The End of Adina in Vienna

Today I went out to Schonbrunn palace, built for the Hapsburgs by Fischer von Erlach. Maria Theresa made a few renovations, and it was also famous for having Empress Elizabeth (“Sisi”), the wife of Franz Joseph, living there. I don’t like all the hype about her; I wanted to hear more about the amazing Maria Theresa. I feel like there should be an entire Humanities lecture just about her, as a representative of the Enlightenment. There’s a famous portrait of her son, Joseph II, standing at a desk where Montesquieu’s “Spirit of the Law” is unrolled so the viewer can read it.

The entire palace was incredible. The funniest part of the garden was the “Roman Ruin” that was built in the 19th century, during the time when they thought it would be nice to pretend they were hanging around in some Roman ruins. Here’s a photo.

From Schonbrunn you can look back and see all of Vienna, especially from this lovely little mini palace called the “Gloriette” that sits on the hill above.

Mary and I are on the same flight to Heathrow in the morning, and our taxi leaves the hotel at 5. It’s boiling hot here, about 90 degrees, so we’re waiting for a few hours in our air-conditioned hotel room, cleaning up and packing, before heading out for our final evening in Vienna.

Thanks to everyone who has been reading my blog; I know it sort of wound down this past week as I was getting ready to leave, but I have many pictures to show and stories to tell when I return, and if you’re lucky I will have brought you a souvenir! Those of you who are taking my 12th grade “Literature and the Arts” class will be having a 5 week Don Giovanni fest as a result of this project, and I am sure next year’s tenth graders will get a lot of new information also.

Thanks to all my colleagues here at the institute, thanks to Dick Benedum and Julane Rogers and all the other teachers here, thanks to Marilyn and Alan for giving lectures that I will be ripping off next year, special thanks to Mary for being such a great roommate, thanks to all the Hapsburgs for providing so much history, thanks to Napoleon for invading, to Emperor Charles VI for creating such an amazing dynasty, thanks to Charlemagne for being the first Holy Roman Emperor, to Franz I for being the last Holy Roman Emperor, thanks to Leopold Mozart for schlepping your son around so everyone could hear him and he could then be exposed to other cultures of Europe, thanks to Baron von Swieten for giving Wolfgang all that Bach and other pieces of music, thanks to Lorenzo da Ponte for writing such funny lyrics to the operas, special thanks to National Endowment for Humanities for making this possible, huge thanks to Jim Schindler for encouraging me to apply and writing me a letter of recommendation (which obviously had great influence), thanks to Tintoretto for painting such amazing paintings, to Wagner, Verdi, and Donizetti for writing the amazing operas I saw while here, and most of all to WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART for providing the reason why we were all here!

We just finished our last class and listened to “Soave Sia Il Vento” (my idea) to wish everyone a pleasant journey home. My colleagues are all scurrying around trying to see one last church, or one last museum, but Jim and I went and took photos of ourselves eating bananas in front of Freud’s house, which is on Berg street. I also stopped by the café Berg to buy some t-shirts as presents for people who have that last name.

There’s not much else to report. I am going out to Schonbrunn tomorrow to see the room where Mozart jumped onto Maria Theresa’s lap, get lost in the garden maze, and sit for hours at Café Dommayer. Here are some photos from last night and today: Me and Mary at Café Mozart (of Third Man fame); Berggasse, and the only Freud photo that was decent enough to put on the web.

The comments on my blog seem to have died way down. I guess the novelty has worn off for everyone. Oh, well. It’s just as well I’m coming back. A huge tour bus of Italians just arrived at the hotel; I congratulated them on their country winning the World Cup.

As I said, the time is running out and my activities are winding down. Yesterday Karen and I went to Café Central for several hours to plan our projects. The quality of service at Viennese cafes is measured by how slow it is. They will never bring you the check until you ask for it, and even then it will take at least 20 minutes. That’s because once you sit down you have rented that space in the booth and it would be incredibly rude of the waiter to rush you. I will definitely miss this concept when I return to the much faster pace of life in Seattle.

