disposal theoretically, but not being able to access it. It felt like much of the city was unavailable to us. Certainly, this is a very high-class problem to have, and it seems very small of me to complain… And yet, when you work hard in order to go on holiday, it’s disappointing to find that the things you wanted to do aren’t possible because of what appears to be a computer problem. (I’m going to get in touch with my bank when I get home, because it reflects badly on Prague and the Czech Republic, which isn’t fair if it’s a problem with the bank machines.)

At any rate, that morning felt oddly like our last day in London in 2003 – we ended up feeling a little bored. We walked for a bit more along the river, and then eventually back to the hotel where I began reorganizing and repacking my suitcase. After an hour or so, Chris (who had been reading about Czech history) suggested we try to go to the Museum of Communism. It was close to the meeting point for the Kutná Hora tour, and if they took Visa we could go. On the way, we bought the tickets for the Kutná Hora tour, and felt very lucky that the Museum took Visa!

The Museum of Communism is pretty small, but the exhibits are really interesting and well laid-out – they take you through the history, starting with the things that led the Czech people to want to align themselves with the Communists in the first place (having to choose between Nazism and Communism isn't an enviable position). Then they present sort of the ideals of Communism – what the people thought they were getting into, and what the Communists were (theoretically) striving for. The “reality” of how it played out in the Czech Republic (and probably everywhere else, frankly) was very different – that’s the next section, followed by the downfall of the U.S.S.R. and the recreation of an independent Czechoslovakia.

Communism is one of those things I learned about in high school and have largely forgotten about – especially since the fall of the U.S.S.R. – so it’s nice to get a little refresher course now and then on things about which I should remember more! It’s also really moving to read about the seemingly small and personal things that people do to resist a force that should seem stronger than they are. In the Czech Republic, the most poignant example of this is the young student Jan Palach who set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square to protest the Communist rule. He died as a result of his injuries, and his death was turned into something of a rallying point for others who had either been too afraid to speak out or who had felt their individual voices were too small. We take so much for granted in the U.S. in this day and age – certainly people have fought and died for the rights we have today, and some are still fighting and dying, but it all feels so removed from my everyday life that it’s hard to imagine how different things could have been if I’d been born into, say, East Berlin.

Then it was time to go on the tour, so we hopped on the small bus. The guide was a Czech woman called Jana who gave us an overview of the country’s history as we drove the approximately 60 km to Kutná Hora. I don’t think I remember even 5% of it (even when I’m trying to pay attention, that stuff tends to escape me), but it wasn’t for lack of knowledge on Jana’s part!

The first stop on the tour turned out the be the thing I was most interested in – the ossuary at Sedleč. We’d seen it depicted in the “Long Way Round” program, though I’d forgotten about it entirely until I was reading about potential day-trips from Prague. And even though I’d seen it in “Long Way Round,” that was many months ago – and I was convinced somehow that it was bigger…

At any rate, when we arrived Jana told us to go ahead in, bypassing the line, and she would wait and pay for all our entrance fees and photography permits. We tried to go in, but one of the women at the counter refused to let us pass until Jana had paid for everything – and despite the fact that Jana was right there showing her the money for the photography permit, she refused to let me take pictures until the permit was purchased. Just plain silliness.

So, tickets and permits finally paid for, we went down the stairs into the ossuary itself. Lining the staircase on both sides (and above, I noticed later) are already examples of the artist’s work – there are various bones, including skulls, placed artistically above the banister and along the balcony. In two recesses along the stairs there are two large chalices, over three feet tall, made of bones. There’s also a small glass display case with examples of skulls they found that show deformities or causes of death.

While most of the bones are contained in four giant hollow pyramid-shaped piles in the four corners of the room, the real highlights are the art pieces. Towers surround the center of the room with skulls artistically woven into the ironwork. An anchor weighs down one wall. A coat of arms on one wall, easily five feet tall, includes a skull with rib bones poking out of a hole in the top like a jester’s hat. The piece de resistance, however, is the "chandelier." It hangs in the center of the room and is as ornate as any crystal equivalent in opulent homes or hotels around the world – it just doesn’t actually produce light, or look quite as opulent! The chandelier is apparently made out of all the bones in the human body, and it’s probably over five feet tall. There are skulls at strategic points, and smaller bones used like the teardrop crystals on “normal” chandeliers. Perhaps my favorite part, however, is the artist’s signature on the wall near the entrance in – you guessed it – bones. His name and the date, all spelled out using bones. Really fabulous stuff. I bought one of each of the postcards they sold, and we were happily on our way after fifteen minutes. Yeah, I just thought it would be bigger. I do think I need to look into what other ossuaries like that might be in the world, and make a tour of them…


A couple of views of the room itself. In the left photo, you can kind of see the corner bone-pile behind the fence (right-hand side of picture). Bones are strung overhead all around you, like popcorn-strings on a Christmas tree.


A closeup of one of the corner pyramid piles - there was one of these in each corner, and all of them were huge.


(L) The Coat of Arms, and (R) one of the chalices.


The ever-so-cool chandelier... Don't you just want one for your foyer?


And finally, the signature of the "artist."

