In mid-March, we visited Prague, part 1 of our 3 week central European tour. (Part 2 was Rolf's Fulbright Seminar in Berlin and Part 3 was Meghan's research lab visit in Zurich.) In Prague, we spent 4 nights at the Golden City Hotel in a residential neighborhood just beyond downtown. It wasn't exactly located in the most "golden" part of town - there was a XXX video store across the street - but it was cheap and safe!
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The first morning, we checked in with our "Best of Prague" walking tour guide in the Old Town Square (see photo above). She was holding a large, orange umbrella, and it wasn't just for show - it was raining. The first sight on our tour was the Astronomical Clock. Last year, it celebrated its 600th year in operation! Every hour on the hour it has an elaborate moving display and a trumpet call from the bell tower. The clock was such a mechanical masterpiece that the town council members blinded the clockmaker once he was finished to prevent him from creating another one anywhere else - or so the legend goes...
Then we were off to Prague Castle - a large complex of government buildings overlooking the city. In the center of the complex is St. Vitus Cathedral. It was built over many centuries, beginning in the early 900's as a basilica and morphing slowly into a high Gothic cathedral. It was still raining, so the church was packed with tourists trying to stay dry. St. Vitus is the church peeking over the rooftops in the photo above.
From the Castle, we walked down the romantic Old Castle Steps into Lesser Town, a quaint maze of narrow, cobblestone streets lined by shops and restaurants in old 5 story buildings. It was much less chintzy or touristy than the area surrounding Old Town Square. We liked the atmosphere of Lesser Town so much, we spent most of the following day wandering up and down the narrow streets.
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We ended the tour by walking across the Charles Bridge. Built in the 1400's, this stone bridge was historically important as a major trade route in Europe. In modern times, the Charles Bridge is best known as a set for Hollywood movies - Mission Impossible and the Bourne Identity to name a few... During the summer the bridge is packed with tourists, artists, and vendors. Thirty large stone sculptures line the bridge, one of which is shown in the following blog post.
Having eaten out only a few times in Norway, we were ecstatic to eat at a restaurant
every night in Prague. Most of the menu items consisted of some variety of meat in a dark gravy sauce served with knedlik (bread dumplings). Where were the green vegetables you say? Nowhere to be found in Prague!
The different effects WWII had on East and West Berlin is still very apparent. In the West the city is dense and well-developed, while in the East there are still large open tracts of land. The photo above was taken in Potsdamer Platz and shows a remnant of the Berlin Wall in the middle of a large, new development - an interesting juxtaposition of the past and present of Berlin.
During the tour, we made short photo stops at the West End Gallery - a section of the Berlin Wall covered in murals by famous modern day artists - and the Brandenburg Gate, shown in the photo above. It was amazing to see places that played such prominent roles in very recent history - much more awe-inspiring than cathedrals and forts from centuries past...
One of our favorite places in Berlin was the Holocaust Memorial. The rectangle stones are deceivingly small on the outskirts of the memorial which covers the area of a city block. But once we walked in just a few yards, the stones were significantly taller plus the ground sloped downward. We almost lost each other when Meghan turned a corner without Rolf noticing! Some teenagers were sadly using the memorial for a loud game of Marco Polo - completely missing the point of the memorial as a quiet place to contemplate a very serious event in world history.
The rest of our stay was interspersed with conference events and a lot of sightseeing. Luckily, our hotel was located within walking distance of most of the major sights and museums in Berlin. The photo above shows a bridge leading into the Museum Island on the right. You could still see pockmarks from WWII gun fire in the stone columns and facades of the museums! Our hotel is the left of the 2 tall buildings visible in the distance beyond the bridge.
The photo above shows the view from our hotel window on the 27th floor. All of the Fulbright rooms faced away from downtown, but we really enjoyed our view nonetheless. Much of the East Berlin that has been rebuilt after WWII was with high modernist urban planning: long, narrow apartment buildings and large public spaces.
