Bad puns aside, our weekend in Prague was super fun. We arrived there around noon on Saturday and we had lunch in the open air Christmas Market where there were a bunch of stalls selling food and souvenirs. We split up after lunch and began to explore the city, mostly Old Town. I love the streets and buildings in Prague. They look both old fashioned and new at the same time. It was fun walking down the cobblestone sidewalks and window-shopping at the stores. I really wish that I had brought my camera so I could’ve taken more pictures, but I did get a couple on my phone. At night we went to a little Italian restaurant that had really good hot chocolate. Staying the night in the hostel wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be, and we had a lot of fun playing on the bunk beds.
On Sunday, we visited the Jewish Quarter. The first building we saw had a memorial listing the names of the people from Prague killed in the Concentration camps. It was really striking because the inside walls were absolutely covered with writing. I feel like the memorial was especially powerful because it took the time and space to make note of all the victims as individuals. Sometimes when I just see a statistic about the number of people murdered, it’s hard to associate that figure with the true number of lives affected, but when I thought about how long it must have taken to inscribe all of those names, the magnitude of the tragedy really hit me. The upstairs room was dedicated to the children taken to the concentration camps, and it had a collection of drawings done by them. These were really sad because a lot of the pictures showed their lost family members or pets or homes. Each drawing also had a small plaque about the child who drew it, and it was hard to look at the ages and see how young they were when they were forced to suffer so much.
The rest of the buildings in the Jewish Quarter were really interesting too, especially the Old-New Synagogue and the Spanish Synagogue. The Old-New Synagogue was built in (I think) the thirteenth century, but it was absolutely huge! For something built so long ago, it was neat because it was made of giant stones and had really high ceilings. It wasn’t overly ornate, but it was still extremely impressive. The Spanish Synagogue, on the other hand, had such elaborate decorations on the inside that I can’t even imagine how long it would have taken to complete it. Every single surface was decorated with swirling and geometrical patterns, and it was all symmetrical around the central chandelier, which had a design like the Star of David. The walls were painted with mostly brown and gold, and the floors were covered with mosaics in a bunch of different colors. The funniest thing about this synagogue was how unassuming it looked from the outside. If we hadn’t had a map, I definitely would have walked right past it without any idea of how extravagant the inside looked.
After visiting the Jewish Quarter and a quick lunch, we had to sprint back to the train station to catch our ride. Even though Luis somehow got us there in record time using some unknown internal GPS, the train was already super full so we hung out in the station for a while and waited for the next one. This was okay though, because sometimes I think that the most fun times on the trip are when we sit around and talk and joke.
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