Prague, Czechia

Though it made for a long travel day, the drive to Prague was pretty interesting and kinda fun. We passed through southern Germany and realized after a short bit that we were on the Autobahn. Now, I had always heard about the Autobahn as a kid - it was legendary; a road with no speed limits - and I imagined a windy road through some picturesque mountains, with only Porsches and Ferarris and the like tearing through the turns at mach speeds. This was kinda like that. Except for all of the stuff I imagined it being like. What we encountered were intermittent, largely straight stretches of highway through rural countryside with no speed limit, where, when floating along at 160km/hr, I was still getting passed by any number of German luxury cars. Nicole did the math and we pretty well kept it to the "suggested" 135km/hr after that :).

We spent the night in some super random short-term rental that we secured while on the road, woke up early the morning and finished the drive to Prague.

Prague was really cool. We stayed in an awesome hostel in an excellent location and found the old city center incredibly accessible on foot or rental scooter (despite being mostly cobble streets, there were very few bikes, but TONS of people on electric scooters). We didn't touch the car the whole time we were there. We were only in Prague for four days, but definitely could've stayed longer to explore more. We walked all around the city, mostly exploring from the areas around the 10th century Old Town Square, full of really beautiful gothic architecture and buildings, shops, historical monuments, cathedrals and, while we were there, an Easter Market, bustling with vendors and people (apparently, it's a point of pride that Czech's the average Czech citizen consumes 1.6 liters of beer a day, so there was A LOT of beer stands). We also ventured across the 14th century Charles Bridge, crossing the Vltava River from "Old Town" to "New Town" (which is funny, since "New Town" was founded in 1348), and up the hundreds of stairs (more stairs!) to Prague Castle. Franz Kafka and Andy Warhol were Czech, and Mozart often composed and performed in Prague. Apparently he liked it better than Vienna.  We took a walking tour and learned a lot more about the ancient and more recent history of this beautiful country. It's wild to think it only became an independent nation in 1993. Also, we heard a lot about Jan Hus, one of the leaders of the Bohemian movement and original contributors to the Protestant Reformation. His assassination triggered the Hussite War and inspired Martin Luther - a man famous for posting his 95 Theses full of demands for change.  

The tour also brought us through the Old Jewish Quarters (these have been literally everywhere we've traveled during this trip), along with stories of how the Holocaust impacted the city and the country. It was super powerful, all taking on more and more significance the closer we got to Krakow. The area had been a Ghetto (though not the type the Nazis built, it was built to force Jews to live together and in poverty). While there, we saw the synagogue Hitler chose to preserve with the intention that it would serve as a relic of an extinct race. We also saw the "Old Jewish Cemetery." The small cemetery came into use in the first half of the 15th century and the last half of the 18th century. Jews were not allowed to purchase more land to bury their dead, but they were allowed to purchase more dirt, so they were forced to layer their dead - they estimate about 12 deep, with over 100,000 people buried there. The multitude of gravestones are essentially leaning on each other. While we were there, we met a woman who was on a pilgrimige of sorts to piece together her family's history.  She had just come from the Terezin Ghetto to see the house where her aunt had lived as a prisoner there.  The cemetary was closed that day due to Passover, so she told her story while I climbed and teetered trying to captured the photos she was hoping for.  We could feal the realness of our proximity to these attrocities as we continued to meet more and more people with personal connection.

Also, nearby, is a memorial to the children who were brought to the Terezin Ghetto not far from there.  An artist and educator, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis - was brought to Terezin in 1942 and taught art classes to children in secret. She taught them to stop drawing what they saw or had seen, and to instead draw beauty they remembered or hoped to see in the future. She died in Auschwitz, but after the war, her husband found the hidden art of the children - over four thousand pieces - which are on display a the memorial. What a testament to the human spirit.

The REAL reason we were in Prague, though, is because of one of those "anchors" we had set last fall, before we even left or knew about the car: We had tickets to see Twenty One Pilots. This had long been a "carrot" of sorts that we all had been looking forward to, like seeing Much Ado About Nothing in London. To be honest, I didn't know much about Twenty One Pilots before we bought these tickets last fall. We found a band that the kids both liked and who were touring Europe when we would be traveling. I liked some of their songs, for sure. They were boppy, had good hooks, and blended some different genres in new ways that appealed to me, but I probably didn't know more than a handful of their songs when they came on (and I'm not sure I would've been able to tell you for sure that I knew the artist was). Those who know me well also know that I don't typically have the "fan" gene, but I can tell you, learning more about them and listening to them (A LOT) while we've been flying and driving around, then seeing them live: They are absolutely awesome, and I am a fan. These two incredibly talented artists put on an absolutely phenomenal show, and every Czech person in that stadium, which was packed to the gills, was singing along and jumping up and down, and having the time of their lives. They were entertaining, interacted with the crowd, and several times performed from within the crowd (starting right off the bat with a stage dive/ body surf, and later the crowd supporting a platform with Josh Dun, the drummer, banging away on his kit). At one humorous point, from his piano on a riser out in the midst of the crowd, Tyler Joseph tried to do a call-and-response type of thing, and instructed different sections of the audience to do different things; it was the only time when it was clear that English was not most of the crowd's first language (but they got the hang of it pretty quickly). 

Otherwise, we mostly cooked, ate, and did work at the hostel, which had a great communal space. We played some volleyball in the park by the river a couple of times, played some more Euchre, ate Chimney Cakes, and Miles found a blue Miata :). 

On our last morning, we picked up the Tesla and drove the six-ish hours to Krakow.