Prague is a city I’ve wanted to see and yet probably shouldn’t have seen. That is, I have five exams coming up and I probably should not be taking any more weekends off. But when a fellow exchange student asked me if I wanted to go to Prague, I couldn’t resist. Ever since I read Kafka my freshman year in college I’d wanted to visit Prague–I’d set my desktop background to Charles Bridge for a while, insisting that I would visit Prague when I got to Europe. I’m very glad I did, but it was one of the more unpredictable adventures I’ve had.
As a disclaimer, I’ll say that Prague is lovely. I really liked Prague and I would visit again sometime. And I think, a year down the road, everything else will seem like a grand adventure to me so I’m not too dismayed at the other events. They seem to be true travel initiation tales, stories I’ve heard from other people but never experienced before this.
What other things, you ask? Well, you see, I always try to travel as cheaply as possible. I find the Ryanair deals and use Mitfahrgelegenheit (a carpooling website) whenever possible. On the way to Prague, we used Mitfahrgelegenheit from Frankfurt, about a 5-6 hour drive. It went smoothly, and the driver makes this trip about once a week apparently so he knew the road pretty well. (I think he knew it too well because he kept checking his Facebook and that was scary.) But things didn’t really start until we reached our hostel.
You see, we’d booked the cheapest hostel we could find in Prague. With hostels, you really do get what you pay for. While the reviews only mentioned that this hostel smelled bad and as dirty (it really was, I won’t go into detail), what they didn’t mention was how sketchy it was. There was a creepy guy who kept muttering to himself in the lobby the entire duration of our visit. He never left the lobby. I hope he wasn’t the security guard the hostel website talks about. Then there was the fact that you have to manually lock your doors, so if someone else doesn’t lock the door when they go to bed, it’s a real security risk. I found that out the hard way.
The first night, we arrived so late that everyone else was already asleep in the dorm room. I hung my coat on the bedpost as usual and put my backpack by my head. I’ve done this in every other hostel. Everyone does that in hostels. The idea is, if you lock the door and put all your belongings where you can see them, they’ll be ok. That’s not exactly true. Someone came in around 2:00 AM and didn’t lock the door. In the morning, my backpack was missing and so was my jacket. Yikes. As calmly as I could, I went down to reception and told them that my things had been stolen, so they called the police. The receptionist didn’t seem overly concerned. I was just another tourist who got robbed because they were stupid enough not to rent a locker. I waited. And I waited.
Two hours later, the manager says they found a backpack and a jacket in the smoking room. The smoking room is a small courtyard area outdoors, covered in a tarp to keep the rain out and it is the worst smelling room I’ve ever been in. My backpack was there, sure enough, having been thrown from the second story window onto the tarp below. Presumably, the thief didn’t know there was a tarp there and had intended to bypass the security cameras by walking out of the hostel without the backpack and picking it up outside. Supposedly. I’m still not sure what happened. Anyway, my backpack had clearly been searched but most of my things were still there–my camera, the kindle, my clothes, my little yellow Kafka book, and my homework. My iPod was gone, and so was my watch ($20 at Target, hope they enjoy trying to sell that.) While I’m really upset that my iPod got stolen, I’m incredibly relieved that my camera was ok. I honestly don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t got my camera back. It’s been my best friend since I was 15 and it’s traveled the world with me. Plus I don’t have the money to replace it right now (nor would I want to, really, there’s too much sentimental value) so there would be no more pictures of Europe to share!
The police came just as we found the backpack, and followed us up to the dorm room to question the other guests. It was really strange: they loudly announced in broken English that they were searching for an iPod, and then pointed at each person in turn and asked “Are YOU the perpetrator?” These two girls from South Korea looked genuinely scared to death, although I think the police weren’t really being serious. As they left the room, one turned to the girls and asked,
“Korea?”
“Yes.”
“South Korea?”
“Y-yes…”
“North Korea’s a joke, yes?”
