Crime and Fame
This has been a really chaotic three days: for better but mostly for worse. I know I said I would get better with the punctuality of the posts but this time it was out of my hands. I'll explain more further down; gotta stay chronological.
Our second day in Prague started off with the Communist Museum. This museum was tiny! Basically four small living rooms crammed with photos, texts, statues, displays, etc... It wasn't nearly as professional as most museums and did feel as if someone rented out their apartment for the cause, but still got the job done. We learned all about Prague's history with communism, from the earliest marches to the Velvet Revolution. There was a fifth room off to the side that was set up as a viewing room, where we saw footage of marches and protests (mostly consisting of police beating nonviolent protestors). After this we grabbed lunch and then made our way back to the Town Square. Chris, our hilarious tour guide from the day before, would be leading another tour of the Castle District across the river and we decided to join up. This was around 2 o'clock and here it started raining. This rain didn't stop. All day. While we walked outside for three hours. Despite the rain though, we learned some interesting history. Plus we learned about another defenestration! Once the tour concluded, we were drenched and cold and so proceeded to head home.
That night we walked up the block to the monastery brewery and had what is widely referred to as the best beer in the world. We tried all five of their options and had a good time ranking our favorites over the night.
The next day was still raining, albeit not as hard. We returned to the Jewish quarter and bought the Jewish museum ticket. This gave us access to several different buildings throughout the area, all of which contained essential Jewish history. Most buildings had old items and texts with information regarding them, but the most awing was the graveyard and the memorial synagogue (both in PHOTOS). As I said before, the entirety of the Jewish quarter used to be a Jewish ghetto and during that time, very few people were able to leave the ghetto. This resulted in the cemetery, which is about the size of a traditional chapel cemetery (not huge) being the resting place of some hundred thousand Jews. The walls of the yard never expanded so the graveyard had only one direction to go: up. Around twelve layers of bodies were buried on top of each other, but the headstone were always raised up with the new layers, resulting in thousands of headstones of different sizes cramped together at random angles, like many stony teeth that never got braces. The Pinkas Synagogue is a memorial to all those that died during the Holocaust. As such, the synagogue is completely empty and on every wall is elegantly written the names of all those who died (pictures show best).
From the Jewish quarter we returned to our hostel and settled down for the night. We thought. Upon arrival, I noticed that the locking mechanism on my locker fell off when I went to open it. I didn't think anything of it as I had noticed it was kinda a crappy wiggly lock before. A few hours later a roommate walked in and quickly yelled and declared that his lock had been broken and that his laptop was missing. The locker next to his was broken too. I then realized that my busted lock was not a mere accident. I ran to investigate thoroughly and found that my camera was missing. I lost roughly 1000 photos from the trip. The police were called and did a surprisingly thorough investigation, complete with photos, witness questioning (two roommates totally saw who did it), and forensics. Super impressed.
They asked me and the two other victims to stay up until they returned, when they brought us a bunch of paperwork to sign and we exchanged information. The whole ordeal took around 4 hours. An exciting but awful way to end our stay in Prague.
This morning the took a train to Dresden. We arrived mid afternoon and walked around downtown. It is pretty amazing because every building we see has been either built or rebuilt in the last fifty years thanks to the Allies (oops). Many "old" buildings stand that date back centuries, but they have been completely rebuilt with pieces of the original structures. As we are back in Germany, we headed to a beer garden to enjoy the finally sunny weather. As we were receiving our beers two men approached us and said that they would buy our beers for us if we would help them for a photo shoot. Short story shorter and two free beers later, we will be featured in the Dresden newspaper in a special on beer gardens! We gave him our information and when he sends us the web article (unfortunately we will be gone before we can get a hard copy) I will post it here.
Again, I apologize for my lack of punctuality but it wasn't for lack of trying. Also, no photos in this post due to ungodly awful internet here at our Dresden hostel. But, as usual, all photos can still be seen on the PHOTOS tab.