Čech Republika - Praha, Plzeň, Terezin

**I think this might be my longest blog yet...sorry for the length, but there is so much to share.**

Dobry Den (hello)! I am thrilled that I decided to go to Prague. It is now one of my top favorite cities that I've visited. Prague is very cold in December, but I enjoyed it (even if it did give me bronchitis) because it made the atmosphere of Prague more like how I imagined it. It is very cold, dark, and the buildings look like they have been through a lot. There is a kind of beauty in all of this that made Prague even more interesting and romantic to me. One thing that I didn't remember until my second day there is that the Czech Republic had been under communist rule. When I walked around the city and even talked to the people I could see the effects that this had on Prague. The people were not very friendly (but not mean either) and the city itself, like I said before, had been through a lot. This is more evident in the older part of the city, which was my favorite part.

Day 1: Finding our way around
Emily and I left Santander on Thursday the 4th and we traveled most of the day, Santander-Madrid-Munich-Prague. We didn't arrive to our hotel until 6 in the evening, but it was enough time for us to walk around the main square, Wenceslas in Nový Hlavní Město (the new town) of Prague. It is the center of the city and has lots of shopping and restaurants. Emily and I decided to look for a place to eat that was in a quieter location and as we walked along Wenceslas we noticed a beautifully decorated patio down a small alley. We found a very beautiful, traditional Italian restaurant (I know....we never actually ate Czech food). It had an old fashioned oven in the middle of the restaurant (which was small) so we were able to watch our pizzas being made...hehe...
The New Town-Wenceslas Square

After we had dinner, we returned to our hostel and Emily and I got on the internet to look up information about Hockey games. See, Emily is a HUGE hockey fan back at home and she told me before our trip that a lot of the really good hockey players in the states come from the Czech Republic. So she researched hockey teams in Prague and she found two HC Slavia and HC Sparta. She never found out about the games though because the website was in Czech. So this night we decided to spend some time looking for the games. Now I've never been to a hockey game before nor have I seen one on tv, but because Emily talked so much about it, I started getting really excited, plus it is somewhat similar to soccer....which I love!

Long story short, after an hour on the internet we found that HC Sparta was playing an away game the next night (Friday) in a city called Plzen, which is only an hour away from Prague. I told her why don't we go for it. So we decided that the next day we would just hop on a bus in the evening and try to find the Hockey arena and hopefully get tickets (just so you know, we did go to a tourist info booth and the woman told us that there would definitely be extra tickets, so we weren't too worried).

Day 2: Prague Castle and Hockey!
We got up early so that we would have time to see things in Prague before we set off for Plzen. In case you are wondering, it was incredibly difficult to get around Prague because we could not read any of the signs and I could not understand one single word, but we managed. We decided to go to Prague Castle, which is funny because there is no castle. Prague Castle has a wall that encloses it and is located in the northeast part of Prague. Within the wall there is the amazing Gothic church St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague Palace, the Basilica St. George, a main square where the nobles gathered, residences where the workers lived, and Zlatá ulička (Golden Lane). The Palace is huge, but we were only allowed to see a small portion of it. We were able to walk into the chapel inside the palace, the throne room, and a sitting room (the ceiling of the sitting room had the family trees of the past kings and queens painted on it). We also saw a few other rooms, but I'm not sure what they represented. Then we went into the Basilica, which is very small, but beautiful. The outside is painted in a brick red color and it shines among the rest of the buildings. Then we walked around the Gothic cathedral (it was closed so we couldn't go inside) and the front of the cathedral has paintings of saints and some are painted with gold. Also in front of the cathedral there was a nativity scene made out of hay figures, which was really fun, and a large tree decorated in lights. The part I loved about the castle (everything inside of the walls is part of the "castle") was Golden Lane. It is 3 different streets that come together at one point and these streets have small buildings that used to be homes or stores (now they are stores where people sell handmade crafts) and each building is painted in a different color. It is very beautiful and lively. It reminded me of when I went to the Renaissance Faire in Gilroy. It was a lot of fun.
View of the Gothic cathedral from afar.
The Old Royal Palace. Don't you love the pink?
The main square in Prague Castle.
The basilica of Prague Palace.
Front of the cathedral. Notice the gold art.
The nativity scene in front of the cathedral.
Golden Lane
Look how short the doors are!