In the evening, Mary and I went out for our final “roommate date.” She took me to see The Third Man, and boy am I glad I went while I was still here. It would have been incredibly depressing to rent it in a few weeks and not be able to walk around Vienna looking at all the places that are in the film. There’s a scene where they run into a movie theater, and that’s the theater where we were watching it! And right at the beginning the “count” says something like, “Meet me at Café Mozart,” so after the movie that was the first place we went. We spent the rest of the date walking across Vienna, stopping at various places, until we finally ended up back at our hotel, watching the moon travel across the top of Stephansdom.

My project is now called, “Don Giovanni through the ages,” and involves looking at some of the Don Juan archetypes and seeing how they are manifested based on the time period in which each adaptation of the story has been set. Are the rules that Don Juan breaks different in the Baroque Era than they are in the Modern Age? This is the question I will be asking as I used the myth of Don Juan to examine each major time period. Doesn’t that sound interesting? That’s just the kind of idea you can come up with when sitting in a Viennese café for hours. If only we had someplace like that in Seattle.

This morning I woke up and realized I was really HUNGRY for some Wiener Schnitzel!!! Apologies to you vegetarian readers, but my colleagues and I are going to have some serious schnitzel withdrawl when we come back to the states. Mary said she’s eaten it about 7 times this week. Well, after my trip yesterday when I felt really nauseated the entire day (gee, I wonder why?) and didn’t eat anything except for some trail mix on the train, I was ready to go to Figlmueller, the most famous Wiener Schnitzel place in town. Luckily for me, Jim and Alan were easy to persuade to accompany me. I told them I was excited to order the exact same thing that they did.

Here we are with our frighteningly large Wiener Schnitzels. Alan and I had no trouble polishing ours off but Jim is a rather more dainty eater and had to wrap the rest of his up to take home.

After that excellent lunch, I decided more excess was in order and went to the Hofburg to see the Imperial Treasury. This part of the palace contains centuries of loot from the Holy Roman Empire and the Austrian Empire from the past 1200 or so years. Highlights were the reliquary of St. Stephen which was made at the court of Charlemagne and was supposed to contain some blood-soaked earth from where Stephen was stoned to death (I have seen pictures of this so-called “St. Stephen’s Purse” but never thought to see the real thing in person); other reliquaries which contained things like a piece of Jesus’ loincloth, a piece of the tablecloth they used for the Last Supper, a piece of straw from the manger (you know how much I love this kind of stuff), a HUGE piece of the True Cross, and also the True Lance, which I had thought was “discovered” at Antioch during the first Crusade, but this particular True Lance (which had some part of some of the True Nails welded onto it) had been used sometime around 955 to defeat some Magyars, so I don’t see how it could have been the same one that later ended up at Antioch. At any rate, the jewels were fabulous, and they also had a bunch of stuff from Napoleon, from around 1804-1810 when he had defeated the Austrians and they had to make deals with him. They had this amazing cradle that someone gave to him for his son, after he married the daughter of the Austrian emperor. Of course, after the Austrians got rid of him and put everything back the way they wanted it in the Congress of Vienna in 1815, they kept a lot of the stuff they had originally given to Napoleon. He didn’t really need it anymore where he was.

This morning we completed our study of Don Giovanni. What a great opera. I can’t wait to see it in Seattle in January with all my students from 12th grade. Time is running out here in Vienna – I hate even to say that – and people are making frenzied lists of things they have to see before they go. I don’t really have one because there’s no way I can see everything I want. But whatever I see, you know I will tell you about it, dear readers.



The outside of the Hofburg

Niemen Vergessen...

Why is The White Hotel my favorite book? Because it seems to come close to allowing me to see the intensity of the Holocaust, seeing each individual as a whole world, as Nietzsche (ironically) said. This seems to be what the Austrian government has attempted with its “Letters to the Stars” project. 30,000 Austrian schoolchildren each chose one person who died in the Holocaust and wrote a letter to him or her after doing detailed research, and in many cases contact surviving family members. Each letter was tied to a while balloon and all the balloons were released at once. I am trying to put a link to the project down below but so far it doesn't work. Try it again in a couple of days if you are interested.

