Our agenda for today was to visit Prague Castle and the library of the nearby monastery, and to try to catch Obama’s speech if we could. Unfortunately we slept in, and had to decide whether to eat the breakfast we had already paid for or skip it and head to the castle for Obama’s speech. Having already seen Obama speak in Boise, we opted for breakfast.
When we did get out there, I made a mistake and got us off at the wrong tram station, about a ½ mile away from the castle. We walked as fast as we could and made it to the square halfway through Obama’s speech. Unfortunately the square was already full and the streets leading to it were all jammed with tourists, so the best we managed was to catch a far off glimpse of a monitor showing him speaking. We later found out that this monitor was actually just a few feet from his podium, but getting an actual view of him was impossible. We did hear him pitch the missile defense system to the Czechs – something that neither most Czechs nor I am very happy about.
We had to wait almost an hour for the crowd to clear out the square after the speech was over so we could get through to the castle. Once inside we visited the cathedral, mostly to check out the stained glass window made by Mucha, which is absolutely fantastic. We also got to see a tower that used to be a dungeon, complete with torture and execution instruments. After that we marched up to the monastery library. They had collections of law and medical books from the 16th century – thousands of books entirely written by hand. They also had collections of theological books from the 18th century and two full rooms with huge collections that were roped off. Apparently to get inside you need to schedule days in advance, pay 400Kc a head, and have a minimum number in your group. Inside one of these rooms is a locked cabinet with “forbidden books” which only the leader of the monastery had the key to. If I remember right Voltaire and Galileo are among those books. Permission to take photos cost 50Kc extra, so we settled for some awesome prints of the roped off rooms for a measly 10Kc each.
After this we tried some more local food – what looked like a hotdog on the menu turned out to be more like a German brat, and a fried cylindrical dessert dipped in cinnamon, which was decent but overpriced. We also checked out a bookshop, and Natasha found a Czech Alice in Wonderland that was illustrated by a Czech artist. Since this wouldn’t fit in our backpacks, we had to go to the Czech post office and ship it to ourselves. The shipping cost more than the book itself (400Kc if I remember right) but it was worth it to see the inside of a foreign post office.
We were delayed in getting back to our hostel by Obama’s motorcade – while it held us up for about 10 minutes, we were unfortunately too far away to catch a glimpse of him. We rode the subway for part of the journey back to the hostel – if you don’t count the little underground shuttle at the SeaTac airport, this was the first time I’ve ever been on a subway.
As we were sitting in our hostel room at the end of our last day in Prague, we wondered about a few things…what would we do if we had more time here? Would we want more time here? Could we live here? We decided that we would have liked at most one more day to take a trip to Kutna Hora, the Bone Cathedral, and perhaps another day to tour those restricted rooms in the monastery library (if we could afford it). Other than that, we’ve seen what we came here to see. This town is a little on the seedy side and I personally have a taste for contemporary architecture, something which is mostly absent from Prague as far as I can tell. On the other hand, we saw only three homeless people on our entire stay here, which is almost miraculous for such a big city. The old buildings and stone tile roads are quite charming. Nevertheless, Prague is a seedy town, with dilapidating infrastructure, ubiquitous graffiti, and a huge crime problem (which we were lucky enough to avoid). Being so far set back from decades of Communism, the city is only just starting to catch up to the rest of Europe. Who knows what it will look like in ten or twenty years?
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