After visiting the Prague Castle, Emily and I roamed the streets nearby and we found a store that sold hockey and soccer souvenirs so we went inside to look around. Later, we went back to our hostel to drop things off and walked around Wenceslas square again to have lunch. Around 3pm we went to the bus station to take a bus to Plzen. Now the game started at 5:30 so by the time that we got to Plzen, we would have an hour to get to the arena and we both assumed it would be very easy to find because it is a huge structure. The only problem is that it gets dark between 4 and 4:30 in Prague so we had a harder time finding the arena. The bus station was a 10 min walk from where the livelier part of the city was. No one spoke English so we had to figure it out ourselves in the dark! We found a large city map and must have looked very stupid...hehe...because we were trying to find the arena (Zimni stadion) and then find the streets to take to get to the arena. We started off in the right direction, but after walking for what seemed a half hour I felt very frustrated and thought we would never find the arena because we were not finding the street to turn on. We then went into a small shop and asked a woman where the arena was. She started telling me in Czech and I had no idea what she was saying and I think she knew that. Thankfully, her co-worker knew a few words in English so she could tell us where to turn left and right. We left there a little less lost, and it so happened the next street we turned on was the street we had been looking for...yay! 10 minutes later we made it to the arena only 3 minutes late and we could hear the cheering from outside. We got our tickets and went inside. It was a really cool experience to be at a hockey game in Prague for my first time and to see all the excitement. HC Sparta played against HC Lassenberg and Sparta won 4-1! We secretly cheered for Prague's team because everyone else was a Lassenberg fan. It was good though; I really had a good time.
Emily and I at the game...can you see the players?
Sparta (in white and red) and Lassenberg (blue). Sparta won!

We returned to Prague around 10:30, quickly got dinner, and then went back to the hostel.

Day 3: Josefov, Karlov most, and Old Town
Emily and I got up really early so we could spend the whole day in the older parts of Prague since the next day we had plans to go to Terezin. We took the metro near where Prague Castle was and walked to Praha 1(the city is split into 8 sections and labeled as such) where Karlov most (Charles Bridge) is. Before we walked onto the bridge, Emily and I found a river bank and walked down to it to take pictures of the city from across the bank. While we were there, we saw tons of swans...I've never seen so many so close up before. I loved it; the swans were so beautiful, but I never realized how large they are. They are about the size of a goose and it freaked me out a little when they started walking towards Emily and I....hehe....so we left to find the end of the bridge. There are two towers at the front and back of the bridge. It is absolutely beautiful and everything I visited this day (the old town, the Jewish barrio) was just what I pictured Prague to be and my favorite day of touring :D Along the bridge there are 30 different religious statues and all very humble, but beautiful. Along the bridge there were several artists selling their paintings. I think we got there a little early or maybe it was too cold because apparently there are usually puppeteers and musicians on the bridge too. That would have made it even more exciting, but I really enjoyed the walk.
Karlov most with the Old Town behind it.
How beautiful is this? One of my favorite pictures of Prague.
I just loved this view of the watermill.
One of the 30 statues on the bridge. This one was my favorite.
I am on Charles Bridge.
The front of Charles Bridge.

The bridge led us into the Jewish barrio also known as Josefov. It was really interesting to see the star of David everywhere. Josefov has the oldest synagogue of all of Europe. We went to visit it, but couldn't go inside because it was Saturday and I guess that is the day of rest and worship, I'm not exactly sure. We walked by the Jewish cemetery and one of the universities in Prague which was surprisingly small. We walked around a little just to look at the buildings and the streets and then walked to Old Town.
The oldest synagogue in all of Europe.

We went to Old Town Square, which had a Christmas market! I was sooooo excited! The different booths sold many hand crafted items and there were stands to buy food and drinks. One thing they sold was hot wine. I'm not sure that I like the idea of that. Also, Emily and I bought a Czech "treat" which was bread that was in the shape of a spiral with cinnamon and sugar on top. It was really good :) After spending a while at the market we walked over to the Old Town Hall Clock. This is a very popular site and one of my favorite things because of how beautiful and colorful the clock is. There are 2 clocks on one tower. One clock has 3 parts to it: time in roman numerals, time with 24 hrs and then an astronomical clock that told you what part of the year it is (cancer, sagittarius, etc). The second clock I don't understand, but it looked like it had religious figures painted in the windows where numbers would go. When the clock strikes on the hour, it is really fun because the bells ring and little puppets come out of the doors beside the clocks. It was really cool.
The Christmas market in Old Town Square.
Old Town Hall's astronomical clock. I just love the colors!

We continued to walk around, had some lunch, went shopping a little, and then returned to our hostel to rest for the next day.