As I rode out to Mauthausen this morning, reading Tirzo de Molina’s play about Don Juan, dozing on and off, I tried to imagine being on a different sort of train from Vienna to Mauthausen, perhaps swelteringly hot, perhaps standing up, perhaps surrounded by loved ones, more likely alone. Over 200,000 went to Mauthausen this way. Is this kind of imagining fruitful? I don’t know. What other Holocausts are going on right now? Who is standing somewhere sweltering or shivering, watching someone they love die? I don’t know and I don’t have any answers. The entire trip was pretty surreal – blazing hot sun, light coming through the windows of the barracks, standing in the gas chamber, walking down the Stairway of Death, taking a ton of photos, meeting this guy called Jurgen who was from Linz and shared a taxi with me. I told him in my bad German that he should come over and travel around the US. He told me in his bad English that he had to improve his English first. The main word we used was “schlecht.”

Back on the train to Vienna, reading the Cambridge Opera Handbook, my feet up on the opposite seat in an air-conditioned compartment, watching the pretty countryside roll past, it’s almost impossible to believe in Mauthausen. I never understood that lack of belief before, and have often taken my faith in God for granted. Yet as I stood in a real gas chamber for the first time in my life I understood how my sister could be an atheist. Of course, I do continue to believe in a loving God and continue to attempt some kind of reconciliation of my belief with the ovens and places they did horrible experiments and the incredibly orderly way they ranked people. I suppose that’s also why I like The White Hotel, because it offers such a profound vision of some kind of justice at the end of everything – a justice I have to believe in or I would not have been able to stand there in the gas chamber.

In some ways the gift of Mauthausen to me today was the gift of that brief glimpse nihilism. It’s a hard vision to have but I intend to hold onto it if possible, never to forget. I came back and realized I hadn’t eaten anything all day and wanted to take about 80 showers. Jim called me to make sure I was okay and had me come up and sit on the roof and watch the full moon over Vienna, and he told me that he and Alan ordered different entrees at dinner tonight (I was laughing at them because they always order the same thing), and I laughed some more, and came down and watched ITALY win the World Cup in a penalty shootout.

I took a photo of the light coming into the barracks, and you might be able to see the chimney from the crematorium through the window. It’s kind of a companion photo to my artsy Venice picture with the light coming through from the Grand Canal. Is that pretentious or what? The landscape and the light were amazingly beautiful there.

Just look at that sky.

The trip up the Danube to the Benedictine monastery of Melk was unbelievable today. Most people take a combination of train and boat, and that’s what we did, zipping up on the train then cruising down the Danube on the way back. The banks of the river are covered with two things: Gothic churches and vineyards. Words cannot describe the experience, so I will just post as many photos as I can.

The organizers of the trip were Jim and Alan, the featured guests on my blog today. I think I have mentioned them both before; Alan gave two dynamite lectures on comedy and Don Giovanni which I plan to rip off almost word for word next year, and Jim teaches at Woodinville HS and is the reason I am here. Aren’t they cute?

Every night in the summer they play outdoor movies here in Vienna, but usually not just any movies. Tonight they are showing L’Elisir D’Amore, which you will recognize as the opera in which the heroine is called Adina. So I’m off to see it.

This last photo on the lower right is a castle we saw on the Danube, where Leopold of Austria imprisoned Richard I on his way back from the Crusades and held him for ransom. After he was released, he supposedly came back in disguise to meet - you guessed it - Robin Hood!

Addendum to this blog: just got back from the Rathousplatz where we watched L'Elisir D'Amore on a huge screen with thousands of people. The moon came up over Vienna as we watched. There was all kinds of food, kind of like Bite of Seattle, and beer, but nobody got rowdy or made a mess. They just sat outside watching a beautiful opera on a giant screen. Could you imagine something like that happening in the US?

This morning we continued our intensive study of Don Giovanni, going more and more deeply into the opera without seeming to make any forward progress. We spent three hours studying La Ci Darem La Mano, and it was fascinating. We heard more from Marilyn Fischer and I found out that not only does she have the amazing talents I listed yesterday, she is also a violinist for the Dayton Philharmonic! Anyway, she related Don Giovanni to Dante, to Mary Wollstonecraft, and most of all to the 21st century consumerism and objectification that may have arisen (at least, in a Marxist reading) from our “Enlightenment” based free-market society.

