praha...and home

i have now been home in toronto for nearly two days. the 4 nights in prague was not nearly long enough - either to really enjoy the city or to get enough of seeing chris. although...and please, please nobody come here and shoot me for this...i didn't find the city itself as life-alteringly wonderful as the majority of people made it out to be. nearly everyone who i told that i was going to prague would get all misty-eyed, sigh, and say "aaahhhh...prague. prague is the best city in the world." i also had a number of people (at least half a dozen) tell me that it was a good thing i left prague to the end of my trip, because otherwise it would have outshone all the other cities. no argument, prague is beautiful and stunning. it has delicate yet grand architecture, a lovely view of the vltava river, rolling and climbable hills right in the city, ruins that pop up out of nowhere, museums galore and some gems of restaurants, cafes and bars. but...how do i explain this right? budapest did it for me better. and so did paris. and more than that, one thing i found about the larger european cities is that there are few parts of them that don't feel like they have been geared 100% toward tourists (which is one thing i appreciated about st-petersburg, as it doesn't like tourists much), and prague was no exception. i get a little tired of being handed the english menu and passing replica after replica of czech crystal in some tacky souvenir-shop window display. moreover, i get really tired of the fact that every beautiful old monument or building or ruin has been cleaned up, revamped and narrated for the gawking pleasure of everyone with a camera. it takes some serious getting lost in these cities in order to find something beautiful that doesn't have 100 people taking photos of themselves in front of it because it was marked on their tourist map, or in order to find anything that doesn't have a clearly-marked and very well-kept path leading up to it. i know these aren't necessarily bad things, but i'm getting the sense that i'm a little more of a 'wanderer' (?) than a tourist; i like to stumble upon sights and never be exactly sure what i'm looking at. i've found that i much prefer the smaller towns and cities in europe to its massive architectural pearls. but before i get into a full-scale rant, yes prague was glorious. it just didn't outshine the rest of the gloriousness of europe for me. and...oh, i know i'm going to get shot for this...i liked slovak and hungarian beer more than i liked czech beer. all 3 are better than anything we have over here, but...yeah.

all of that being said, i had an amazing time IN prague. on the 10-hour train to get there, i saw all of hungary, a quarter of slovakia and half of the czech republic. chris and i met up within an hour or two of each of us arriving in the city (our hostels were down the street from each other), and instantly commenced wandering. i think i actually got a total of 11 hours of sleep over all 4 nights. we didn't go to any museums (not even the sex machine museum), and we didn't go into any stores (except the grocery store), and the only sites we actually searched out were the synagogues and the castle. the synagogues for me were a really emotional experience...similar to what i found in pecs, but on a much larger scale. the first synagogue we visited was the Pinkasova Synagogue, commissioned by my family in 1535. the synagogue is now a holocaust memorial; all the walls (and there are a lot of walls) are completely covered with the names of the people who were murdered in the Terezin concentration camp (which was one of the smaller and nicer camps). upstairs, a room is dedicated to displaying the artwork done by children who were in the camp. it's just like any normal drawing by a small child - but depicting beatings, deportations and starvation. as well as some drawings of rainbows and big dinners and happy families. i never saw anything like that before. there are about 6 synagogues located very close together is the Josefov neighbourhood...we visited a few more (also converted into museums, but generally museums of jewish culture), but the mood for me had been completely set by the first one. this also led into some long and interesting discussions between chris and me about religion and what it's meant in our lives.

the one thing that was especially cool about prague was how nothing seemed to be where you left it when you tried to get anywhere...and i mean buildings, streets and mountains. we got lost and confused a number of times, even with 2 maps, and would often look for something we had seen earlier, find something completely different but think it was the first thing, and then eventually randomly stumble across the first thing. on the first night, looking for the charles bridge, we ended up way out in the suburbs. we climbed up and down the mountain with the castle on it 3 or 4 times before finding that we had been walking in circles around a tower we had wanted to see since the first day. it was an interesting feeling, and not at all unpleasant - we certainly laughed enough.

chris and i have both spent the past month walking our legs off around various parts of europe (thus no longer feel tired basically ever), and so prague for me was as much walking as any other city, and more. we literally got up in the morning, started walking, and kept walking until we went to sleep - between like 4 and 6 in the morning - with some breaks to eat delicious food, drink a beer or relax in a park. i'm not sure how many parks we sat in, but it was a lot. i found him just as wonderful to get along with as i had in dublin, and there were no dull or bad moments. once again, it was not easy to say goodbye.

i think it's about time to end this blog. i haven't told all the stories, but i've told a lot of stories in pretty exhaustive detail. i'll post the links to the photos from hungary and prague in a few minutes. being home is nice, calm, and a total culture shock. i really feel like i'm seeing toronto through the eyes of a tourist, and i find myself wondering things like 'were there power lines in europe, too?' and 'how are there so many houses, right in the middle of the city?'. i find myself itching to buckle down and do some very concrete things for my future, and somehow i feel more clear-headed about myself, about what to take seriously, and about where i'm going. this trip left me with few bad memories and there were few struggles on it. more than anything, i discovered a lot of things in depth about myself and my personality - mostly things that make me feel like i have a lot of growing that i want and need to do, and soon. the most interesting thing about the trip for me was that i went in with almost no goals (mostly just to see my friends again), but the one goal i had was to exercise being more independent and making decisions for myself. instead, i found this trip was more than anything a lesson in being taken care of, both by people i've known for a long time and people i just met. i don't know if i know much more about taking care of myself at this point, but i think i've been shown a thing or two about true hospitality and friendship.