Four Weeks, Four Countries, Ilka Cohen [manga ereader .TXT] 📗

the Place of the Republic. Muchta was my destination this morning, more precisely his museum near Wenceslas Square. It is not all that large but I spent two hours nevertheless, spending time with each of his pictures and viewing the film on Muchta’s life. I left with a calendar full of his beautiful art deco illustrations for the Leipzig apartments and little bookmark souvenirs for friends and family. Then I marched back in a hurry, worrying the boys might get restless. No such thing – they were actually still asleep. After I had them suitably awake, they decided they wanted to see the old town. So back the way I had just walked twice, good exercise. We did the tourist loop – Wenceslas Square, Starometska Namesti, the famous astronomical clock at city hall, Tyn church, cathedral, the former Jewish quarter of Josefov with its synagogues. It was duly appreciated, but Micah admired the fancy stores on Parizska more, especially the Rolex store. Well, one of us needs to move to a different income bracket first for that. But while he had to be content with window shopping, I bought a little silver necklace with yellow amber pendant in art deco style on the way to Charles Bridge. Customary jewelry purchase out of the way, I took the kids across the Charles Bridge and then back to Wenceslas Square and home by tram. Micah bought some cannabis vodka, which turned out to taste terrible, and I some absinth, which is still unopened and waiting for the right occasion.
Aaron arrived shortly after us, we fed our children Chinese takeaway food (a bit more bland than the American version), and then left for Pivovarna Klub, a microbrewery cum restaurant with excellent traditional Czech food (meat and knedliky, sauerkraut, strudel and pancakes) and great beer, of course. Afterwards I felt so full, I had the need to walk back to the city center one more time. After which I was sure I must have walked off an inch of my legs.
The evening ended with detective work at the internet: Aaron was trying to find out where his Petik grandfather had come from in Bohemia. A tricky quest, made more complicated by transcription errors that had turned his home village from Křičen in Bohemia to Bricon in Austria by the time he got to South Dakota. But he found the village in the end, not far from Pardubice, leading to the idea of renting a car on the last day and paying a visit.

The next day we split up in similar ways. Aaron to work, me to culture in the morning while the boys were still resting. This time I had picked St. Agnes monastery, which houses the medieval art collection of the National Museum. And a very extensive one, too. So many Marys and saints… I took the tram this time, as the threatening gray clouds of the last two days had finally started to release all that rain. The monastery is centered around a Romanic-early Gothic church of simple beauty. The many, many paintings and statues differed in style more than topic. My favorite was a small statue of a highly pregnant Mary, not too different from all the old fertility goddesses.
When I emerged from the middle ages, it was raining so hard, I actually regretted my usual aversion to umbrellas, especially since I was determined to walk back. Before I could get even close to being soaked, a friendly fate sent me an umbrella left behind leaning against the river railing. It said “Four Seasons Resort” on it, but the “Four Seasons” was nowhere in sight and no unshielded people either. So it was mine and served us well over the next couple of days.
The weather did not improve this day and Micah did not feel like facing it. But Marcus was ready for an afternoon outing up to the castle. Like before I enjoyed the streets of Malastrana below the castle more than the old town across the river. We trudged through the soaked gardens of Wallenstein Palace, now the seat of the Czech senate. When we reached the castle yard, the rain was so relentless that Marcus agreed to the palace tour just to get into a dry place. So we saw the old royal palace, the Rosenberg palace and the St. George Basilica. One of the highlights was the place of the second Prague defenestration. Curiously, all 3 Habsburg officials who were thrown out the window survived the steep drop, a fact immediately celebrated by the house of Habsburg and the Catholic church as a miracle. We finished off the round with a look inside the huge St. Veit’s Cathedral, where somebody happened to play the organ expressively and I even found the Muchta-designed stained-glass windows. I rewarded Marcus’ endurance with pizza, and the evening ended apartment-bound with home cooking.