The four bases, she claims, of stability in our post-feudal rational society are 1) contracts (as in the Social Contract); 2) enlightened self-interest (as in getting a good education like Maria Theresa wanted you to so you could learn to postpone your desire for self-gratification in service to the General Will which would, ultimately, lead to something better for you); 3) religion (either the rational deism of Jefferson or the more conventional superstition that many enlightenment philosophers believed was necessary for the masses); and 4) marriage. Don Giovanni clearly attacks and cuts down all of these. He is out of control. Pure id, we might say.

We then spent an hour looking at the music of La Ci Darem with this amazing music professor from Brandeis named Allan something (can’t remember his last name and don’t want to identify him on this blog in case someone googles him). Up until his lecture, some people had been referring to him as the “comb-over guy” for reasons you can guess. Now I would refer to him as the amazing brilliant music guy. I tried to get him to go to Café Demel with me and Laura but he had to go do some kind of serious and sophisticated music stuff.

So here we are at Demel, probably the most famous and most fancy among a dozen famous and fancy Vienna coffeehouses and confectionaries. I have never taken so many photos of food! But look, they had a giant marzipan Bill Clinton and a Nelson Mandela cake filled with a light meringue. Need I say more?

I was too tired to go see the fabulous jewels this afternoon, especially because we had a 6 am fire alarm where everyone had to exit the hotel after we had stayed up till midnight on the terrace. Jim and Alan (the one who lectured about comedy last week, not the comb-over guy, whose name is spelled differently) invited people to go to Melk with them tomorrow and I decided to go, even though I had originally planned on going to Schonnbrun with Mary, Pete, and Ed. But then we found out that Andre Rieu is going to be there, so we had to avoid it until he blew over, and they decided to go to Melk with me. It is supposed to be a magnificent abbey and church, and a lovely boat ride down the Danube on the way back.

After a little nap (which I needed after my late night and early morning) I went to the Prater with some of the gals. Mozart used to go there with Constanze when they were living here, and he has one letter to his dad where he says he went there while she was pregnant and he was “fat and happy.” (I can’t find the reference right now.) They had some good times there, and there’s an old ferris wheel from 1896 that was the one from The Third Man where they’re fighting at the end, and it’s supposed to have a great view. I think we’re going to see The Third Man at the movies here (they show it three times a week or something) before we go so for all those reasons I felt it was time to go up there. We rode the ferris wheel, I ate some greasy bratwurst and frites (the ones at that place in Seattle are actually better!) and we walked around looking at the cheesy souvenirs and buying a few. I got a Vienna Swatch, a Mozart Christmas ornament, and a really hot t-shirt. I came back here to show everything off, but everyone else went to sleep early after their late night and no nap.

My featured person of the day is Barb, a math teacher who also has a degree in German from Heidelberg, a Master’s in counseling, and went whale watching with Victor Frankl. The people here are amazing. Can you find Barb in this photo? She's taking our picture from the ground!

La Ci Darem La Mano…

And let’s go into the world of Don Giovanni, dear reader. That is what I have been focusing on this whole time now that I have recovered from Prague. Actually, I don't have time to take you into the world of Don Giovanni right now, because I have to study for once. This morning we continued listening to Don Giovanni (and I have been listening to it nonstop on my ipod as I walk around Vienna) and heard a fabulous lecture on a “feminist interpretation of Don Giovanni.” Now, you might very well say to yourself (and to me) “How on earth can an opera about a womanizing licentious sex addict be feminist?” And you’d have had me stumped until I met Marilyn Fischer, philosophy professor extraordinaire and expert on Mary Wollstonecraft and (most of all) Jane Addams!

Can you believe this woman? She is amazing. She even dresses up as Jane Addams every year and gives a lecture in character to her freshman humanities class at University of Dayton! Is this a woman after my own heart or what? After class we went out to another of Vienna’s magnificent cafes, this time Café Sperl, still containing the original panels and other décor from its opening in 1880.

