WEDNESDAY, APRIL
23 – PRAGUE PROBLEMS AND HAPPY ENDINGS
Yesterday's
entry said that our trip had been a disappointment, but I didn't mean
the whole
trip, just the fact that the Palace itself had been closed, and the
churches, which were open, had not topped my must-see list. So, when
I say that we've had problems today, I don't mean to complain. If
something doesn't work out on a trip, you adjust your plans and move
on.
Today's problems had surfaced before, but never so consequentially.
What I'm referring to is signage. Czech street names, if you're
lucky enough to spot them on the sides of buildings, rarely have more
than one vowel squirreled amongst a collection of consonants, and
they bare only passing resemblance to those on our English-ized map.
Thus, despite Bob's fabled map-reading skills, we ended up hiking all
the way up to the Castle that was not open yesterday—no tram, no
funicular: just huffing and puffing. When we finally
realized that we
were nowhere near our destination, the Furstenberg Gardens, we
decided to head back down a seemingly endless flight of stairs that
led us to within a block of where we'd just started. Eventually, we
did find the gardens, but to view them properly, we would have had to
hike back up to the Castle area again to work our way down a
series of landscaped terraces. So much for that plan.
We were rewarded, however, by two sights we might otherwise have
missed. We walked across a bridge one up from the Charles Bridge,
thus providing Bob a chance for a good photo of the latter. We also
passed a striking memorial to those who
resisted the Nazi occupation
during World War Two. The ordeals of this occupation and the
following Soviet one must be vivid personal memories for many older
adults.
On the other side of the bridge is the Jewish district, whose
residents were almost totally exterminated during World War Two. We
had planned to visit the old cemetery, but there was such a long line
of people dying to get in—and paying to do so—that we skipped
that. We did discover a lovely concert hall right next to it,
though—another benefit of getting lost. And we also scoped out our
evening's restaurant and the Municipal House with its Art Deco
Smetana Concert Hall, both of which were artfully concealed in the
maze of tiny streets in the Old Town. Good thing we did too, because
we
might still be looking for them instead of having an excellent
Indian dinner at a restaurant called the Indian Jewel and hearing a concert by the Czech National Symphony
Orchestra playing Gershwin, Mendoza (world premier), Charles Ives,
and Leonard Bernstein. Due to the world premier of Mendoza's piece, "New York Stories, Concertino for Trumpet and Orchestra, maestro Vince Mendoza conducted the whole evening himself!
(The following pictures of the Muncipial House and the Smetana Hall are taken from web images. I just cleaned them up!)
