Ruins, Food and Art

Two days ago we had day trips: in groups of three we are given the day and told to organize a trip either nearby or as far as Austria. My group decided to take a 20 minute train ride to a tiny little town called Trisov and hike a mile into a protected forest to see the Divci Kamen ruins. The castle was built on top of a little mountain between 1349 and 1360 and was abandoned in 1500. So we were hiking through the woods and all of a sudden I looked up and this was exactly what I saw.

We had the entire castle to ourselves for almost the entire time and we were able to do some drawing, eat lunch, and lay out in the sun. It was a tough day.
Last night we went to a delicious restaurant for a group dinner and this was the tray of food that was presented to me and the girl sitting across from me for dinner. Chicken, potato cakes, boiled potatoes, dumplings, smoked pork, and sauerkraut.
The past three days we have done 2-3 hours of drawing outside each morning. Tourists take lots of pictures of us and comment in every language on the face of the earth which is pretty amusing. This is me with Cristina on the left and Owen on the right: two of the sweetest most quality people I know, we have had so much fun on this trip.
Here is the huge drawing I did from the past three on-site drawing mornings. I have this and a mighty red sunburn as a souvenir and I definitely like this more than the sunburn. I did it in pencil first, then colored chalk and then details in pencil again. I left the buildings un-colored as a way to emphasize the roofs which were supposed to be our focus.

Cesky Krumlov

Two days ago we arrived in Cesky Krumlov, a UNESCO world heritage site. It is in a group of little hills along a river and surrounded by trees. At the top is the castle, the elaborately painted tower that you will see in the last pictures. If you have seen the movie "The Illusionist" you have seen the castle, it is one of the most unique and magical looking places I have ever seen. Yesterday we got a tour from a woman whose family has lived in Cesky Krumlov for generations. Both of her grandfathers were sent to labor camps in WWII, one escaped and hid in a monastery until the war was over and the other had to be the truck driver that went through towns with a siren warning about air raids. Both of her grandfathers survived and moved back to Cesky Krumlov at the end of the war.

Here is a view from the top of the Castle gardens. The castle is supposedly haunted by a good spirit named Perchta. She was forced to marry a man she didn't want to and who was terrible to her and on his death bed he recognized how terrible he had been and asked for her forgiveness. She couldn't find it in her heart to forgive him so he cursed her before he died. She lived for 3 more years but had more joy than she had had during her entire marriage. After she died she began to appear to young children who were alone or needed protection and also to people as a warning. If she wore red gloves she was warning about a fire, black gloves meant death, and white gloves meant good news. I'll keep my eyes out for her!
This is the castle tower. The amazing frescoes were made in the 1500s and then painted over with plaster in the 1600s. The plaster was removed in the 1900s and had preserved the frescoes really well so that is why the colors look so great. On the bottom you can see what looks like yellow bricks which is actually just painted to appear to be bricks. I guess they wanted to make people question reality and what was really real or fake and then look into their lives and think about what they took for granted as real or present that really wasn't.

Olomouc, I miss you already...

I don't even know where to start to explain Olomouc. This was the most amazing little college town I have ever been to and we had so much fun between drawing for hours in the main square, going out every night with new friends, and biking 31 miles in one day I was busy but enjoyed myself so much. This is the St. Wenceslas Church which was absolutely beautiful. The first version of this church was built all the way back in 1017 out of wood and now you can see that it is an amazing architectural monument that towers over the city.

This is the inside of the Church of the Virgin Mary of the Snow which was absolutely beautiful.

This is the statue in the middle of the main square. All the Patron Saints surround the statue, each one pointing towards the church that is dedicated to them around the town. Near the top of the statue is a gold plated canon ball that got lodged into the monument during the 30 year old war by the Prussians. It obviously did nothing to take the tower down so they celebrated it by coating it in gold and leaving it where it hit.

A beautiful park complete with botanical gardens surrounded one side of the college campus. A path to walk or run followed the little river that went through the city following the city wall.
Here is another shot of the park that I got to run through. So many people were walking their dogs and just taking little walks through the park during the afternoon. Luckily, our weather was amazing while we were there, I'm actually still pretty sun-burned from our bike ride.

Food and Friends

After spending 5 weeks in Prague, we have definitely found our favorite restaurants and places to spend our precious time. For our last night we knew exactly what we wanted to do. First we went to a restaurant with delicious pizza. Here is my vegetarian pizza complete with mushrooms, zucchini, eggplant and parmesan. Delicious!

We ate in the cellar of the restaurant where we could watch our pizzas being made and cooked in the brick oven. The walls were decorated with mosaics that were beautiful!
Here is my beautiful group of friends!

