Thanks for the Memories

My house in Hatfield

Well, I’ve been home for almost two months now, ever since June 13. I readjusted fairly easily, although to this day the bottles of soda in supermarkets look bizarre to me. (The ones in England are tall and skinny. Now all the ones here just look silly and squat.) Even though I extended my stay, I was feeling traces of homesickness by the end, so it was great seeing my family again. It was especially fun to say things like, “Spaghetti carbonara? The last time I had that was in Italy…” (people get tired of hearing things like that pretty fast, so now I just content myself with thinking it).

Some friends and I at the club on campus, the Forum

The weird thing is I do miss the UK a lot more than I thought I would when I was contemplating coming home six months ago. That little red-doored house in Robert’s Way, Hatfield really became home for me. I miss my room with the shelf I cluttered up with travel books, jewelry, laundry detergent (“washing up liquid”), textbooks, and the photo calendar my sister made for me. I miss the big floor-to-ceiling windows and the glass door that opened out onto the little path zigzagging through the emerald grass between rows of houses. I miss the magpies and the way the birds start chirping at the insane hour of 3 a.m. I miss the food…not traditional English pub food, which I am thoroughly sick of (I will never eat bangers and mash again), but Indian food and Max’s Kebab, which delivered to the campus. Oh, and scones with jam and clotted cream, I miss those as well. I miss having pound coins instead of dollar bills. And I miss being only an hour’s flight from places like Berlin or Dublin. And in this 110-degree heat I miss the fact that it’s 63 degrees and rainy there now.

Oh well. I’ll go back someday. And let me tell you, it is good to be home in a multitude of ways.

I’ve meant for ages to continue writing in this, if only to chronicle my last two trips abroad—Prague and Edinburgh. Both wonderful places that I hope I can visit again. I’ll do Prague first.

View of Prague from a hill near Strahov Monastery

Tyn Church and statue of Jan Hus at Old Town Square

Ever since eighth grade I’ve had it stuck in my head that I wanted to see Prague. This seems odd because you don’t hear people talking about going to Prague the same way they might talk about Paris or Rome. But I read this book that was partially set in Prague, and ever since then I’ve been really interested in it. Enda and I went May 15-19. The timing was great because the weather was beautiful—sunny and cool—and the hordes of tourists weren’t too terrible.

Our flight left at 6:30 a.m., we were wiped out by the time we dropped our stuff off at the hostel, but we still made it to Old Town Square in plenty of time to buy a Czech specialty, fried cheese on bread, before the tour started. Anyway, Prague is beautiful, fascinating, and also cheaper than places like Paris (the exchange rate for Czech crowns is much nicer than the one for euros or pounds). I loved it. The Old Town has the two towers of Tyn Church on one side and the astronomical clock on the other, which has been in use since the 1400s. The streets are cobbled, the houses are painted beautiful colors and flowers overflow from window boxes. It’s so different from a loud busy city like London, where it’s beautiful but grand and kind of overwhelming. Prague seems quainter.

The astronomical clock in Old Town Square

On the tour we saw a statue of Jan Hus, the Powder Tower (one of the huge old city gates from 1475), the concert hall the Rudolfinium, the Jewish Quarter, the Charles Bridge and the Vlatva River, and more. Across the river you can see Prague Castle and St. Vitus Cathedral. The history there is really cool. We heard a lot about the Hussite Wars and defenestration and the Thirty Years War and Czech revolutionaries in WWII. I wish I could remember it all better, though.

That evening we got beers from the brewery called U Medvidku, since beer is a huge deal in Prague—Pilsner Urquell and Gambrinus are a few of the main ones. He got beef goulash (one of the most popular dishes), I got this roast beef in a sweet sauce. It was actually really good. The waiter spoke enough English to understand us fine, although he wasn’t overly friendly. Most of the Czechs I encountered weren’t the friendliest…I don’t know if that’s a cultural thing or just coincidence. They were perfectly helpful, but it was pretty rare to get a smile.

View of St. Vitus and the castle across the river

The next day we trekked to Pražský hrad, Prague Castle, which included a metro ride under the Vlatva and walking up the huge hill where the castle sits. The metros in Prague are funny—the escalators leading underground are the longest I’ve ever seen. I mean, they are so long they look like optical illusions. The metro system is really ridiculously far underground. But I digress…

The tour includes Golden Lane, a street of tiny colorful houses from the 1500s where castle guards, goldsmiths, and even fortunetellers lived over the centuries. Franz Kafka lived at No. 22 in 1916; now his house is a shop selling Kafka memorabilia. I found the whole complex somewhat confusing to navigate. There aren’t really any signs so you just sort of have to explore on your own and hope you don’t miss anything. I thought Prague Castle meant just one building, the castle itself, but it’s actually a whole complex of buildings—a cathedral, a basilica, a monastery, gardens, defense towers, and several museums, even a toy museum.