After lunch, I finally went to the Albertina to see the Mozart exhibit they have there for his 250th anniversary. I’m really glad I saw the other schlock exhibits in Salzburg and Prague before this one, because this exhibit blows everything else away. I can’t even begin to name everything they have there, including a ton of original manuscripts, letters, paintings, and so on. They even have the painting of Voltaire getting dressed that is on the cover of our Candide books! And some original 1797 Marquis de Sade illustrations from La Nouvelle Justine that I would NOT want my kids to see!

But as far as Mozart, I think the biggest thrill was seeing the original opera manuscripts they had there, penned in Mozart’s own hand. They had Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Idomeneo, and Cosi Fan Tutte. I think seeing that first one, open to “se vuol ballare, was probably the highlight for me. They had Leopold’s original 1756 violin book as well, published the year Mozart was born. And the original manuscript of “Ave Verum Corpus.” That was pretty amazing too. They also had some really bizarre costumes for the Queen of the Night designed by fabulous modern people, and upstairs this strange exhibit called “Reinventing Roccoco” with some strange John Galliano faux dresses that I could only see Nick Garrison wearing.

I love Vienna. As I was walking to the tram, I realized I had started to take being here for granted and took some photos just of the views I was seeing every day going back and forth. I have also started thinking about buying souvenirs, which I haven’t really done (except in Prague). Finally, I have to catch up on my reading of all the Don Giovanni material, including the old Spanish play by Tirso de Molina and a few other commentaries, since that’s what my project is on (as you all know by now). Later there will probably be some kind of festivities on the roof, as usual, which I will let you all know about later. Thanks for reading. Walking through the Volksgarten




Here's the "D" tram I take almost every day, either to or from class. Public transportation here is unbelievable! If only we had something even remotely as good in Seattle.

Independence Day at the Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts

After a morning studying the Mozart Effect, the literary antecedents to Don Giovanni, and Mozart’s annoying “Credo” Mass, it was time for a vision of Hell. Hieronomous Bosch’s triptych of the Last Judgment is in Vienna and Mary, Pete, and I were on a mission to see it. We had to get back by 4:30 for the afternoon salon on Mozart’s contemporaries, where I was supposed to talk about Jacques-Louis David and Mary was supposed to talk about Lagrange and Laplace.

Our first lecture was, strangely enough, by a psychology professor appropriately called “Don.” He told me he ”loves women.” He gave me a sip of his absynthe when we were in Prague. He didn’t talk about his namesake per se, but he did tell us that the so called “Mozart Effect,” which is an increase in spatial reasoning abilities after listening to Mozart (specifically K. 448, for two pianos), while difficult to replicate, is somehow a legitimate phenomenon.

After that we heard from Dick about the “Credo” Mass, which Mozart wrote in Salzburg in 1777 and which is really annoying in the way it keeps repeating “Credo! Credo!” I was more than ready to hear from the wonderful Professor Kimbrough about the literary precedents to Don Giovanni, especially since that’s a lot more relevant to what I will be teaching in the fall and winter next year. I am getting some great ideas for my project, which I will be doing jointly with Karen, who lives in Wallingford but bikes to work in Edmonds! She is a cellist but doesn’t carry her instrument on her bike. I think I may have mentioned this before, at least once.

Anyway, the museum was great. Not only was there this Bosch triptych – you can imagine how amazing it is to see something like that in person - but just out of the blue was a luminous Botticelli Tondo, just hanging there on the wall! It was lovely. Also there was one Durer drawing, which stood out like magic from all the others. And a bunch of amazing 18th century “Academy” style paintings with typical classical subjects like “The Death of Germanicus” and “Odysseus and Circe” and of course the ever popular “Blind Belisarius Begging at the City Gates.”

