Czech Republic

4.5 days. rainy. cold. beautiful but overrun prague castle. a lazy day in the old, old city, on the old, old fort, where we found karel capek's grave and played deep dark secret, in a way.

august: osage county with its fishing poles sticking out of the rotating set that the actors kept breaking. a cute if too-pda gay couple on the fountain outside the theater. a very strange man walking down the street playing with his shirt. fried cheese sandwiches.

not making it to cesky raj...oh well.

knedliky. free museum night + bad performance art. fried green beans. lots of czech beer though we never did have budvar. i bet they'll have it in poland. poland. poland is next.

archie hostel, which i recommend.

lauren getting trashed thanks to her crazy czech relatives. lauren and parag leaving this morning. christina and i heading off to krakow, which is where you'll hear from me next.

it is all i can do not to find this language ridiculous. this is because the only words i recognize are english words that have just had a slight spelling change and a "y" added to the end.

steaky
ryby (ribs)
alkoholy

...i mean, come on. that's funny.

when we arrived, i took 2000 kc out of the atm (a little over $100). the atm gave it to me in one 2000 kc bill. the woman at the internet cafe looked at us like we were crazy when we tried to pay for 30 minutes of internet (30 kc) with a 2000 kc bill. all we needed was to look up our hostel information (that's right, ladies and gents, we forgot to write down what hostel we had booked and how to get there before leaving for prague).

today we bought tickets to see the czech premiere of august: osage county on sunday.

me: do you have tickets available for this show?
ticket lady: we don't perform this show in english.
me: oh that's ok.
ticket lady: that's ok?
me: yes, that's ok.
ticket lady: ...ok.

dear world: we like to see theatre even when we don't understand the language of performance. get used to it.

today, we (that's me, lauren, parag, and christina) wandered around the jewish quarter of prague. it is stunning. the old cemetery: mounds and mounds of graves, over 12,000 stones and there are far more people than that buried there, the stones sticking out at crazy packed-in angles like the snaggleteeth of a hick horde. giant hicks. the golem rabbi is buried there. and the old-new synagogue, the oldest extant synagogue in europe. and another, the pinska (i think that's right) synagogue, painted with the names of czech jews killed in the holocaust.

there is a display upstairs in pinska of pictures drawn by children in theresienstadt, the propoganda camp. one of the most intense holocaust-related things i have ever seen. children were still children.