honest Brits

Friday morning I woke up to Jackie and Miranda talking obnoxiously loud a little before 8am. They were leaving, Blake had already left, and Kate and Maureen were on a day trip outside of Prague. So I was going to spend Friday alone, but it seemed slightly less depressing because of those few hours of solid human interaction the night before.

This was the first trip I brought an umbrella on, and it’s really good I did because it rained most of the day Friday and I didn’t have Isa to lend me her umbrella, or Laura to sit in gelato shops with.

My first stop was an old Jewish synagogue that is now a monument to the 77,297 Czech Jews who were sent to the concentration camp at Terezin (near Prague) and later exported to death camps. There were three or four separate rooms with all the victims’ names, cities and the years of their births and deaths written on the walls. It was really powerful, especially sad were all the names followed by years like, for instance, 1935-1942. I had to suppress tears multiple times, which seemed strange, because I’ve known about the Holocaust for a long time, I’ve known that millions of people, including young children, died, but something about seeing those names on the wall just got to me. The other interesting part of the synagogue was an exhibition of a bunch of drawings made by children in the Terezin camp. Then just outside the synagogue was a Jewish cemetery where, due to lack of space, bodies were buried on top of each other until there were 12 bodies in each grave. The cemetery had about 12,000 gravestones and more than 100,000 people buried there.

The synagogue and cemetery were a bit of a reality check, made me feel pretty ridiculous for being sad because I was alone in Prague for two and a half days.

My next stop was the Prague castle, the old part of which I didn’t get to go inside because of some jewel exhibition that was free to the public (i.e. a 2 or 3 hour line). But I did see this church and street, called Golden Lane

and this house, where Kafka lived a couple years
and this statue
and a medieval prison that I forgot to take pictures of. And the changing of the guard.

That night at the hostel I was in pjs ready to call it a day when Ashley, Jon and Lynne checked into the adjoining room. Ashley (Canada) and Lynne (Bejing) are working in Vienna as UN interns. Jon (Los Angeles) is a firefighter/musician who met them on the bus and didn’t have a hostel arranged in Prague yet, so followed them to the Midtown. We talked a while in the hostel, then went out to a bar, where the first person we saw upon entering was Ben:

I wish I had gotten a full body picture, because his red skirt and red fishnet hose really made the outfit. He’s getting married in September, so he and his friends from Manchester were in Prague for the bachelor party. Oddly enough, he kind of reminded me of my brother-in-law Ryan. He resembled him in the face a little, but also because he seemed like he was probably a conservative, a “man’s man” as Berk would say, a wild partier, and a genuinely good person. (but yes, I know, Ryan Branam would never dress up like a woman). He’d served a couple years in Iraq and his left shoulder was covered with the same tattoo Duane Johnson (aka “The Rock”) has on his shoulder. He was telling me and Ashley of Duane’s new tattoo, and how he plans on copying it also. I asked why he would want to have the exact same tattoo as someone else, and his response was really honest. “Because I like it.”

We talked to some other guys in the bachelor party group, two of them had accents so thick I could hardly understand them. The third guy bought me a drink, admitted he was “chatting me up”, but did a fairly bad job of it. He kept talking about how he’s scared of women because women black widows eat their mate after sex, then told me I look like a female Harry Potter, and also that I am very intelligent but lack common sense. I asked why he thought I’m intelligent and he said because of the look, I apparently look nerdy.