Prague #3of7

Customers were standing in line outside a grocery store, and we discovered each customer had to have a shopping basket before they were allowed inside. We stood in line, then bought some bread and butter. The loaf of bread, white and soft, not crusty, but very, very heavy, was as tasty as any, and it cost only 20 cents. Butter was also very good. The next visit, at the same store, we bought another loaf — not nearly so delicious.

As we were parking in the campsite that night, the lady next door came and watched carefully as we backed into the space. When we talked to her (from the DDR, East Germany) she carefully looked around to see if anyone could hear, before she said very much. Their name had been on a car shopping list for twelve years before they could buy their car, so she wanted to make sure the Americans didn’t bump into it. Later Emmy, using her “best” German, spent some time talking with her, and it was interesting to hear her story of life in East Germany.

Prague’s Jewish Cemetery is one of the most unusual old curiosities we have visited. In just a very few acres 100,000 people were buried between the late 1400’s and the late 1700’s. No one has been buried in this cemetery for two hundred years, but it’s still kept as a memorial, and is now a tourist attraction. There are only 12,000 graves sites, people were buried six and eight deep over the years. The headstones in this Prague cemetery are various sizes, some are six inches thick, two and a half feet wide, five feet high, some smaller, some larger, with inscriptions in Hebrew. They are close, and tilt in all directions.

Wenceslas Square, a half-mile long, 200 feet wide boulevard, can comfortably hold 400,000 people. It has long been the location for protests and celebrations, including the Prague Spring (on the night from 20 to 21 August, 1968, when the Soviets crushed a reform movement), and the Velvet Revolution (a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989). Today the street hustles with commerce, hotels, shops, and restaurants.

We remember Prague as a terrific, but frustrating city in 1985. By 1991 and 1995 it was impossible to say how much of the change in our thinking was the result of less paranoia, as compared with the changes we could “see and feel” as we met/watched people on the street. Prague was as beautiful as we remember, but it was so different from the first time we visited, while the Communist government was still in power.