Day 4: Terezin
Going to Terezin was definitely something I was very glad that I did. For those of you who might not know, Terezin used to be a concentration camp during WWII. It is interesting though because it was different from others such as Auschwitz. First of all, Terezin was a transportation concentration camp. They would keep Jews in the camp until it was time to send them to the exterminating camps. Also, this camp is different because it isn't surrounded with a fence or any type of fortress; it is just a small city where people used to live. In 1941, Terezin became a concentration camp and the townspeople were forced to leave their homes. At first, the camp was mainly for children (I don't remember the numbers very well, but I believe there were 16,000 children and only 2,400 survived...it is so sad). The total number of Jews that entered Terezin was 150,000 (not all at one time) and of those only 17,247 survived. 33,000 Jews died in Terezin and 88,000 that left Terezin died in other camps.

I think I will explain the rest with each picture because that way you can understand better what I'm explaining. As you know, I'll be writing about some really sad things that happened.
The Ghetto Museum for Terezin. This used to be a boarding house for the Jewish children.
When Emily and I walked along the streets of Terezin, you could just sense something horrible happened here. You could see it in the buildings, the land, and you could feel how empty and cold this small city is. On the left side of the street, one of the buildings was used as the barracks.
This is the SS guards gate. The SS guards or Schutzstaffel (Protection Guards) were a large Nazi organization and they were the ones that ran Terezin. This gate was used as an internal defense circuit. It was demolished in 1898
This is the columbarium. When Jewish prisoners died, they were cremated and the ashes were put into boxes and housed here before they were buried in the cemetery.
This is the Jewish ceremonial room (there was a Christian one as well). Families could go and pray for their loved ones.
These are coffins that were used to cremate Jews. Because there were so many "prisoners" that died, the Nazi's didn't want to keep making more coffins. The part of the coffin you see here is the top. The corpse of the prisoner would be tied to the bottom of the coffin and that part would be cremated. The top would be reused.
This is the Terezin cemetery, with a beautiful menorah in the center. Every tombstone in the cemetery had stones on the top. The stone is a Jewish tradition, which represents that a person has come to visit the deceased.
This is the small fortress. It is on the outskirts of the city and was used to imprison any Jew who disobeyed the rules or the SS guards. There are different levels of punishment, some were supposed to be just imprisoned for a certain amount of time and then released while others were imprisoned and were sentenced to death. Now I say "supposed" because this isn't really what happened at least not for the "short term" prisoners. Because the conditions were so horrible in the rooms, prisoners were lucky if they survived.
This part of the fortress was where the "short term" prisoners stayed.
There would be 5 people sharing one single shower head and I believe a total of 250 prisoners at one time. The prisoners were lucky if they got a shower. Depending on how many prisoners were at the fortress, they could have had a shower 1x month or 1x every 3 months. It was horrible. Even worse, the guards were to wash the prisoners clothes when they took a shower and steam them. This didn't happen of course and instead the clothes were only steamed so that when the prisoners got them back their clothes would still be infested with bugs and diseases.
This surprisingly didn't bother me even though it was a little spooky. I don't think I mentioned this, but when we went to the small fortress this was the only time we had a guide and because there were so few people in Terezin this day, it was only the two of us with our guide. So, she took us through this tunnel and yes, it was as dark as it looks in my photo. The other thing is that it took us about 5 minutes to walk through from one end to the other and without any other way out. There were some open spaces, but they had iron gates on them. This tunnel was never used during WWII, it actually was used before the war to train soldiers.
This is the part of the fortress that had the prisoners who were sentenced to death. These are the smaller rooms and if you notice there are no windows in the hall (nor in the rooms) and no air ventilation.
This is one of the rooms from the above hall. There was one small bed and one toilet for 12 people! Can you believe that? Because of little ventilation, sleeping on a cold floor, and being with so many people in a tiny room with diseases and such, prisoners barely lived past 2 weeks.
This is the larger room for the prisoners sentenced to death, but the conditions weren't much better. In this room there were 9 sinks and two tables for 600 people. There were not enough beds and usually 3 people would share one. This room did however have windows.
This is a memorial for all the Jews who died in WWII.
After hearing all of these horrible things, we walked out of the small fortress and saw something beautiful. A sunset falling over the cemetery.

I know that going to Terezin was going to be hard and depressing, but I am very glad that I went. It was worth it. I feel that it is important that we learn about these terrible things in the past so that they will never be repeated again...with hope.

I will write more soon. This is my last week in Santander, which I need to enjoy it to the fullest even though I have my final exams and it is raining every day. I am going to be sad to say goodbye.

With love to all my family and friends, Celeste