Speaking of cheese, cheese is actually a great place to start. It’s what I ordered the first night in Prague. Stinky cheese to be specific. However, either for better or worse, four hours later… it never arrived. Welcome to the Czech Republic, (where as opposed to American eateries with brown-nosing waiters), your entering a restaurant is considered to be a nuisance to the owner. Our professor tried explaining this to us before we left, and warned that vegetarians will need to be a little lenient, as Czech food is pretty limited. I thought he was exaggerating. Four hours after arriving in a seedy pub in the outskirts of Prague, all I had been served was one beer…no stinky cheese. About half of the 31 DIS students had not been served, and the waitress actually snuck out of the restaurant, coat on, and did not return. It turned into an embarrassing display of scavenging people’s plates for leftovers. It turned out to just be hilariously absurd in a Kafkaesque kind of manner. Speaking of Kafka…
Kafka's house! As written in Hebrew
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I should give a little background:
near Wenceslas Square
babies that artist David Cerny put on Soviet TV Tower to render it powerless (read rest of blog for more on Cerny)
old town square
“In the beginning…“
This past week, I along with 31 other students, took a bus from Copenhagen to Prague on an integrated study tour with our European Culture and History class (“Memory and Identity in Czech Republic”). We experienced the Czech Republic (Prague, Lidice, Cesky Krumlov) within the context of our classroom discussion. For example, for the past month in class in Copenhagen we examined different forms of architecture (Renaissance, Art Noveau, Gothic, Baroque), different types of art (David Cerny, Milan Knizek, Egon Schiele), and different pieces of literature (Kafka, Kundera). When we arrived in Prague, everything that we learned in a boxy classroom in black and white letters suddenly took on an entirely new lifeform. (Stinky) cheesy as it sounds, our class texts all at once surrounded us, three dimensional and in full color, pulling us into the beautiful city of Prague.
What we read in class from Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
“In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square.”
What we saw in Prague:
the ACTUAL balcony!
In class, we read about a controversial artist named David Cerny and a mosaic of Europe he created called “Entropa.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropa
In Prague, we met Cerny in his studio! What a character. Crazy head of hair, absolutely no concern for anyone’s perception of him (so he claims), and his aim is to “piss people off”. Here’s his recent famous piece entitled “Entropa” which we visited (and was one of my favorite parts of the trip):
Entropa
It’s three stories high- HUGE!
Entropa is a sculpture created by Czech artist David Černý under commission for the Czech Republic to mark the occasion of its presidency of the Council of the European Union. The sculpture was supposed to have been created jointly by 27 artists and artist groups from all member countries of the EU; but in a hoax, Černý and his three assistants created the satirical and controversial work depicting pointed stereotypes of European nations and fake artist profiles complete with invented descriptions of their supposed contributions.
Here’s some closeups:
Romania = Vampire Theme Park
Germany = set of moving highways in the shape of...well...Cerny denied it was in the shape of anything...hmm...
Denmark! made out of legos...and in the shape of the provocative Muhammed cartoon, althought Cerny denies this as well
Exploring
On Monday, we trekked up to the castle. (Sidenote: we thought we’d get some exercise rather than take the metro…but unfortunately as some of you may know, my depth perception is quite skewed and I see on a very compressed scale of reality…meaning, I typically think things are 5 times closer than they are. This is not a physical ailment relating to my eyeball or anything like that…it is just a subset to my inability of orienteering myself (never ask me for directions) and hence my over-reliability on my GPS. Poor directional sense + stubborn nature = me = an extra hour finding the castle.) SO! That being said, we find the castle…and it’s closed. But! We visiting the castle cathedral which was incredible. Here are some pics:
view of the castle (pointy thing in distance) from Charles Bridge...as you can see, we are still quite far
view from the top of the climb...quite lovely!
gargoyle looking things at the entrance of castle...a little unnerving
Gothic Cathedral- extremely ornamental
stainglass window
Even though we didn’t get to tour the inside of the castle, had we not taken the extra hour to walk there, we wouldn’t have had a guard stop us…
Guard: Stop right there.
Us: Huh?
Guard: Halt…don’t go further.
Us: Have we done something? What’s wrong?
Guard: Just wait.
(we wait….at which point 2 black cars zoom by mafia style)
Guard: Okay you can go now.
Us: What was that?
Guard: President.
Us: THE president? Of Czech Republic?
Guard: THE president.
COOL!
After the castle, I tried finding the observatory tower, but got lost instead (see parenthetical above). I ended up on top of a mountain with a friend and we had a great view and challenging climb down.
ok i admit it, we used self timer.
I forgot to mention that on day 1 we visited the Lenon (John) Wall, which some people thought was the Lenin wall…hmm…interesting mixup.
peace and love, man
Not sure what this display was for, but I thought it was cool:
So many locks!!