The last full day in Prague saw a little change in the routine – this time I took Micah along in the morning to the Kafka Museum. It had not yet been open the last time I was in Prague. It is set up as a kind of psychoanalysis of Kafka illustrated by his life stations, letters, quotes from his works, photos, introduction of his family and friends, again and again the father as central conflict figure. Nevertheless, Kafka remains a bit of a stranger to me, his sensitivities seem overheated. My down-to-earth instincts kept whispering: What was he really complaining about all the time? No matter, he wrote some pretty good books out of all that inner turmoil and mess. When we emerged, the rain had finally stopped. So Marcus and I dared the long trek to the Prague zoo in the afternoon. It is situated at the edge of the city, in an area called Troja, which is very green, villas interspersed with parks and vineyards. Providing the zoo with plenty of space to grow. It is at least twice as large as the one in Leipzig, its natural hills well used, with some fantastic new structures like the Indonesian jungle building or the Africa house. We were fascinated by the free-flying fruit bats that zipped by our heads in the twilight and the great number of giant tortoises and Komodo dragons, by the aardvarks and the baby gorilla, and the little mountain goats practicing their climbing skills. Four hours had passed fast, and we had not even seen everything.
Back at “Emma”, Aaron soon arrived with the rental car, a small Mercedes. Our last dinner in Prague was enjoyed at “Pod Slevicem”, a neighborhood pub + restaurant where the food was even cheaper and the meat portions more generous than in the previous places. And the Czech beer good as always. Not exactly diet food in the long run, but then, we had to say goodbye the next day.

And a long goodbye it turned into. We steered our budget Mercedes out of Prague early in the morning. The car smelled strangely like vinegar and cheap plastics, no idea why Mercedes tarnishes its nice reputation with something like this. O well, it’s not like we wanted to buy it, just get us around Bohemia for a day. Our first stop was the old mining town of Kutna Hora. We strolled through its pretty town center, took in St. James Cathedral and great views and then walked over to mighty St. Barbara Cathedral and the Jesuit College next to it. The town is geared to tourist crowds, but aside from a few busloads full of Japanese, we saw mainly Czech school classes. At last we visited the “bone church”, a church decorated by Cistercian monks from the 16th century to the 1870s with bones – bone garlands, sculptures, candelabra, coats of arms, mountains of skulls. The most active in the somewhat macabre art had been a monk named Santini in the 18th century, unfolding true Baroque splendor in human bones. The reason for the strange decoration was an oversupply of human remains. The local cemetery was regarded as particularly holy after a returning monk had sprinkled it with water from the Holy Land. Add some wars and plagues, and the burial grounds kept overflowing, so the old skeletons were exhumed and recycled for decorative purposes. Marcus and I sneaked in with a travel group and saved the entrance fee and I got some good photos.
Next we made a brief detour to Milovice, where Aaron took pictures of a Russian military cemetery from the First World War. We couldn’t help noticing that the neighboring Italian military burial ground was much better taken care of and signed out. Sticking with the cemetery theme, the next one we visited was in Křičen, Aaron’s ancestral home village. Though we found no long-buried Petiks there. Aaron also talked to two teenage girls from the village and came away with the impression that there is none of the family left. The village itself is too small for a church of its own, rather idyllic, remote, and surrounded by wheat fields and forest.
Now we turned the car north toward Usti where we had to drop it off by 4 p.m. and catch our succession of small trains back home. Since there seemed plenty of time left, we stopped by in Terezin, the former German “model” concentration camp, the place shown to Red Cross visitors to impress them by the wonderful treatment of the Jews there – with self-government and schools, even a riding hall and a theater. Of course, they were not told that most of the lucky actors only stayed for half a year or so before being shipped on to places like Auschwitz and that even in Terezin many died of hunger and disease. I thought it might be valuable for our sons to see one of these places. Not such a good decision. OK, Aaron got some nice photos of the local Russian war memorials – for WWI and WWII, facing each other. The Austrians had a military prisoner camp here in the first war. But there was no time left to see the ghetto museum, and without the historic background, modern Terezin looks like a very pleasant little Czech town, not like the monstrosity it once was at all. There is no obvious horror like in Auschwitz, no barracks and crematoriums, just a Prussian fortress around a pretty town long ago resettled by Czech people. Micah and Marcus were more bored, hot and bothered than intrigued. And now we had to hurry because we had overlooked that the highway has not yet been built all the way to Usti. The last stretch is the old winding road along the Elbe river, scenic but not exactly fast to navigate, stuck behind and between endless trucks. And then we needed to fill up the gas tank before returning the car. Of course all the gas stations were on the left where Aaron did not want to turn for fear of never being able to return to the endless stream of traffic. But the river was on the right and it seemed unlikely that somebody would build a gas station so close to it. Aaron was optimistic something would come up – and then we were suddenly in the city center, half-lost, then drove by the hotel were we needed to drop of the car. But still no gas and time running out. After a couple more kilometers finally a station on the right. Perhaps, with fast drop-off service at the hotel, we could still catch the train. Aaron jumped out to fill up the car – and couldn’t get the tank cover open. We all ended up searching – no button, lever or anything else to press to open up the tank access. Defeated we drove back to the hotel. And while Aaron looked for the car rental manager, Marcus and I more or less accidentally solved the puzzle: No button whatsoever,