And then they left. They also asked me where I was from and then talked about Chuck Norris and Walker, Texas Ranger for a minute. They then told me that since the door wasn’t locked, and the iPod wasn’t worth enough to be considered more than a misdemeanor theft, there was little they could do about it. I could spend 3 hours in the station with an interpreter if I wanted to. I said no. They said “Bye, Texas.”
Oh and afterwards, we figured out the lockers don’t work anyway.
So, lesson learned: put your things in a good locker or literally tie them to yourself. Even if you wake up to someone getting out of bed across the room, as I do, you may not wake up to a quiet thief.
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Now, with all that craziness out of the way, how was Prague? AMAZING. Prague is a very old city, and unlike the majority of the cities I’ve visited so far, very little of it has been destroyed over the years, either by wars or by time. The city is full of lots of little alleyways and roads which turn in all sorts of illogical directions so that the only sure way of finding your way back to something was to follow the river or look for church spires. Of course that only makes the city that much more fun–I truly believe the best way to experience a new city is to wander about it and to get lost. You’re more likely to find something when you’re lost than when you’re looking for it with a map.
Naturally, I loved Charles Bridge and the Prague Castle. Charles Bridge, built between 1357 and 1400, is the most famous in Prague and is a huge tourist attraction. It’s the main way to get from the Old Town to the Prague Castle too, and something to see in itself: Gothic church figures stand watch all along the bridge, and bands play for the tourists in peak hours. It’s also enchanting at night, lit up with the castle in the background.
The Prague Castle is really more of a complex of buildings forming one “castle.” In fact, from a distance, most people think that the castle is actually St. Vitus Cathedral, even though that’s really in the middle of the Castle complex. We approached the castle in the middle of a ceremony of the guards, probably their changing of the guard ceremony but it was difficult to see because of all the people. Fortunately the crowds thinned out inside the castle, mostly because there is so much to see! There are at least two churches, a castle history museum, an armory and torture tower (yes that happened there), an art museum, and a treasury. The armory was really fun; the hallway full of suits of armor seemed to go on forever, and there was an opportunity to shoot a crossbow for 2 Euros (or 50 Czech crowns). I’m a terrible shot!
One of the most beautiful places in the castle is the Golden Lane, a small street with tiny, colorful houses which were used most often by castle servants but was also a residential quarter up until WWII. It’s a very cute area and you get a feeling for how these people would have lived in these incredibly small houses. Some of the stories of the people who lived there are happy, some are sad. A fortune-teller kept setting the table for two, even when her son did not come back from the war. She then predicted the fall of the Third Reich and they tortured her to death for it. On the other hand, one of the houses belonged to a man who hid Czech films from the Nazis and so preserved some of the Czech culture. Of particular interest to me was the fact that Franz Kafka, one of my favorite writers, lived
in a tiny house there for a year. Really, his novel The Castle (or Das Schloss) makes a lot more sense once you realize that Kafka lived in a castle himself; even if it is debated that this was the castle which influenced his writing, I think he could not have written the novel without thinking of it. Consider, for example, this quote from Kafka’s novel:
“It was neither an old stronghold nor a new mansion, but a rambling pile consisting of innumerable small buildings closely packed together and of one or two stories; if K. had not known that it was a castle he might have mistaken it for a little town.”
Now, to be fair, the Prague Castle is in fact an old stronghold, though it does not look like it. But I thought it was an interesting comparison, since Prague’s castle is not what one thinks of when one imagines a castle, and it is difficult to tell where the castle ends and the rest of the town begins. Speaking of Kafka…
KAFKA. SO MUCH KAFKA. I’ll admit it, I’m a huge Kafka nerd. I absolutely love Kafka’s stories, from shorter ones like “Das Urteil” (The Judgement) to his novels like The Trial or The Castle. Kafka is very important to me and is, in fact, very closely related to the reason I am studying in Germany in the first place. As a freshman in college, I read some Kafka short stories for the first time and was fascinated. I decided that I would like to read them in the original language, and although that was not the only reason I decided I wanted to learn German, I do believe it was the first time I’d considered it. So, I asked my German/Literature professor if I could take his German class and long story short, he put me on the fast track to learning the language so that I could be here now. I’ve advanced twice as quickly as I should, and after only a year of studying the language I am taking classes in it. But the real moment of success, when I felt truly accomplished, was in Prague. You see, I can not only read Kafka in German, but at the Kafka museum, I could read Kafka’s original manuscripts in German. It was unbelievable.
