Larry and I have always talked about taking a trip around the major cities in or near Eastern Europe, in particular Prague, Budapest, and Vienna. It’s always been a dream trip of mine to visit these three historic and beautiful cities. We ended up having time on this trip for just a couple of nights in Prague, but that’s enough to whet our appetites for next time.

Prague is a very large city (population around 1.2 million) famous for its astronomical clock, St. Vitus Cathedral, its castle, the Charles Bridge, the Velvet Revolution, and King Wenceslas (yes of Good King Wenceslas fame), among other things. We’ve always heard it’s beautiful and we weren’t disappointed. As soon as we checked into the hotel we hopped the tram for old town (Staré Město) and climbed the stairs of the town hall tower for beautiful views of the Old Town Square.

We were then treated to the once hourly procession at the astronomical clock, in which Christ appears followed by his Twelve Apostles. At the same time, a skeleton representing death rings a bell and shakes his head at a statue of a Turk (representing an infidel at the time the figures were made in the 17th century). There are also statues representing other deadly sins: a man admiring himself in a mirror (vanity), a Jew (political correctness didn’t exist in the 17th century) shaking a bag of gold (greed), and a man amused only with dance and music (sloth). As events go it’s a bit anti-climactic. Larry says, “Imagine a giant cannon, and when it goes off a little tiny cork pops out.” If you happen to be in the area near the hour, then you may as well watch, but certainly don’t wait more than 5 or 10 minutes for it. Nonetheless this did not dampen the waiting crowd’s enthusiasm as they all cheered and clapped as if someone had just made an impossible rim shot in the final seconds of an NBA playoff game.

Shiny, Happy Workers

We spent that afternoon at the Museum of Communism, a small private museum amusingly situated next to a casino and above a McDonald’s.

My favorite part of the museum was the way the owners have taken historical propaganda posters and turned the text into something else, such as these:

It really was enlightening to spend time in replicas of classrooms, food stores, secret police interrogation rooms, etc. The thing that really struck me as ironic was the system of barter that went on among the “haves” of the society, i.e. those who ran a food store, those who were doctors, those who were party leaders. For instance, the worker in a food store would save the hard-to-get items, such as bananas, in order to exchange it for something he or she wanted with a party leader or other person who was in a powerful position. It was essentially a form of capitalism taking place within the restrictions of a communist society. It kills me. Even in these societies, the people still gravitated to a form of capitalism. Capitalism will always find a way to exist, no matter what the government or ruling party does to try to stop it! (My political rant for the day). It also makes me angry that the average worker in such a society could never see something like a banana, though the propaganda posters always advertised all of the “wonderful food available for the people!”

It was also amusing to see all of the propaganda directed against the “evil imperialist regime” of America. For example, a poster showing a picture of a noble farmer shaking hands with a military leader with the caption “No American agent shall get through our village! Help the National Safety Corps protect your United Agricultural Cooperative against Western imperialism”.

They depicted America as greedy capitalist war mongers (hmm, sounds like the tag line of today’s Democrat Party). When potato crops were attacked by potato bugs in 1950 the Czech Press informed the public that the bugs had been spread from airplanes by American saboteurs.

Drunk Footballers

When we were in the old town square earlier in the afternoon, we heard what sounded like a loud, boisterous (possibly drunk) crowd cheering and jeering not far away. We weren’t sure what it was but never want to investigate. As we left the Museum of Communism, we discovered that we couldn’t get back to the square because it was blocked off by police in riot gear. According to the waitress at our restaurant, Serbian football fans (that’s soccer to us Americans)  who were in town for a match got out of control and started breaking store windows. This actually happened before the match even got going. I can only imagine what old town was like when the match was over. We didn’t stick around to watch.

Charles Bridge: More Spiders, Argh!

We finished off the evening with a leisurely walk across the Charles Bridge (where we crossed the path of an American family who was also on our castle tour in Cesky Krumlov – small world!). We decided to climb one of the bridge towers as well to get a night time view of the city. It was covered with spiders busily spinning at the top, just like the riverside at Karlovy Vary. Maybe it’s just slow-moving river cities in general, I don’t know. Actually my personal theory is that because the agricultural practice under communism involved such heavy pesticides and poisons it threw the environment into such an imbalance that now they have an overpopulation of spiders. (The Museum of Communism pointed out the fact that much environmental damage was done and many species were rendered extinct by the heavy poison and insecticide use during communist rule). We discovered when we got back to our hotel (which was unfortunately fairly close to the river) that our outside windows had lots of busy workers as well. Larry used up all my hairspray torching them but in the end, they won, and we shut the windows.