We're Back!

We came home on Tuesday, April 4, and within a week or two I was able to rejoin the Pacific Time Zone. Since then I've been working on our photos, and I've completed a web site on Prague. Take a look: http://www.votaws.com

These blogs only work backwards, it seems. You have to start at the end of the trip and work backwards. If any of you can figure out an easy way to read this blog about our trip from start to finish, please let me know. In the meantime we can all read it from finish to start.

I have not yet published any web sites or photos for Berlin and Dresden. It took me a month to get Prague done and I'm behind on some other projects. So my Berlin and Dresden sites will be published later on.

Prague Day 4

This morning I left before breakfast (!) to see if I could get some good photos of the Charles Bridge and some of the more popular areas nearby. It is so crowded during the day that photo ops are hard to come by. The photos you see here are some of the results. Assuming that it works...

Then I went and had breakfast. Karen did not want to get up early, so I was on my own. We had agreed to meet at the Mucha Museum at 10:00. I went over to Wenceslas Square and found a coffee shop, where I had an omelet and cappucino. Their omelettes are different from ours. The ham and cheese were not cut up and the egg mixture was not really stirred much, so it was kind of like a large crusty fried egg with a piece of ham and a piece of cheese. Not bad, really, but not what I was expecting.

Karen and Jane (one of our tour companions from yesterday) showed up on time to the Mucha. Alfons Mucha was a famous maker of posters and other art objects in the Art Nouveau style, in the first 30 years of the 20th century. He was most famous for his posters of Sarah Bernhardt. It was a lot of fun to see his works. You can see some at http://www.littlereview.com/gallery/mucha.htm. We bought some coasters, since they're easier to haul home than posters.

Jane and Charlotte left us to visit the Museum of Communism but we wanted to see the Jewish Quarter (a.k.a. Josefov). There we visited five sites, among them the old Jewish Cemetery where the third picture was taken. We visited a couple of synagogues and saw some beautiful items from Jewish communities all over Europe. When the Nazis were in power they confiscated a lot of beautiful Jewish items and brought them to Europe, because they had planned to create a museum here as a memorial to the former race of people who were known as the Jews. There is another building that lists all of the names of all of the Jews who were taken prisoner by the Nazis, and includes a display of drawings made by children who were imprisoned by the Nazis in the crowded ghettos and concentration camps. It's quite moving.

After that we came back for a rest, then out again to visit Prague Christian Fellowship. They worship every Sunday at 4:30 p.m. It's an English-speaking service, full of young people. I'm sure we were the oldest ones there. All of the songs we sang were songs that we knew from Salem Alliance. It was exciting and encouraging to see what God is doing in Prague, a city that is probably more than three-quarters atheist.

The service was good, and we worshiped the Lord, and that was good too of course. Then we took Jane and Charlotte back up to Old Town for a quick bite of dinner before we went to the Black Light Theater. This was a wonderful performance and will make a great memory for our last night here. We couldn't take pictures, of course, but you can see lots of them on their web site at http://www.imagetheatre.cz/index_e.asp.

Tomorrow we will leave after breakfast and take the train to Berlin. This will take about 5 hours. We are staying at the Holiday Inn in East Berlin, and I don't know if there will be any Internet available. So you may hear from me, and you may not.

Prague Day 3

Today we went with Sarka (the same wonderful guide we had on Thursday) and two women from Seattle (who were added to our tour at the last minute, cutting the price almost in half) down to Cesky Krumlov, a medieval town in Southern Bohemia. There is the second largest castle in the Czech Republic; the largest is the Prague castle. We got a tour of the castle, a wonderful lunch, and a chance to shop for some goodies at lower prices than we would find in Prague.

The trip was great fun. The two women are mother and daughter; the daughter is studying at St. Andrews in Scotland and the mother came over to meet her for spring break and a trip to Europe.

C.K. is a wonderful little town, very medieval and picturesque. Really, it's like you are at Disneyland or something. But it's quite real. The castle was absolutely freezing but lots of interesting things to see in there.

On the way home we stopped off for a photo session at Castle Hluboka, and I will try and upload a picture for you. Hluboka is one of the prettiest castles in the Czech Republic. It was built late in the 19th century so it had no purpose except to impress everyone, and at that it is quite effective. It's like a fairy tale castle. Finally, there it is, the picture at the top of this post.


Karen said I should tell you one funny thing about our hotel room at Dresden. Our room was rectangular, but the bathroom was created by putting up a curved arc across one corner. This curved wall was covered in nice wood-grain paneling. There was a table attached to the paneling; if you pulled on the table a section of the panel would swing out and there was the closet. Another section of the wall was the bathroom door.

The light switches for the bathroom were on the outside of the room. There was also a large square window in the wall, next to the door. The window was fogged over. But if you pressed the light switch on the inside of the bathroom, between the wall and the window, the window would clear up - transparent both ways! So you could have a little peep show, I suppose. It was really pretty funny.

There, I got a second picture to upload. This is part of the castle at Cesky Krumlov. I'm really glad we went there. It was a great day!