We were a little late back to the salon, but everyone gave their presentations, and then I tried to go on the exercycle while reading the Don Giovanni libretto and listening to the opera on my ipod. This only lasted a short time. Then Karen and I went out to a great Italian restaurant and brainstormed a little bit about our projects. Now we’re back watching the World Cup, and it’s still 0-0 although there have been some close calls. We are all feeling the time running out, with so many things to see and places to go yet. On the list: Schonbrun, the Hofburg, Melk, and Mauthausen (I hate to put those things together like the last one is some kind of fun lark outing but you know what I mean). So many cafes to visit, too! Be assured I will keep you all posted as to my frenzied activities.


Karen and Mary watching World Cup soccer!

Prague Epilogue

Imagine waking up around 5:30 (after staying up very late indeed the night before) but not feeling tired. Everything is completely quiet and you go out for a run through the narrow winding cobblestone streets. After about a mile you come to the river and run across the almost deserted Charles Bridge, on the way up to the Hrad (castle), with the sun coming up over the water. That’s how I started my day this morning, then went back for breakfast and strategizing how to spend my last hours in Prague.

It wasn’t hard to decide. We spent all morning in the Jewish quarter, looking at the ancient cemetery (yes, I took a ton of photos), the drawings by the children of Terezin, the 80,000 names of Holocaust victims on the walls of one of the synagogues.

After a relaxed lunch, I just had time to climb the town hall tower and look down at all the places I had visited on my trip. I was amazed at how much looked familiar to me after only two and a half days, but that was definitely because of the guide I had been privileged to have the entire time. I spent the bus ride “home” to Vienna sleeping and comparing notes on the visit with my pals, whom I had barely seen all weekend.

Prague Day 2
In Search of Mozart and Kafka

This morning over a leisurely breakfast I tried to explain to Professor Otto how “Kafka” was a household word during my childhood, how my mom would say “It’s like Kafka!” to describe a certain type of difficult and frustrating situation, how my little sister would run through the house yelling, “Kafka! Kafka!” when she was upset. I guess you had to be there.

After breakfast we walked down Na Porici, past the insurance company where Kafka worked, on the way to the Estates Theater, built in 1783 and site of the world premiere of Don Giovanni. What a combination.

At the Estates Theater, the retired conductor/music director, Pavel von Druscka, showed us around. We sat in the very seats where people had first watched Mozart conduct his final opera, and listened as the current maestro played hits from Figaro like “se vuol ballare” for us. He finished up his little concert with the Czech National Anthem, to such acclaim from the audience that he took us downstairs to the piano in the basement and played some Dvorak and Smetana pieces as well.

Chris took us over to the “Hussite” church, named after Jan Hus, who was an early reformer, burned at the stake 100 years before Luther got into trouble with the same people. Hus (or Huss, as we spell it in English) objected to a number of Catholic practices, including the selling of indulgences (sound familiar?) and the nice church fathers invited him down to the Council of Constance to discuss the issues. While there, they conveniently had a trial and burned Huss at the stake. My guess is that Luther knew about this, so when the nice church fathers invited him to come down to Rome he burned their invitation. In 1965, at Vatican II, the Catholic Church finally overturned Huss’ sentence, declaring him “innocent.” Thanks a lot, 550 years later.

We strolled through the old Jewish quarter, known as Josefov, but didn’t have time to see it properly because we had to catch a bus out to Bertramka, the villa where Mozart stayed while finishing the overture at least for Don Giovanni, with his good friends the Dusecks, who also welcomed Beethoven in 1796.

There wasn’t a lot there, although we saw a room that they said might have been Mozart’s bedroom, a harpsichord they thought he might have played, and 13 hairs they claimed were from his head.

After the main group broke up, it was time to follow the amazing Professor Otto around again for the rest of the day. First we visited the huge Baroque-ized (I always thought it was Baroquified) Gothic church of St. James (since that’s my parish at home, and for a couple of other reasons, it was an important pilgrimage site) with the second longest nave in Prague, after the Cathedral. The place was gutted by fire in the 1690s, just in time for all those Italian Baroque guys to rush in and fix it up. I gave Chris a little test to see if he could find the Fischer von Erlach chapel (one of 20 chapels done by different people) – as you might imagine, it was easy peasy lemon squeezy for this particular individual (whose remarkable attributes and hotness I have already mentioned a number of times), even with the distraction of a 400 year old decomposing human forearm (I told you I loved Prague) hanging just inside the door. It seems that a thief tried to steal something from the church and one of the statues of Our Lady grabbed him and wouldn’t let go; the local butchers had to come and saw his arm off in order for him to be freed. Hm…sounds like a recent movie.

