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August 8th

When we were in Russia, someone said "stay at the Boathouse Hostel in Prague! you´ll love it. so we looked in our lovely Let´s Go Europe Book. and called the number. and it was wrong. so we looked it up online, and called the number, and got a reservation. The person taking the reservation said that she´d send us directions over email. checked email. no directions attached. yahoo mail went down. no matter, we´ll just follow the directions in the Let´s Go Guide.

Got to Prague at 7 last night. looked for the number 3 or 17 tram. 17 did not exist. got on 3. Looked at the tram map on the tram. looked at the places being stopped at. no match. finally, we start running into stops that are on the map, and we are headed the wrong way... in fact, we´re about 10 miles northwest of the train station, when we want to be 10 miles south of the station. no matter, we get off the tram. get on a 3 tram going the other way. go by the train station. start heading northeast... uh.. get to the end of the line. get kicked off the tram. at this point, it´s 10 pm, and we no longer have a tram ticket, which you can only buy at the train station, we´re in the middle of nowhere, we don't have a phone number or a phone card, which is the only thing that the phones take, we don´t speak czech, and our bags are killing us. There´s very few people around, and we flag the first person who comes by, who, fortunately speaks some english. we pull out a map. he shows us where we are.. which is no longer in prague, and we point out where we want to be. he mentions that this is quite a long way away, which we know, and we ask for any suggestion of how to get there. he has no idea. we ask if he knows where we can catch a cab, because provided that you don't get one of the ones run by the mafia, only about 50 percent or so, they won't steal all our luggage, and rip us off, and stranded in the middle of nowhere. since we already are in the middle of nowhere, and if we got ripped off we'd have fewer bags to carry, we decide to take the chance. anyway, he thinks catching a cab is a bad idea, but he doesn't have any other suggestions. he leaves, we wait to flag a cab. one comes by pretty quickly. we pull out our map, he, who speaks very little englsih, says "that's a long ways away" and says he'll take us for 10 dollars which is .. well.. about the weekly salery for a czech citizen. sounds great to us. it takes us another half hour to get there, because not only is it a long ways, but he can't figure out why nice girls like us would want to go down to a deserted part of the river. he´s rather suprised to find a hostel out there. we get there, with all our luggage and sanity and everything, and walk in the door, and the woman looks at us, and says "oh, it's christi and celeste! we're so glad you are here! here's your rooms, here's beer, see you at breakfast at 9" it was so nice. everyone there is so nice. one of our hostel roommates is from Berekely- in fact she lives about 1 mile away from us.

Prague is very old, and amazingly beautiful. there are 12th century buildings, wonderful bridges.. it's amazing..
--christi

All of what Christi has said is true. And everyone who works in the hostel knows our names. Even people I had not seem before said good morning to me and told me Christi had ordered me breakfast. They are amazing. The whole place is sort of like summer camp with beer for Austrailians and Californians. But sometimes waves of different english speakers come through. last week, we are told, it was 80 percent canadian.
The aforementioned beer is verz good and verz cheap. arrrg. the z and y are transposed on these keybaords. um anyway, all the buildings here are very beautiful, the new ones and the old ones. which leads me to the realization that american cities are not ugly because they are new, they are ugly because the people in them have decided they should be ugly. we have forsakeen art and architecture, not as some immutable path of development, but because we seem not to care how auful everything looks. as soon as i get back, i am going to learn how to make sculptures and monuments that are easy to transport until you fix them in the ground or attach them to a building and then i am going to start putting them places. in the dog park. on telephone polls. on tilt up box buildings....whose design ought to be a crime...

The woman who lives one mile from us is a teacher at the berkeley psychic intitute. i am trying to ask her a lot of questions because i think it could be very useful to be psychic. if it doesnt work, then i have wasted a bit of time, but the risk reward ratio is good, so maybe i will one day take a class there.
i am very happy happy to be here. having a great time, wish you were here.

- celeste

August 11

We've been here for 45 days, we'll be back in 45 more. So it's the halfway mark. I forgot what the dog looks like, so I guess I shoulda brought a picture. Anyway, see y'all in 6 more weeks.
-celeste

August 12

It's our last day in Prague and I wish we were staying here for a month, although not necessarily in the hostel we've been in.
We have seen the cathedral in the Prague castle and it's got the actual tomb of Good King Wenceslas in it... Who wasn't actually a King, was just a Duke and was so hated by his Christian population that they asked his pagan brother to murder him and be their leader instead, all of which took place no where near the feast of Stephen, but it makes a nice song.
The amazing thing about St. Vitus Cathedral, aside from Wenceslas (who is the patron saint of Bohemia) is that they actually have the shoulder of St. Vitus in it someplace. Ok, maybe that's not so amazing. It is just stuffed full of all sorts of tombs and has pieces of two saints of questionable origin. But not St. John the Baptist, who we've had zero sightings of since leaving Scandinavia.
The cathedral spent more than 5 centuries under construction. It's darn amazing looking. Great stained glass windows. And it's inside the castle/palace thing which is also pretty cool. The famous Defenestration of Prague that has something to do with the 30 years war and the Hapsburgs took place in the castle. I stood in the actual room looking at the actual window that they threw the Catholics out of (they landed in a heap of muck and thus survived their 50 foot drop and might even be sainted today for all know, since the Hapsburgs won and Bohemia stayed Catholic). This event spawned the words antidefenestratable, which means unable to be thrown out of a window, which was my favorite word in 8th grade beacuse it was so long and involved such a strange historical event, so you can imagine my awe at visiting the location where it all came from.

