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.