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.

Journal Entries for Terezín and Old Jewish Cemetary

While we were in Terezín, the most amazing things I saw were the peices of artwork that came out of such a horrific situation. I copied down several of the drawings that I saw to the best of my ability. There were so many different styles and medias used and most of them had to be done in secret on stolen away materials.

The Rim Rim Rim lettering is from a boys magazine that was published in Terezín. There were dorms for young boys and girls and it looked like every house had their own little magazine. The mushroom is propaganda from a children's book called "Poisonous Mushrooms" intended for aryan children to instill anti-semitism from an early age. To the right of that drawing is a drawing from a photograph of Jewish men from Berlin standing in line at the Palestine and Orient travel agency to apply for emigration. The little circles to the right of that are from the Nuremberg laws which had standards to identify Jews and 1st and 2nd level part Jews called Mischlinge or mixed blood.
This is from our visit to the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague that we visited yesterday morning. The cemetery is so old that there are several different layers of bodies buried there because they ran out of room repeatedly for the bodies. Because of this, tombstones are all cluttered and leaning up against each other and you will see tombstones from several different centuries right next to each other. Each time they made a new layer for more bodies, they would bring in a bunch of dirt and have to most the old tombstones up so you have a huge collection of about 12,000 of them all together.

Terezín

Today was the most serious day we have had so far considering that we took a trip to Terezín for the day. During WWII, Terezín was used as a holding village for Jews, over 150,000 passing through there in total. The Nazis used it as a model village to fool the Red Cross in 1944 into believing that they were treating the Jews well by dressing them in normal clothes, ordering them to say certain things, performing the children's Opera Brundibar, and setting up a soccer game between the detainees. Terezín was not the normal concentration camp, there were not gas chambers there or mass killings in the area, but it was a transport center and around 33,000 people died while in the camp and less than 200 children survived.

Here is a Star of David we saw from a synagogue that was worshiped in illegally in a cellar during WWII. They had paintings and text all over the walls that was still visible. I was so inspired by the dedication and desire these people must have had to continue worship in such a dangerous situation.

This was inside the small fortress. There are two fortresses and they were built during the rule of the Hapsburgs. It was perfect for the Nazis because it had been built as a fortress and a prison so they were protected and already had the military layout that they needed.
Here is the fortress from the road (you can see beavers in the river). It was built sucken down so that it was pretty much invisible except for the grass on top, until you got right up to it.
Here is the entrance to the small Fortress, the black and white seemed so out of place and terrified me.
You may have seen these words before, made famous by the entrance to Auschwitz. It means "Work makes free" Can you say 1984?

What made this day so amazing was the artwork and literature and poetry that we got to see from the interned. There were thousands of documents saved and so many children's drawings. Because of this, the day really wasn't that much of a downer, of course it had it's moments, but to see how people, and especially children, can make such beautiful art out of such a horrifying experience really gave me hope for humanity.

To make this visit even more special, next week we get to meet Ivan Klíma, an internationally famous author who was a child and survivor of Terezín. During our visit to the museum today we also met another survivor, a 90 year old man named Pavel who gives tours now and tells his stories. He was one of the sweetest people I have ever met and wished us all the best. I asked him how it was for him to return here and he responded by saying, "It is my moral duty. Don't you think so?"

Day Trip to Krivoklat Castle

Yesterday we were put into groups of three and told to go on day trips to interesting places around Prague. My group decided to go to Krivolklat Castle, a little over an hour by train from Prague, complete with a torture chamber, tower, and unbeknownst to us, an archery. Our train left at 7 am and riding into the countryside so early in the morning was amazing. There is something called the Chata culture here which is the country life. Every weekend there is an exodus of Prague and people travel out to the countryside where they all have their own little cottages called Chatas. These are usually pretty bare and simple with gardens and streams to go fishing and forests to pick mushrooms in or hike around in. Czech people are very fond of outdoor activities but until yesterday I didn't realize the extent of this culture. It was so interesting to see the little cabins lining the rivers or forests and then we got to Krivoklat which was a tiny little town with a huge castle up on the top of the hill. We got a full on tour, and although it was in Czech, we were able to follow along with an English handout.

This is a village we passed on the train. There were a countless number of these perfect little towns and they were surrounded by mustard fields and rivers and forests with a castle here and there. It looked like a fairytale.

Krivoklat Castle and the big tower.
Here I am with Robin Hood, who we met right when we got into the castle. After trying out these weapons I will definitively cross off marksman from my employment possibilities, I was terrible.

We were excited to get off the train and to the castle, can you tell! We were also a little delirious from waking up before 6 am.

When we got back to Prague last night we did a quick grocery store run and then headed to Choco Café where I have thick sipping chocolate with fresh raspberries and strawberries and whipped cream. Perfect ending to a perfect day.

Graffiti

The other day we went out on a two hour walking tour to do an "exegesis of Place" with Professor Vaclav Cílek, one of the most respected professors in Prague. He studies geology and philosophy and connects them by studying the history of places and architecture.

One of the most interesting parts of the walk was the TV Tower which is one of the highest buildings in Prague and also one of the most hated. It was made by the communists to block out the European and American radio stations at it does not fit in with the rest of the beautiful city. As a way of covering up such a horrific building, the country hired the famous Czech sculptor, Cerny, to make the building more "humanic". His interpretation of this was to put enormous babies crawling all over the building with giant tv screens as faces. Don't ask me how this makes the building more inviting, I am extremely creeped out by the idea of huge robotic babies crawling around a tower but they made the sculptures and put them on the tower. To make it worse, the tower is actually built directly on top of a Jewish cemetery, many headstones can still be seen from one side and the old mortuary is now used as a pre-school. Just when I think Prague can't get any more strange, something like this pops up and amazes me. Cílek explained that the Czechs have a way of dealing with things through sarcasm and dark humor and the baby sculptures were really the only way they saw to change such a terrible and disrespectful building into a mockery and make their peace with it.

Cílek took us around a touristless part of Prague and we were quickly aware of all the graffiti around us. He explained the importance of the graffiti and how it has gone from a subculture to a mainstream part of the Czech culture. He even said that some neighborhoods appreciate the graffiti that is done well because it covers up the ugly old cement communist buildings.