After dinner we headed straight for Angelato literally the best gelato place in the world. This was my gelato sundae with crème brulée and nutella icecream topped with homemade whipped cream and fresh strawberries. I almost dies of happiness!

After dinner we headed straight for Angelato literally the best gelato place in the world. This was my gelato sundae with crème brulée and nutella icecream topped with homemade whipped cream and fresh strawberries. I almost dies of happiness!Ally and Lauren on Charles Bridge posing in front of the Hrad (castle). Our night was so much fun and we had fun walking slowly back to the hotel full and giddy from dinner and Angelato.

Lidice

A few posts ago I posted about the paratroopers who assassinated one of the main nazi generals. After that assassination the nazis targeted a completely innocent town called Lidice which we visited last week. Here is the view from the entrance of the memorial which is a huge field with hills and a river and lake and trails that go through it. The weather cleared up quickly after we got there so I was able to enjoy walking around and seeing all the different monuments and remains of the old school, farm house, and church.

This is the monument to the children who died in the war. The faces on the children had so much emotion and sadness it was a pretty moving monument.

At the far end of the valley that you could walk through there was an old cemetery. It was surprisingly beautiful and each grave was marked by a little cross and the graves were covered in cabbage plants and wildflowers. Old willow trees lined the cemetery and I was able to take a few minutes and sit in the shade there.
Here are the remains of a farmhouse that was destroyed by the nazis. We also saw a school that was destroyed and the church as well. When we had gone to the paratroopers' church earlier we saw a picture of the men who were assassinated at the church in Lidice so when I climbed up the steps that were still left of the church and walked through the grass, it was an extremely surreal experience for me. It was so strange to make the connection and be at such a terribly historic spot.
Here is one of the monuments that are scattered around the area. This one was called crying woman with child and it was set just up from the valley and river in the middle of the field.

The Secret Garden

History and the National Theater

Yesterday morning we walked to the Church of St Cyril and Methodius. Where do I start? So during WWII there was a man named Reinhard Heydrich who was the Reich's protector and came up with the idea of "the final solution" which was the idea of killing off everyone of the Jews. The Czech government was in exile in 1942 and they decided that Heydrich had to be assassinated so they organized 7 paratroopers who were dropped into Prague and kept in houses around the city while they finalized their plans. They ended up catching Heydrich on the corner of a street in his car and were able to kill him by throwing a bomb into his car. He died from shrapnel wounds that got infected on June 4th, 1942.

While the assassination was a success, the 7 paratroopers remained stuck in Prague and the Nazis quickly retaliated. They searched hundreds of houses and went as far to target a completely innocent village, Lidice, by burning it to the ground and killing everyone in it. (We will be visiting this town later on). The paratroopers ended up hiding in the Church of St Cyril and Methodius for 6 weeks when a traitor told the Nazis where they were. 200 nazis surrounded the church and tried to kill them through flooding, gun shots and gas. Each paratrooper committed suicide after fighting and attempting to escape by digging a hole through the stone walls to the sewer (we saw this hole and it was terrifying to think of the mental state those men must have been in. The desperation that drives you to try and dig through a stone hole and then the realization of your inability to escape). Their final hours were spent in the crypt of the church which is freezing cold and terrifying. Gun holes are all over the walls and the little museum there has one of the men's shoes and a book stained by his blood.

Without exception, every family member and church official that helped them got killed or committed suicide before the war was over including a 14 year old child- this amounted to 294 people dying. The traitor ended up being found guilty for being a traitor after the war and was executed.

Josef Gabcik, Jan Kubis, and Josef Vaclikwere the three who carried out the assassination, all dying in the crypt. As dark as this sounds, it was incredibly interesting to learn about.

This is the hole that the paratroopers started to dig in hopes of escaping through the sewer.

On a happier note, we had a great day and evening after that humbling visit. I spent the afternoon walking around Prague and eating gelato at Angelato, literally the most amazing gelato place on the face of the earth.

At 6 I walked to the National Theater, which was about 20 minutes away and met up with our whole group to go to a ballet there called Trio . It had music by Jacques Brel in it and lots of french which was great to hear and the dancing incorporated a lot of modern movements. It lasted about 2.5 hours and I loved every minute of it. We had front row seats of the first balcony which gave us a great view.

The beautiful ceiling of the National Theater

Afterwards we went to Café Louvre which is a famous café here in Prague where we got a private room and enjoyed pea soup with mashed potatoes in it, traditional czech meat in gravy served with dumplings and cranberry sauce, and then an amazing chocolate cake with whipped cream. To top it off I had the most amazing café latté in my life that I didn't even need to put sugar into. We also tried the homemade ginger ale there which I'm sure Mama and Baba would love. I'm pretty sure it was pure ginger concentrate with mint and lemon in it.