Day Three

Traipsing around the city all day is tiring. We did the castle today, and we got to take the metro (plus trolley) to it. The metro wasn't too exciting really, nothing like the Russian system (which I didn't get to go on when I was there, akas), but I like subways. One of the escalators in the metro station went about twice as fast as a normal escalator. Also, you had to push a button on the subway car door to get it to open.

Our entire group agrees that cobblestones are rough on knees. The streets here are mostly cobblestone, and our knees have been aching. After the castle, we went to Friday night services (at 15:00 -- it gets dark really early and stays that way for a while here this time of year) in the oldest standing synagogue in Prague, one that was built in the 9th century. In Gothic architecture, there are interior ceiling beams in groups of four that form a cross, but in the temple they added a fifth beam because, well, they didn't want crosses in their temple...

It was an orthodox service, so all the girls had to go into a room in the back that had a little window peering out into the main room, and they said they couldn't even hear anything. They blazed through the prayers in six minutes (it takes an hour at Beth Am [my family's synagogue]), then there was a long sermon which was longer because they paused after each sentence to translate the Czech into English, and then there was more singing and praying for a while; the whole thing came to about an hour and a half.

I spent the time reading the footnotes in the prayerbook (which, sadly, didn't have any Czech in it -- it came from Brooklyn.) There was one prayer in which the congregation declares that the nations of the Earth should praise God for his protection of Israel (here meaning the biblical "nation of Israel", e.g. the Jewish people, not the modern nation-state.) The footnote told an interesting story. A Czarist minister goes to the head Rabbi in the city and asks, "Rabbi, why should the other nations praise the Lord for what He has done for Israel? Shouldn't Israel thank God itself?" The Rabbi replied, "Minister, only you know what plots and schemes you have devised to bring about our downfall, and so only you are in a position to know how great God is for stopping them."

Jeffrey and I were walking today, when a man came up to us and asked if we knew where the Charlesbridge was. We pointed him in vaguely the right direction, sort of. He said, "oh, I'll ask you in your language... Karluv most?" (the name for Charlesbridge in Czech.) I was still concentrating on trying to figure out where the thing was, so this confused me. Then he asked us how far it was, and we weren't sure so again I gave some vague answer. Then he asks, "You're from here and you don't know where it is? You don't like tourists, do you?" Now I'm completely caught off-guard so I nod and he proceeds on his way. At this point I realize what just happened. He thought that Jeffrey and I were Czech, and we just agreed with him that we hate tourists. Oops. Fortunately, we caught up with him a minute later and I corrected his mistake and pulled out my guidebook to give him a better answer. He was from Slovenia. Now, Jeffrey and I do have Eastern European features, since that's where our ancestors are from, but... *shrug* Clearly we just look like we know what we're doing.

They put camembert on pizza here. (Not ubiquitously -- although I hear that they do put ketchup on by default, but our dinner place didn't.) Can't say I'm a fan.