The Next Day
We visited Prague Radio and heard a great speaker, David Vaughan, talk to us about Prague Spring.
The Prague Spring (Czech: Pražské jaro, Slovak: Pražská jar) was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II. It began on 5 January 1968, when reformist Slovak Alexander Dubček came to power, and continued until 21 August when the Soviet Union and members of its Warsaw Pact allies invaded the country to halt the reforms.
We debated whether or not it was a good idea for Jan Palach to light himself on fire in protest.
On 19 January 1969, student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Prague’s Wenceslas Square to protest against the renewed suppression of free speech.
Something that got me thinking was that Palach was my age when he revolted against the invasion and “committed suicide” (the religious authorities of the time actually deemed it wasn’t suicide…interesting conclusion). I feel truly lucky that I live in a free country, and take that for granted some times. But at the same time, I wonder how I would have reacted as a 21 year old during Prague Spring. It was neat to hear about the history from a building smack in the middle of where it all took place.
Later that day, I went on an Art Noveau walking tour and saw the building where Kafka worked as an insurance agent, an experience that inspired much of his hatred against bureaucracy. Now, the building as shown below is home to trendy clothing store H&M.
After the Art Noveau tour, we explored the Mucha Museum. That night, DIS provided us with a dressy, hoity toity, froo froo, uppidy dinner reservation at Francouzska Restaurant, after which we enjoyed a musical performance at the municipal house- “Best of World and Czech Music.”
Municipal House, another example of Art Noveau
Day Three
The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art was #1 on our itinerary, where we met the director/ artist/old hippy with a ponytail Milan Knizek (also famed rival of Cerny). Knizek was very into “action art” that riles people up…for example:
He wrote up these instructions, then followed them...see next pic for demonstation
Stand still in a crowd, unfold a piece of paper, stand on it, take off your ordinary clothes and put on something unusual, e.g. a jacket half red, half green with a tiny saw hanging from the lapel, a lone handkerchief pinned onto the back. Display a poster on which is written:
I BEG PASSERS BY, IF POSSIBLE, TO CROW WHILE PASSING THIS PLACE.
Lie down on the piece of paper, read a book, tear out the finished pages. Then stand up, crumple the paper, burn it, sweep up the ashes carefully, change clothes and leave.
And so he did:
Grandpa, I thought you would appreciate this piece of art I found:
"Election Poster of the Communist Czechoslovakia in 1925"
Later that day, we toured the Jewish Quarter, saw the house Golem was created, and walked through the cemetary which is very eerie.
who needs Golem to protect you when you've got a mezuzah?!
clock with hebrew letters that goes COUNTERclockwise because you read hebrew right to left
Jewish cemetary
Slight tangent:
That night, DIS treated us to the yummiest buffet dinner ever. The only 2 seats left for my friend and me were the two at the table with our teacher and the intern, which was fine by us! In between hard focus on using my utensils properly so the professor wouldn’t deem me “infantile” (that’s what the eating in Europe website warned if I switched hands with the fork and knife!!), I discovered the following:
1) my professor, who was originally American, used to be premed but is now a philosophy professor
2) he is unfamiliar with the names Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen
3) hair straighteners BAFFLED HIS MIND. He had no idea how girls hair was straightened, and didn’t believe us when we told him there was a device that obtains such desired results
Lidice & Cesky Krumlov
The last few days of the trip we ventured away from Prague, and into Cesky Krumlov, a beautiful quaint town, with winding cobblestones, stunning hills, and old but gorgeous architecture. On the way to Cesky Krumlov, we stopped in Lidice to check out the memorial for the town that was completely razed by Hitler as retaliation against his #1 man Heydrich being assassinated. Horrific story, and the memorial was very moving.
On the busride to Cesky Krumlov, the teacher decided to show us a movie about a creepy vampire princess who died a strange death, and was rushed away in the middle of the night to be buried in a church in Cesky Krumlov. So when we arrived, everyone was kind of creeped out. But it turned out to be the cutest town, with cheap prices.
OH! So, in the Czech Repulic, all the prices look the same as they did in Denmark, HOWEVER, to convert to American $ in Denmark, you take the kronor and divide it by 5. In Prague/Cesky Krumlov, you take the Czech kronor and divide by…20!!!!! SO CHEAP!!! Huge meals for under $10 was such a relief after mucho expensive Denmark for 5 weeks.
the church where the vampire princess was buried
"Van Gogh Cafe" decorated accordingly
I could go on and on about this week, but it’s 2:30 am and I leave for Barcelona in the morning (CAN’T WAIT!!!! I’m visiting my 2 best friends from school), so I’m going to call it quits yall.
If you have anything to add or questions or anything at all, as always feel free to email. I love hearing from everyone. Stay well, I hope your weather wherever you are is glorious, and I’ll update again after Spain.
