Friday, January 19, 2024
Prague, Czech Republic: What rolls down stairs alone or in pairs, and over your neighbor's dog? What's great for a snack and fits on your back? It's Prague, Prague, Prague!
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I enjoy winter travel. In fact, I recommend it because you get to wear decent clothes and there is less sweating, less stinking, and less swamp ass involved. It's also an excellent excuse to stay inside. On Friday we had another opera planned, but not until that night, so to keep warm during the day we decided to head over to the National Museum.
And of course we had to pass by the train station again.
There are two parts to the National Museum, an older part and a newer part. We confined ourselves to the older part.
At one point while walking around the dioramas there was a place where you could sit and watch a little video about the process of building such a diorama. They had a lot of fun with it, because it went from a timelapse of building a mammoth to a little baby mammoth running around the museum loose at night, to that baby being pursued by various prehistoric beasts... At one point it showed this particular prehistoric beast busting out of its glass case to join the hunt -- which is why the case is depicted with a crack in it.
More rocks... So many rocks. The National Museum had an enormous rock collection, but the odd thing was that there was only one room of rocks and minerals found in the Czech Republic. You got the feeling they had all the others just because they looked neat, and I can respect that.
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They had quite a few glowing rocks as well, which I know a certain forumer will appreciate.
Part of the appeal of the National Museum is the architecture itself, which makes it a must for any SSP forumer who finds themselves in Prague. You can go up in the cupola of the museum to find delightful city views.
Dinner was Italian. One of the best things about travel is getting inspired by what you find to eat. I recreated this dish of pasta with salmon and spinach pesto, except with chicken.
After dinner, it was time to walk to the State Opera to watch a performance of
Tosca.
From the outside, the State Opera looks lovely, but not unlike a lot of other theaters across Europe.
On the inside, the State Opera is perhaps the most palatial, opulent building I have ever had the pleasure to visit.
Unlike at the opera house in Vienna, this time we did it right and got ourselves a box.
Then it was time to walk back to the hotel, passing by the train station of course. We went inside because in the rush to head out to Kutná Hora the day before, I'd caught a glimpse of something in the station I wanted to see, but we didn't have the time. Heading back from the opera, we decided to fix that.
This is one of two monuments at Prague Main Station dedicated to
Sir Nicholas Winton, who organized the rescue of 669 children from Czechoslovakia before the Nazi invasion. Most of the parents of the children he transported to Britain were later killed in Auschwitz. Sir Nicholas Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003, received the Czech Order of the White Lion, the highest honor the Czech government can bestow upon a person, in 2014, and died in 2015 at the age of 106.
The trains transporting the 669 children to safety departed from this station. One more train, with 250 children on it, had been scheduled to depart on September 1, 1939 but was unable to do so due to the official outbreak of World War II. Of those 250 children, two survived the war.
We ended the night in a contemplative mood.