Golden Lane

St. Vitus

Off Golden Lane stone stairways lead to various towers and rooms, most of them set up to look as they would have centuries ago. There were bedrooms, alchemists’ and blacksmiths’ chambers, racks full of medieval weaponry and suits of armor…and in between all that some cheesy shops selling figurines of knights and dragons and fairy tale trinkets. One of the towers, White Tower I think, used to be a prison and torture chamber. They still had a bunch of the torture instruments—cages and spiked collars and even this horrible man-shaped thing they used to shackle people in. There was also a pit in the floor that they used to lower people into. The Czechs didn’t mess around.

We also got to see St. George’s Basilica and St. Vitus, a beautiful Gothic cathedral with the most amazing stained glass windows that threw multicolored patterns all over the interior. Inside the castle itself, we saw the audience chamber Vladislav Hall and several other rooms. It actually seemed like a rather barebones castle. Some of the paintings and architecture were beautiful, but there wasn’t much inside it at all except the Czech crown jewels.

Afterward we wandered around that side of the river, took a tram, and found Strahov Monastery. It’s in good shape for a building built in 1149. Right next to it is a restaurant called the Strahov Pivovar. It was getting a little chilly out by then, but the outdoor booths had not only heaters but nicely folded red blankets to drape over your legs (I thought they were Snuggies at first, which I would’ve found hilarious). The food was probably some of the best of the whole trip. I got pork with goat cheese.

Strahov Monastery

 It was nighttime by the time we were finished. I loved walking around Prague at night. I found the streets somewhat confusing—lots of zigzaggy cobbled alleys, but it was nice to see the less touristy side of Prague. The Vlatva River at night reflects all the lights, and Charles Bridge really looks beautiful.

The next day we booked a day trip to see the town of Kutna Hora, about an hour outside Prague. Our guide was a scruffy-looking Dutch guy named Tijo who spoke excellent English. We had to take a train (there is no more horrible sound in the world than the sound of a Czech train braking—it’s like the sound of nails on a chalkboard mixed with the sound of a rusty door hinge), and the scenery was really pretty. The main draw of Kutna Hora was to see the bone church, the Sedlec Ossuary, which I’d wanted to see since I randomly saw pictures on the Internet a few years ago. So many thousands of people were buried in the yard during the Black Death and the Hussite Wars, it soon began to overflow, so in the 1500s they began exhuming skeletons and stacking them into these massive pyramid shapes that reach almost to the ceiling. They’re so precisely stacked that they stay that way without any glue. There’s also a square hole in the center and at the top, which if I remember right is supposed to represent the soul’s path to heaven. In the 1800s, another man began creating designs with the bones, which is why it’s so famous today. There’s a bone chandelier made of every bone in the human body, bones lining the ceiling arches, a coat of arms made of bones…it was really cool seeing it all in person.

Bone chandelier at the Sedlec Ossuary

Kutna Hora itself has a cool history—in the Middle Ages it was a center of silver mining, so there were lots of stories of the horrors of working in the mines back then. You know, the usual. We saw a medieval church that is now owned by Philip Morris, of all things, and serves as offices for the cigarette company. There was also a beautiful church still in use, St. Barbara’s, that had paintings depicting medieval life on the walls. Enda and I bought our moms rosaries there. Then Tijo took us to a restaurant where most everyone got beef goulash, because hey, it’s the thing to do in the Czech Republic.

Old Jewish Cemetery

The next day we explored the Jewish Quarter, which used to be a ghetto and is now actually considered a trendy and expensive place to live. The Old Jewish Cemetery is a fairly small square of ground covered with crumbling old tombstones, where as many as 100,000 people are buried in a tiny area because the government of Prague wouldn’t allot them any more land for a graveyard. We took a tour of several synagogues, which had a lot of history about the deportations to death camps during WWII. Inside one synagogue several rooms have the name of every Jewish person in Prague who was killed during WWII handwritten over the walls. In the attic of the Old New Synagogue lies the body of the golem, supposedly. I’ve always loved that Prague legend. Unfortunately tourists aren’t allowed to explore the attic. Darn.

That afternoon we took an underground tour of Prague. The level of the city has actually risen over the years, and so we got to walk through what used to be medieval houses and streets and prisons, all beneath the Old Town. That was one of the few times the tour guide was actually Czech. He was fairly nice except he kept having a go at me for being American, saying things like, “Yes, this door is older than your country…” I get it, buddy.

For dinner we went to another restaurant near the monastery. The funny thing was some sort of celebration was taking place there. I have no idea what it was—birthday, anniversary, could be anything. All I know is that the place was packed with jovial, well-dressed Czechs who all seemed to know each other and who were all singing at the top of their lungs in their language. They even started a conga line at one point. It was pretty funny, but I just wish I knew what the heck they were celebrating.

Another walk on the Charles Bridge that night, and then another walk the next morning, and that was it. Time to fly back to England. Which, hey, isn’t too shabby I suppose, but I don’t think I was quite ready to leave Prague yet. It really was one of the most beautiful places I’d seen. I was a bit nervous about going to Prague because I’d built it up so much in my head, but I can honestly say it didn’t disappoint.