We started our journey in Prague where we arrived after taking the night-train from Paris, with a change of trains in Frankfurt. It took us about 15 hours. Prague is like a delicious marzipan cake with multicolored layers and lots of whipped cream. Perfectly preserved, it was like walking around in a quaint dollhouse filled with very chic and affluent central Europeans (and hordes of tourists).
This is an exciting place with punky looking youth who have shaved patterns on their heads and very fluorescent hair colors. But Prague's youth also seems confused about their European Union future and resort to begging money in the streets to buy the latest Nokia like their Western European counterparts.
We enjoyed this first stop by spending a lot of time in the city's many parks: picnics in bare feet, jogging at dusk, sketching the architectural wonders, and observing the Afghan hounds and other dogs strolling with their owners in the well-kept gardens.
This is a city where we could see ourselves living. In terms of beauty it ranks with Stockholm, Budapest, Amsterdam, Lisbon and San Francisco.
But the city is more than just a living museum. We were very moved in the Jewish Quarter where the 80.000 names of all Czech Jews murdered in the Holocaust have meticulously been written on the walls of the Pinkasova Synagogue. Upstairs in the synagogue we saw an exhibition of drawings by the children in the Theresienstadt camp. |
