September 16, 2013

After another great day of touring yesterday, I forgot to post about my day! Yesterday was an amazing last day in Prague. My dad and I took a tour of the old city and the Jewish Quarter. We started out in the old city and learned that all of the buildings and the houses and structures and architecture were extremely old. Basically the whole city is from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The “modern” and new building and churches were still from the eighteenth century. All of the architecture is beautiful and either Barak or Medieval or Renaissance architecture. Our tour guide showed us old churches and the current senate building, with used to be another palace. We also saw the famous clock in the Old Town Square. It was built in the thirteen hundreds (I think) and it very intricate and complicated. It tells the time, minute, hour, and second, and when the moon rises and sun sets and sun rises. It also showed where the moon was in position to the sun and the earth. In my opinion, the coolest thing about this clock was that there were four sculptures on the side of the clock and at the beginning of every new hour, they move. Also, there are two doors and a gold rooster at the top of the clock. At the beginning of every new hour, the doors open and the twelve apostles are shown dancing in front of the doors, and the gold rooster makes a noise and dances. It is amazing that this clock and whole structure was created so many years ago.

After touring around the Old City, we went into the Jewish Quarter. This was also very interesting because it was all in tact and very old and beautiful. Apparently the Jewish people that lived in Prague were the first people to live there, until they were kicked out with WWII and the Holocaust. Even after the Holocaust, all of the temples and housing and the whole Jewish Quarter was not torn apart or damaged. