Planes, Trains and Automobiles (and Buses)

Note: Sorry it´s been a while. First, there´s been some good real life that got in the way of blogging. And some mishaps, described below, that prevented me, despite my best intentions. Most recently, the problems have been technical. The keyboard is completely different in this part of the world, filled with Teutonic symbols like Ö, and Ő and even Ü. And then, when I´d do something wrong, I´d get error messages in Hungarian, a language even more incomprehensible than Czech, which alerted me to the fact that I´d messed up, but not exactly how. Anyway, we´ve been having a really GÖÖD time.

And now back to our story...

When you travel on a budget, everything doesn´t always go according to plan. Sometimes that´s good and sometimes that´s bad. Good was when the furnicular broke in Prague and Laura and I were forced to take the long way to the castle, through some picturesque woods on a sunny fall day. Bad was when we couldn´t find the bus station Monday morning, couldn´t speak to anyone who might be able to help us, nearly missed it, and yours truly had to ride about two hours sitting on the inside steps on the middle of the bus.

You do see some interesting things from that vantage point, though: At one town, a girl came on carrying a pet rat in a bright pink cage.

Anyway, the arrival in Cesky Krumlov was worth the discomfort. Can I say something more about the weather? I realize that I´m going on and on about it, and should probably just shut up, but here´s the deal: When I read the extended weather forecast for this part of the world before I left, it showed nothing but rain for, like, the next 2,000 years. So our unbelievable record of sun these past few days has been nothing short of remarkable.

This helps in places like Cesky Krumlov that just ooze Old World charm. Though I have never been to Germany, it looks like I imagine some of Germany´s castle-dominated towns like Heidelberg and Rothenberg might look like: high on a hill, with narrow cobblestone streets, and an impressive castle built into the rock above. Add to that the gurgling Vltava river, which bisects the town, and some friendly locals, and it´s a really relaxing place to just amble.


The place looks like Prague´s Old Town, but on a much smaller scale. And the resemblance to Germany makes sense: Many German-speaking people moved here when it was part of the Austrian Hapsburg empire, and it was easy for Hitler to later claim the region -- then known as the Sudetenland -- as rightfully part of Germany. The annexation of the Sudentenland was one of the first land-grabs that ultimately erupted into World War II. After the war, a sort of ethnic-cleansing took place, and many German-speaking people whose families had been here for generations were forced to move to Germany. The town remained virtually empty and untouched during the Communist years, with the exception of a buildup of grit, giving a kind of lost-in-time, faded-over fairytale quality to the place. With its newfound prosperity, the town has again opened up to tourists, and has been used as a backdrop in several movies, most recently ˝The Illusionist.˝

The Pension Mysi Dira, where we stayed, was right on the water. We could hear the peaceful running of the river at night, and a set of picture windows opened up onto it and a view of a huge cathedral and forest below.

Aside from strolling and window shopping, the big draw was the castle, which amongst other notable things, has the oldest fully operational Baroque Theater in the world and a functioning bear pit where a family of three lives year-round -- bears, that is.

At one point, Laura turned to me and said,˝My kids would think it was so cool that we saw a castle with a live bear pit.˝


˝Forget the kids,˝ I said. ˝I think it´s really cool.

The theater, where original works by Mozart were performed, still has its original special-effect machines and set-change devices. Our guide spun a huge wooden wheel to show us how they created the effects of wind and galloping horses, and scraped his feet on a metal grate to simulate the sound of thunder. Backstage, we saw the elaborate system of ropes and pulleys that allowed a series of 8 stage hands to move huge backrops in a matter of seconds.

But mostly, we ambled. An observation: No matter where you go in the world, any town that draws a reasonable share of tourists will have at least one shop that sells hand-made soap.

Discuss.

Another happy accident -- Laura wanted to go to a confectionary shop for some sweets. We both asked for hot chocalate, and got something wonderfully unexpected: a cup of gooey melted chocalate that we had to eat with a spoon. It was richer than chocalate mousse, decadent and amazing.


But since accident karma seems to come in pairs, lest there be an imbalance in the force, I would be remiss if I didn´t tell you about our ride back to Prague.

The tourist office in Cesky Krumlov listed a departure time for the bus of 6:30 p.m. It never came. As we huddled in the evening chill, we waited as the listed 7:15 bus also never came. When a bus finally arrived in the Prague entry lane, Laura used her language skills (she speaks Russian, a sister language) to learn from the driver that the last bus to Prague had come and gone hours before. She defiantly pointed to the schedule, and the driver dismissed her with a wave as the luggage assistant chuckled to herself. We had reserved a room in Prague for the night, and had already paid for a tour in the morning, so we were anxious to return. I knew there was also a train to Prague, and we quickly raced down the hill to flag a taxi, where we found an extremely helpful driver. This guy was a savior. After checking times on his cell phone, he told us that the last train would be leaving in 30 minutes from Cesky Budejovice, some 25 km. away. He drove, in the rain, like a man on a mission, quickly darting through winding, hilly roads as a light rain began to pour.

