Tuesday, 19 February 2013

La bohème; Act 2

And so we continue North-West towards our proverbial Ithaca. We sojourned in Szeged, a university town in Southern Hungary with some great neo-Baroque buildings including an incredible synagogue. It was an especially nice sojourn because we were shown around by Yasmin's cousin Dany who has been studying there.

But the main course of today's blog entry is one of Europe's greatest cities, Prague.

We saved something special for the end of our trip, and despite it being our 39th capital city, Prague was super duper from the very moment we arrived to our botel (half boat, half hotel). 

Prague's medieval town is unchanged from the glory days, as it was mostly untouched by either world war.

And it looks just as good at night.

Josh accidentally poured himself a traditional Czech beer. i.e. with lots of head.

A particularly tasty veggie meal

Another night we went to see Slavia Prague beat Kladno in a game called "Speedy Violence on Ice". (We only took one of the photos below)

Charles Bridge

The view from Prague Castle

St. Vitus Cathedral, inside Prague Castle

The fancy things inside St Vitus Cathedral

A rare untouristed street

A quirky self-portraitist

Prague's Jewish quarter is still in tact due to a Nazi decision to maintain a museum to an extinct race. We took a tour to see several synagogues including the oldest active one in Europe, the Old New Synagogue.

The Jewish cemetery of Prague has seen possibly 100,000 people buried within a small space, such that some graves are twelve people deep.

A stranger way of remembering the dead, however, can be found in the nearby town of Kutná Hora. The Sedlec Ossuary contains the bones of between 40,000 and 70,000 people.


And so, we close another chapter in our story, and say goodbye to Eastern Europe.

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