The Kafka museum was fantastic. It contains many of his handwritten manuscripts and drawings, as well as the famous letter to his father. It tells the story of his life chronologically in an environment which they tried their very best to make Kafkaesque. One hallway is lined floor to ceiling with file cabinets, labeled with the names of his characters and containing some 1st editions or handwritten pages. Throughout the museum, surreal music played–it was sort of alienating. It didn’t really bother me, and I enjoyed the environment. Most of all, of course, I loved seeing Kafka’s writing in person and learning more about him and his life in Prague. His handwriting was really beautiful, and I loved being able to read the parts of the letters which were not translated to English below them. I learned about where he’d lived in Prague (so many different places within the same city, many centered around Old Town Square.) I learned that the Czech Republic has only recently begun to embrace Kafka as one of their own, for several reasons: he wrote in German, and his works were banned until 1989 under both Nazi and Communist regimes. They weren’t even all translated to Czech until 2002. If I had one critique for the museum though, it’s that they took Kafka completely seriously. But some of his stories have really funny elements if you know how to look for him–they say Kafka even laughed aloud while reading them to his friends! (I can’t remember specifically which book he was reading, but I know some things in “The Judgement” are really funny.) Insofar as one can understand Kafka, and it’s impossible to truly understand Kafka so I could be wrong, they seemed to only understand one side of his writing. Still, they understood that much very well and I read every single thing in that museum. Finally, someplace where people like Kafka as much as I do!
I also bought a map of Kafka’s Prague from the museum. It turned out to be a really good purchase, because only one or two buildings where Kafka lived or worked are marked. Using the map, I was able to retrace his steps through Prague, for example, the route his cook would take him to school in the morning. In addition, I visited the Old New Synagogue where Kafka used to go in the Jewish quarter. It was also my first Synagogue so that was really interesting–I only wish I’d had the time to visit the others in the Jewish quarter too.
Another highlight of the Prague trip was that one night while we were there, all the churches were open to visit until very late. It was great to walk into all the old churches and hear the organ music. We also attended a short classical concert inside one church (Vivaldi and Mozart, primarily) which was very beautiful. Oh, and I also ate fried cheese because apparently that’s a Czech specialty. Fried cheese is very, very good, especially the kind they make there. It’s good I’m not studying in the Czech Republic or I would be eating that all the time!
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The trip back was also pretty crazy. The same driver took us back to Frankfurt, and it was pouring down rain the whole way. At one point we got off the highway to drop another passenger off, and we were driving on an unlit road which was occasionally so thickly covered in fog that when the headlights hit it, it was as if the road was on fire. A couple times the driver swerved to stay in the correct lane, or on the road at all. What made it worse was that he was trying to drive quickly enough to get us back for the last train to Koblenz from Frankfurt, which apparently is a lot earlier on Sundays than I thought. He slowed down after we all decided to tell him that we’d prefer to live. We did miss the last train and had to stay in Frankfurt overnight at a hostel, which was better than the last hostel, thank goodness. The other passenger in the car said if we needed to, we could stay in his flat for the night. Somehow I think my parents would panic if they found out about that, and a hostel is better anyway.
After a long and very exciting trip, I’m finally back in Koblenz. And I hope to stay here until exams are over, not only because I really should be studying but also because I am beginning to notice that I don’t have much time left in Germany and I know I’ll miss it here.