Left you in Dresden, ready to cross the border into the Czech Republic to catch up with our friends Steve and Dani, who had at that point been wandering about Prague for a few weeks. It's about 150 km due south to Prague, through mostly countryside, farms and the outskirts of Usti--where there was some sort of detour along a long stretch of river, until arriving in a clearly more populated area--hello, Prague. We'd managed to print up map directions earlier in Germany, and these held up fine until we hit Prague. Between trying to read endless strings of consonants with nary a vowel, and dealing with the usual city traffic, one-way streets galore, we got totally lost. Crossed one of the bridges into what appeared to be the old city and zeroed in on a hotel, where the extremely kind reception desk clerk printed up the remainder of the directions--that is, how to get from that point to our meeting point/apt. A dream, despite the Czech-- and we started on 5 days of Prague. We had come without any real notions of the city, other than that it appears to be a "hot destination" for tourists--especially within Europe. We had slivers of information from Rebekah--who was there with her choir last summer--but not much more.

The neighborhood we stayed in(Prague 6) was quiet, residential, dotted with small grocery shops, some cafes and a few publike restaurants--local eateries. We gravitated to a cafe for our afternoon tea/cake routine--hard to break after all those weeks in Germany--and over the next several days wandered with our tour guides, hitting the highlights of Prague. We visited the area with its 6(!) old synagogues, the beautiful central square in the old city, flanked by beautiful ornately decorated buildings, the lovely clock tower with its astrological clock, the alleyways that lead from there to the Charles bridge--the sole(?) pedestrian bridge--part of the royal way from the "castle" to the old city. We also attended a concert in the staid Smetana Hall--where R. sang last year--, to celebrate Dani's big 40th birthday. On "our side" of the Vltava river, lies the phenomenal "castle" complex, a city in its own right, although most of the castle's buildings are now musea, and even some of the alleyways there have entrance fees. We had enough work for our eyes letting them wander up, down and over the ornate buildings, the lovely pictures that were used instead of house numbers in times of old, and then, wandered, only several of endless possible ways the sprawling castle gardens, which include forests, terraces, English manicured gardens, tea/cafe gazebos, stairways of all sorts, beautiful viewpoints of the castle, the old city, the succession of bridges over the river, and only a smattering of tourists, as they don't generally have the time--I imagine-- to cover that as well. Wandering the inside of the castle's cathedral, St. Vitus was also most worthwhile. The whole place has been steeped in an unusual mixture of old and communist. On the one hand, the home to the renowned Kafka, on the other Havel. The language is incomprehensible when spoken, but one can occasionally--and I do stress that-- make interesting connections with languages when seeing it in print. I love how tea is caj, which is pronounced CHAY, same as in Turkish, and of course, Chinese! Interestingly, there seem to be romance language links, but also complete otherworldly alien sounding words. Quite a few people do speak English of sorts, though.

We also braved the provincial roads with the barest of maps to the town of Kutna Hora, which lies about 75 km east of Prague. A tremendous amount of traffic until one really clears the endless sprawl of IKEA, shopping and office complexes, factories and then from one moment to the next, wheat fields. Somewhat of a disappointment, another medieval town that has lived under the shadow of gray that communism presumably was... The highlight was our pic-nic lunch. Besides the touring and walking, though, it was lovely to spend time together, filling in the gaps of several years and also getting to know eachother better. Doing laundry in a washing machine was also a highlight! Did most of our own cooking there as the food is --in short-- pig or meat based, and leaden looking. Plus it was HOT. Definitely a place to think about looking around again, but the list of places is so long, I don't know where, exactly it will fit on the list!