May 5 Wednesday This day we had Jaroslav with us. He is the Czeckish guide who accompanied us all the rest of the trip. He arranged lots of things, as booking hotels and meals and then he helped if something happened which required a person who could talk Czech etc.We had a walk around Josefov, the Jewish part of Prague.
The town hall has two clocks, one with Hebrew characters and that one went backwards, as you read Hebrew from right to left. The other one at the tower top was a normal European clock.
We visited four synagogues, some of these are nowadays partly museums. When we visited a synagogue which is used as a room for devine services, the men were oblidged to take on a "kippa" if they had no other kind of headgear. The ladies could have their heads bare. The reversed regulations to Christian and Muslim temples!
In one of the synagogues the walls are covered with names - the names of all those from Prague and neighbourhood who were executed in concentration camps during the Nazi time. Nearly 80000 names are the witness about this frightful period. There was a small museum in the same building holding drawings made by children in the school in Theresienstadt (Terezin)
At the door you could read this reference:Lam 1:12
"Does this mean nothing to you that passes by?
No one has ever had pain like mine,
pain that the LORD brought on me in the time of his anger"
The Jewish Cemetery from the fifteenth to eighteenth century is an uncommon view with its closely standing leaning tombstones. In this place there are about 100000 Jews buried, layer on layer
After the whe walk around the Jewish town we had lunch at the Town Hall Cellar. We had a chicken-mushroom soup spiced with curry, a dish made of pork interlarded with bits of smoked pork and a huge piece of chocolate cake as dessert. You really could not leave that meal hungry!
We walked around by ourselves in the Old Town, looking if there was something we wanted to buy - but we just discovered how much there is that we don't need...
Our steps went gradually home to our hotel. This day it was Roland who had difficulties to manage, he had feelings of vascular spasm.
In the evening our bus took us up to a restaurant in an old house on Castle Hill - Hradcany. The walls were decorated with pictures of Bohemian-Austrian kings and emperors from the fourteenth to seventeenth century. A pair of musicians played Czech music during the meal, one accordion player who sang and one clarinet player. We had a drink at the beginning of the meal "slivovits". The food was a paté, a fried trout with almond sauce and potatoes and for dessert something like the "yeast pancakes" my mother sometimes used to make, with blueberries and whipped cream.
Outside again it was dark and there was a fantastic view over the lamplighted Prague and Moldau. But it was really good to have the bus for the tour back, good that we had not to walk down this time.
May 6
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