We visited the Kafka exhibit, which was brand new (about a year old) and really interesting, if somewhat pretentious, with phrases like “The I is an enigma and the community is entelechy” (neither of us knew what that word meant – any of you readers want to help me out?). We learned a lot about Kafka’s life and work – I particularly appreciated what Kafka said his main message was: “the only true foundation for the realization of all dreams is PATIENCE.” (does this ring a bell for anyone else?)

After the Kafka museum, Chris took me all around Prague. It was quite an experience, once again, to have a Cornell architecture professor with gorgeous blue eyes showing me all the sights - the Bata shoe building, the Grand Hotel Europa, the National Theater, Wenceslas Square…finding hidden little gems like Manet’s painting The Absynthe Drinker, learning what Modernism really is, and the difference between ‘mass’ and ‘volume’ or between ‘symmetry’ and ‘balance’ (he did this with dinner rolls, very hard to explain), about a photographer named Sudak who is the most important Prague photographer, and buying Infant of Prague fridge magnets. I told him the story of In the Penal Colony and tried to explain why I thought it was actually hilariously funny, but once again I guess you had to be there.



The many Infant of Prague dolls on sale!

Prague Day 1



Hello you blog guys and gals – I am writing this from the beautiful city of Prague, city of Baroque, city of Jesuits (until 1773), city of defenestration. Czech people are incredibly friendly, the World Cup is going on, and the city is absolutely beautiful. Everywhere you turn is a new feast for the eyes and a new story of a strange saint. One of my favorites is St. Wilgefortis, daughter of the King of Portugal, whose father forced her to marry the King of Sicily even though she had already taken a vow of chastity. After Wilgefortis prayed for help, God intervened and made her miraculously grow a beard. The Sicilian king decided he didn’t want to marry her after all and her rather was so angry he had her crucified. When you look at the statue it kind of looks like Jesus in drag.

St. John Nepomuk is another famous one here. He was the queen’s confessor and refused to divulge her secrets to the king so he had St. John’s tongue cut out, then tortured him and threw him into the river. There is a bronze cross on the bridge marking the spot and if you touch it, you are supposed to be sure to return to Prague one day. (Believe me, I touched it!) The Jesuits dug up his body later to ensure his canonization, and claimed that St. John’s tongue had miraculously grown back.



Mary, whose birthday it is today, has learned a few phrases in Czech: “What do you think of the current government?” and “What are your hobbies?” are two social starters. Then of course there is the ever popular “I was ripped off in Prague.” We were warned to be careful of pickpockets and practiced fighting them off…






Prague is also the city where Tycho Brahe died of a burst bladder (do you remember hearing that story from Benji?) after dining in the Schwartzenberg palace and feeling it would be rude to excuse himself to use the restroom. Here I am in front of the palace where he fell ill! His tomb is in the nearby Tyn Church, which we didn’t end up getting to see inside.


We visited the magnificent St. Nicholas church (not pictured), another amazing Baroque structure full of fabulously ornate decorations including a statue of Cyrus the Great, king of Persia. Remember him, 10th graders? He’s the only non-Jew blessed in the Old Testament, since he sent the captive Israelites back to their homeland.

See the golden handcuffs he’s holding?










We also saw the tower where Kepler made many of his observations which led (together with Brahe’s notebooks, which Kepler got after Brahe’s unfortunate demise) to his heliocentric theory of the solar system, later picked up by Galileo.

This place has been continuously monitoring meteorological conditions since 1775. The Jesuit library here contains more books by Wycliff than any other place in the world. He was a big influence on Jan Hus, whose statue is in the main town square (I’ll tell you more about him tomorrow). We did go by Kafka’s birth house but it was closed. I am sure we’ll end up learning more about him tomorrow. Meanwhile, we had a fun dinner as usual and stayed up late walking on the Charles Bridge.