We also went to the Jewish Museum, which is a series of a bunch of synagogues in the Jewish Ghetto in Prague. They lived in a walled city area for more than a thousand years, so it might not be called a ghetto, cuz it started way before that word was invented, but I haven't been reading my guidebook very carefully, so i dunno what they actually call it. Actually, Christi, who always pays attention, tells my the word "ghetto" was actually invented to describe this settlement. It's never been one of my favorite words like antidefenestratable, but origins of words are facintating. We've seen two words in just the one city! But there's more!
One of the very oldest buildings is the Old-new Synagogoue, which was knocked down so a more structurally sound exact looking copy could be put up.... in the 13th century. The first golem was created there (yet another word!) and is suppossedly decomposing in the attic there. There was no sign of it anywhere tho, except in the hundreds of postcards for sale outside.
The rest of the jewish museum was historic buildings with a history of the settlement. There are a lot of artifacts there because during World War II, it was the plan of the Nazis to put an "Exotic Museum of an Extinct Race" in Prague. One of the synagogs in the Museum has the names of Bohemian Jews who died in the war painted on the walls. It's a large building and all the walls are covered with small script.

And we saw the astronomical clock. It tells time in the current system, in Old Bohemian Time, in Babylonian Time and it charts the travel of the planets and the sun around the Earth (did I mention it's a really old clock?) and can be used by people who have the right knowledge, to tell the date. On every hour, two windows open and the 12 apostles go sliding by both of them. Actually, it's statues of the 12 apostles, it's not /that/ amazing. And a skeleton rings a bell, vanity looks in a mirror, a turk shakes his head threatentingly and an urserer shakes money bags. Then a rooster crows and the bell rings. Huge crowds gather to watch this. People start picking out their position more than 20 minutes before the hour to get a good view. It's not all 100% tourists in the crowds either, locals also get a kick out of it. The whole thing was considered so cool when it was built, that the town council poked out the eyeballs of the clock maker after he built it (that sort of thing in leui of payment could make it hard to get artists to take on comissions) so that he couldn't build another one for anybody else. He was justifiable upset and blindly tore apart the works and stopped the clock for 80 years before they could find anybody who could manage to fix it. These sorts of stories, things sitting broken or unfinished for a long time, are common around here. Hence the 500 years of cathedral building. It mostly was not build on until this century and they worked on it right up through the war before it was finished.

We did not make it the Ossuary, where the bones of 40000 people are used as construction material for a church sort of thing. It's a different solution for an overcrowded cemetary. The one in the Jewish settlement, they just kept piling dirt on for 12 layers, so that it got to be very tall and so the mostly buiried tip tops of headstones peek out. In the Christian area, they just kept dumping more and more people with no thought of putting mulch or anything on top (i bet they didn't compost things very well either), so that bones were actually sticking out of the ground in a most unsightly manner. SO they got some guy to do something with all the bones lying around. And alas, I stayed up too late drinking beer with 20 year old boys and then slept thru the train out there. The very worst thing is that the boys there thought we were /old/. To put us at ease, they told us about how they once drank beer with some 40 year olds. Aieeeeee. Hello? I'm 25! I mean, not that 40 year olds are old, but I mean, I thought I might have been in their peer group and they think I could be their mother or something. Which makes me rethink grad school, cuz I mostly wanted to hit on 20 year olds, not be a respected elder. Not that Christi would let me within 50 feet of a coed.

Absinth is legal here and in Spain and no place else. We split a glass of it five ways when we first arrived. It seems to have not made us insane. And then last night somebody explained that you have to pay extra for the kind that makes you insane. There's a second active chemical aside from alchohol present in it. So I guess we have not been enlightenedthe way some artists types claimed to be. We did see a cool self portrait of Manet sitting in a cafe with a green glass in front of him and a bright green muse perched on the table next to him. It's hanging in the cafe where it's set. Pretty cool.

So we're catching an overnight train to Amsterdam tonight and we actually paid for a sleeper, so hopefully it won't be auful, but it's a 14 hour train ride, and I can't imagine not doing it overnight. You might be wondering why we're taking this ruote through Europe and it's both because we promissed to meet Jenny (whose brother used to live in the house in front of my parents) in Hamburg and because we are not going even through Austria. If they're going to have a facist government, well, then I'll go through Switzerland instead. Other travellers laugh at this, but I don't care. If I'm not going to be vegan, I'll be inconvient in some other highly principled way.
coffe makes me verbose

-- celeste
P.S. No, we do not have any idea of where we will be staying in Amsterdam.