The next stop was Kutná Hora proper (Sedleč was a suburb, of sorts), a UNESCO World Heritage Town. The buildings are really lovely, and though it’s an easy – and touristy – day-trip from Prague, it felt like a million miles away. The first stop in Kutná Hora was the Cathedral of St. Barbara, with its distinctive tent-like roof and beautiful art nouveau stained glass windows. (I’d been getting art nouveau and art deco confused up to this point in Prague, thinking they were the same thing and that I didn’t like them – truth is, they’re very different and I only dislike art deco. Art nouveau, it turns out, had some of its origins in the area as Czech artist Alfons Mucha is one of the founders of the artistic movement. The lithe figures and long lines in the art nouveau pieces are reminiscent to me of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the painters of the arts & crafts style, which I love – so I’m happy to have had the confusion put to rest.)

Inside, the Cathedral of St. Barbara (the patron saint of miners) isn’t unlike other cathedrals I’ve seen, though it’s far less heavily decorated. The windows are comparatively new, and Jana told us that when they’re replacing pieces of old buildings they try to do it in keeping with the style of the original time rather than duplicating the original work exactly. I’m not sure why, but the overall effect is really lovely – the sunlight streams through the bright and colorful art nouveau windows and hits the Baroque carvings inside the small chapels around the perimeter of the altar.

Kutná Hora came to be a wealthy and important town because silver ore was discovered there, leading to the establishment of a minting house. Italians were “imported” to create a beautiful town (architects) and because they were master minters (silversmiths), and the town does have an Italianate feel to it in places. The locals were employed largely as the miners themselves, and there are statues honoring their work all over the town. It’s nice that they’re honored in death, because they had altogether the most difficult positions in life.

The statues of miners in the cathedral, Jana told us, show us what they wore to work – long white shirts and leather belts with, essentially, “tails” like from a tuxedo extending off the back. The white shirts were an attempt to make them more visible to one another in the mines, which were sometimes 600 meters deep and where they could take no candles because of the potentially explosive gases (though I can’t imagine how a white shirt with basically no light is going to help at all, especially as they were likely to be covered in coal dust not long after starting out), and the leather “tails” made it easy for them to slide down the mineshafts and get to work more quickly. They each carried a large bowl atop their heads in which they deposited the coal they mined. (I think Jana explained how they got back up, but I wasn’t clear on that part.)

From the cathedral we walked to the nearby Italian Court, which served as the center for the minting process. There are several small doors which used to open into a central courtyard and which used to be the entrances to the various minting houses (they’re closed now and bricked up). Jana handed us off to a tour guide working for the Italian Court, who led us on a brief tour of the public areas of the building. It’s in use today as a town hall, and even a few of the rooms we saw on the tour are still used for town business. The new guide picked up a set of enormous metal keys that looked like something out of a storybook, and we were off. She showed us the town meeting room, where weddings are held, and where new babies are “welcomed to be members of the community” in special Czech ceremonies. We also saw displays of the coins made in the area dating back several hundred years.

For some of its history, the Italian Court served as the royal home of King Wenceslas II, who was apparently quite short – the guide said he was just under five feet tall, including his crown. Off of one of the display rooms there’s what looks like a tiny door into a tiny room – if you can call it that. It appears to be only big enough for an overstuffed chair, if that. That was apparently a private chapel for the King and not, as Jana put it, a closet where they put the vacuum cleaner. The highlight of the tour, however, was the Royal Chapel. The small chapel – perhaps two rooms – was beautiful, painted on every wall and the ceiling with art nouveau figures and designs, all done by a husband-and-wife team around 1905 (so therefore a newer addition, and likely not part of the chapel the King saw, but still…).

We had about twenty minutes until the tour was officially over and nothing more to see – so Jana suggested we go to a small café she knew. After our little break we were on the bus back to Prague. The ride back was almost entirely silent, though Jana did pipe up now and then to tell us about something we were seeing – mostly as we entered the city. The commentary was welcome at that point, because we were stuck in some pretty awful rush-hour traffic. Jana pointed out the other castles on both sides of the river, the Communist-style high-rise buildings in the new town, and the area that used to have the royal vineyards (there is apparently still wine produced in Prague, but in such small quantities that it’s not exported).

Back in the city, we walked back to the hotel, dropped off our bags and went right back out to find a place to eat dinner. The first place we tried, courtesy of our trusty Rick Steves book, looked beautiful – art nouveau tiling on all the walls – but didn’t take Visa. They took Diners Club, but only Diners Club. Only Diners Club? Thankfully, by that point we mostly had a sense of humor about the whole thing – Chris said the “Diners Club only” place was just a symbol of all the silly money problems we’d had the previous few days.

The next place we looked at, Café Fischer, had a nice-looking menu and a Visa sign. We were escorted to what felt and looked like an old wine cellar two floors below street level and seated in a nearly empty restaurant. The menu was fairly extensive, but I went right to the “Czech Specialties” page. Once again, I had roast duck with baked cabbage and dumplings. Chris had beef goulash. Both were wonderful – the dumplings at the other place had been converted to gnocchi, probably to “mix things up a bit,” but I prefer the steamed doughy bread dumplings I remembered from my last visit. This place served the dumplings the old fashioned way, and they were great – big and fluffy, sort of like humbao rolls without the meat filling.

We walked back to the hotel via the Old Town Square one last time, finished packing, and got some sleep – ready to get back to Germany and bank machines that believe we’re not broke.