Monday, August 10th - Prague

After our usual relaxing breakfast today we were off to the old city once again.  We had a while to wander around the old town square before our 11 a.m. tour.

I went into the St. Nicholas Church for a few minutes.  It is right on the corner of the square and it is a white baroque building from the 18th century.  As usual it has been renovated many times over the years and part of it is now going through reconstruction.  The church had many owners as well and most recently was/is a Hussite congregation.  The church has a huge chandelier that dominates the whole building but is very impressive.  It had white walls, pillars and high arches and beautiful frescoes on the ceilings and walls.  It features a 200 foot dome and a tower that is even higher.  There are statues and paintings around as well, and balconies, curved plaster decorations and gold trim.  The organ was once played by Mozart, which is something very special in any church.

The Communism walking tour was very interesting.  It was supposed to be 3 hours but was closer to 4 hours and it was a lot of walking as we went to see buildings, memorials, streets, etc. that were important from a communist perspective.  The bunker was beneath a currently-operating hotel and it was interesting but much smaller than I had anticipated.   The hotel was used by the communists for their key individuals so the bunker was mainly for those individuals in the case of a nuclear war.  The communists of course rescued Prague from the Nazis in May 1945.  The people were initially very thankful to be rid of the Nazis but soon the communist rule seemed very heavy handed and by 1948 they had seized complete control of the country.  Businesses were taken over by the state and people's rights and freedoms were suppressed.  In 1968 during the "Prague Spring" there was a slight thawing or relaxation of the socialist powers.  However, when Russia realized what was happening in the country it decided to clamp down even more and Russian troops invade the country again.  Any dissidents were eliminated and the situation went back to the way it was pre 1968 and any kind of action against the soviets went underground.  It was in 1969 when Jan Palach, a university student, set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square to protest the situation and I actually remember that happening and hearing about it on the news.  It was the Velvet Revolution in 1989 that finally led to the independence of Czechoslovakia - about the same time as the Berlin Wall came down.  There were so many details that I just can't remember them all now.

The Velvet Revolution was interesting as it was all done so peacefully, hence the term velvet revolution as in velvet gloves and handling something gently.  Our guide Teresa had some amazing stories about what happened during the communist years and the revolution and after. Actually she had some interesting WWII stories too as her family was Jewish.  One grandfather was in Auschwitz near the end of the war when the Germans were trying to get everyone out of the camps before the Allies arrived.  He was put on a train and when recognized the area around Prague he and another man escaped from the train and he got back to his family safely.  Her grandmother was pregnant with her mother during the war.  She moved to a small village and was hiding in the basement of a house for six months.  She gave birth there and lived with the new baby and her young son in the dark in the basement until the country was liberated by the Russians.  Her other grandfather also survived the camps but couldn't get a ride home so he borrowed a bike and rode hundreds of miles through the mountains to get back to Czechoslovakia.  

Her stories were all very moving and yet she didn't dwell on those who didn't make it.  She talked about her dad being involved in the 1968 movement and she herself being there in 1989 to watch everything change.  She talked about what it was like to live under communist rule.  If your house was bigger than the acceptable limit you would suddenly find another family had moved in with you.  You couldn't buy many of the things you needed.  You just got the essentials.  There were streets you just didn't walk down because they were all communist offices.  But at the same time she was a Pioneer along with all the other children and she loved the fun and camaraderie of the experience.  She loved the games that the communists held with everyone cheering.  Her parents were very well educated and informed and so was she.  She said it was a bit like being a schizophrenic because you had two parts to keep separate: the part that the communists needed to hear and see, and the part that told her all of this was wrong and it should be changed, the part she could discuss only with her family because you couldn't trust anyone else.  The tour was good but the stories of her first hand experiences were even better.  They certainly made you realize just how lucky you were to grow up in Canada when you did.

After the tour we wandered around a bit and just happened to walk past an interesting place, a chocolate museum.  We decided to go in and we had a demonstration on how to make pralines and even got to sample some.  We learned all about the different types of chocolate and got to sample each type.  We learned about  where chocolate comes from, what goes into milk chocolate (cocoa mass or liquor, cocoa butter, milk, sugar) and white chocolate (no cocoa mass) and dark chocolate (no milk).  The cocoa powder is not used for making chocolates but is used for drinks.  That was news to me.  We also learned about the process for harvesting and processing cocoa beans and it was all very interesting - and tasty.

From there we continued down the street to the Powder Tower and the Municipal Hall.  I was too tired to climb to the top of the tower but apparently the views were quite nice from up at the top.  Municipal Hall was closed to tours so we couldn't go in there.  The trams were also right there so I was all for going back to the hotel.  Somewhere along the line we had lunch but it was quite late after the tour - maybe 3:30.  As a result we didn't really want any dinner so we just stopped for some dessert around 7:30 p.m. and had apple strudel, which was really good.  Then we caught the tram back to our hotel for an early evening.