Once we arrived, he helped carry our luggage into the station and, perhaps sympathizing with our predicament, spoke to the ticket lady in Czech on our behalf. He turned out to be wrong: the train actually arrived at that time, but wouldn´t depart for another hour. But the hassles weren´t over there. Laura searched for a bathroom. The ticket lady told her it had closed an hour earlier. Almost all public restrooms in this part of the world have an attendant who charges a fee for admission. As in the musical ˝Urinetown,˝ you have to pay to pee. And that means that you´re at the mercy of the attendant. That person had, alas, gone home.

Thus, we were both somewhat surly when we arrived after midnight at the Hotel Anna, on the outskirts of Prague´s red light district. When the shower offered nothing but frigid cold water the next morning, I nearly had an Ugly American incident.

A final word on karma: The next day, back at Prague´s Old Town Square, I was doing some shopping when I suddenly found myself surrounded by a throng of Hare Krishnas, singing in Czech. I guess the Hare Krishnas, like hand-made soap stores, are always with us.

Another addendum: I have gotten a few comments (privately) about the Sex Machines Museum in Old Town Square. I swear I was joking about the wooden vibrator! But to show that truth is stranger than blogging, that same night as my encounter with the Hare Krishnas, I found a brochure for the Sex Machines Museum that showed, on page two, a picture of a vibrator, an early German invention made of, yes, wood and metal, looking rather uncomfortably like a flour mixer.

Um...discuss.

The day after our adventure in Ceskzy Krumlov was devoted to a tour of Prague´s Jewish quarter, known as Josevov.

The incredibly-useful Rick Steve´s Guide to Eastern Europe describes Josevov as ˝the most interesting collection of Jewish sites in Europe.˝ While the Nazis decimated Jewish communities in Poland and elsewhere, Prague´s Jews were allowed to collect and archive their treasures. The archivists were ultimately killed in concentration camps but their work survives...part of which was ultimately planned as Hitler´s ˝Museum of the Extinct Jewish Race.˝

Our guide was an affable elderly elf of a man, who spoke quietly and sometimes to just one person in the group, checking off names and dates from thousands of years of history in a way that was often more dizzyzing than illuminating. But he´d obviously been around for a while, and could speak humorously, and movingly, about the lives of Jews and other Czechs under Nazism and Communism. Of Communism, he said: ˝It was like elaborate theater. We pretended to work, and the State pretended to pay us.˝


Of the lives of Jews during World War II and after, he said it was ˝like living on the edge of knife.˝ He related the story of his friend Hannah, whose family had lived in Terezinstadt, the show-camp outside of Prague where Jews and others were interned before going to more deadly camps like Dachau and Auschwitz. Her father was a carpenter. One day, one of the main buildings in the camp collapsed in a bad storm, and the Nazis ordered carpenters to set about rebuilding it. Almost all of the carpenters, now wise to the Nazi´s plans, refused. They were sent to Auschwitz and gassed. Hannah´s father alone agreed...but because he was the only carpenter left, the job took over a year. ˝By that time,˝ the guide said. ˝the war was over. His decision saved his life, and the life of his family.˝

Terezinstadt, incidentally, played a role in prolonging the extent of the Holocaust. It was there the Nazis sent the International Red Cross on a carefully controlled, and pre-planned inspection. The Red Cross´ positive report of that inspection is used to this day by deniers as proof that the Holocaust never happened.

If any further evidence were necessary to contradict such claims, however, it is this place, these formerly functioning synagogues once filled with vital people, talking excitedly and loudly, no doubt interrupting each other...now turned into museums for the tourists. They could no longer function as places of worship because their congregations had been decimated. The names of the victims line the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue, along with the dates of their transport and execution. The names were kept meticulously by Jews whom the Nazis had appointed as overseers of the ghetto, and who made an illicit copy to keep as eventual proof of what had been done under the regime.

It is next to impossible for the brain to accept the magnitude of such numbers like 77,000 killed, close to 3,000 of them children. In such circumstances, you try to hone in on something familiar, to help bring home and make sense of the vastness of such a tragedy. We saw the names of Madeleine Albright´s grandfather and Franz Kafka´s sister. Then Laura showed me the names of Marta and Janna Braunsteinova, Prague Jews who were killed in 1944. They are not even remote relatives -- my father´s extended family came from the Ukraine and had a different name -- but the similarity nonetheless had the effect of making that endless array of names and dates very real: It could have been you or someone you knew.

Architecturally, the best site of the Jewish Quarter is the Sephardic Spanish Synagogue, built in an almost Moorish style of elaborate patterns of five-pointed stars set against a huge dome. But the most evocative is the Old Jewish Cemetary, it´s 12,000 gravestones a reminder that for 300 years, this was the only burial ground allowed for Prague´s Jews. Because of the space, and the Jewish belief that the body should not be moved once buried, the tombs were piled atop each other, making the tombstones crooked and the cemetary a small plateau. One of those buried here is Reb Levi, famous scholar and mystic who is said to have created a golem, a Frankenstein-like creature that can be summoned and commanded at will. Like many people in this part of the planet, our guide had no problem accepting the truth of such stories or that Levi´s gravestone is a powerful guidepost to the spirit world. It is said that if you make a wish there, Levi will make it come true.


I didn´t understand everything our guide said about human beings ˝not being too far removed from the primordial forest˝ or Prague containing ˝outposts of positive energy˝ that our brains have become too complicated to comprehend. Nonetheless, I made a wish to myself and left a coin on Levi´s tomb.