Trips and Tours

One of the best things about my summer language course in Prague is the free weekday tours and weekend trips. Three times a week and twice every weekend the school's administrators and teaching assistants take us students on tours around Prague or trips to surrounding areas outside the city at no extra cost. Although I usually end up exhausted and sweaty, it's always been worthwhile. The first trip I went on was last Wednesday and consisted of an arduous, but beautiful, walk around Prague's much, much smaller Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower of Prague was nice but generally unimpressive compared to the real thing. What was nice was the view (bottom picture). Something that I found very interesting from the first tour was a church with a "magic", (their words not mine), wooden statue of the baby Jesus that has protected the church from being destroyed over the last five or six centuries (second to last picture, it's really small and in the center). Its about the size of a GI Joe and has its own wardrobe of robes given to it by various popes and other important Catholic officials over the years. Our guide told us that a couple hundred years ago, one of the priests was playing dress up with the splintered savior, (sorry, I couldn't resist), and its arms fell off. That night the priest of the church dreamed that only a person of pure spirit could reattach the arms. He was disappointed to find that there was no one holy enough in the whole city, and the arms were never reattached. After hearing this I walked up to the spruce son of God, (again, I'm sorry), and snapped its arms back in place...just kidding. It turns out that its arms were already attached when I saw it. I don't know if it was all just a legend or a story to amuse us, but I was pretty bummed that I didn't get my time to shine in front of the lumber lord of lords, (last time, I promise).
The next trip I went on was to a Czech museum with the fourth largest equestrian statue in the world, (impressive, I know). I forgot my camera that day but there wasn't a whole lot to show. The giant statue outside of the building was covered by a tarp for repairs and they wouldn't let us take pictures inside the museum. The museum was very modern and informative, and it even had English translations. It was very nice to learn a little more about the recent history of the Czech Republic and how it is now just starting to overcome all the struggles that it was forced to face over the past century.
The weekend trips were a little more exciting for me. On Saturday, I started off by traveling several hours to the castle of the Austrian diplomat and chancellor Metternich (third from bottom up). This place was very, very cool. Sadly, I couldn't take any pictures inside though. Metternich begged, borrowed, and stole 'gifts' from around the globe while he was working in international politics and was a good buddy of Napoleon. I saw everything from libraries with thousands of ancient manuscripts to Roman busts of philosophers and statesmen, Egyptian sarcophagi to Samurai suits of armor, Turkish guns to Ming dynasty Vases, Italian Renaissance tapestries to Greek statues of Psyche and Cupid, a lock of Napoleon's hair to medieval pikes and claymores, and the list goes on and on and on with amazingly awesome things. Later that day we traveled to the spa town of Mariánské Lázně whose 'curative' spring water has drawn some of the 19th and early 20th century's most powerful, artistic, and brilliant people, (Twain, Goethe, Chopin, Edward VII, Dvořak, Dumas, Kafka, and Kipling just to name a few). As you can see from the pictures the town was incredibly beautiful and it was a blast just walking around and staring at the architecture (pictures four, five and six from the bottom up).
On Sunday I traveled about an hour to the silver mining town of Kutna Hora to see a couple of churches. The first was an awesome Gothic church that was/is a rival to St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague (pictures four and five from the top down). It was paid for by the villagers with the leftover slivers of silver, (say that ten times fast), after the ore was turned into currency. The second church was a little more strange. For a long time the church housed over 30,000 bones in its crypt from various battles and the plague. One day in 1817 some extraordinarily creepy monk(s) thought that they would put those leftover people parts to good use and display them in even creepier ways to teach the locals about how fleeting life is. The walls were literally covered with human bones (the first three pictures). There were columns, vases, a chandelier, coats of arms, etc. made out of human remains. It was incredible and disgusting all at the same time; a lot to take in. Some people on the trip were having a hard time with it all. I, of course, was humming: "them bones, them bones" and eating beef jerky. I drew some dirty looks.

First off I'd like to apologize for the way that the pictures are arranged. I meant for them to be in correct order. Once again, I'm sorry but I can't comment on the comments. I don't know why. I do really appreciate them though. It's really humbling to know that people care about my day to day activities and well-being. Thanks for reading and all of your kind words.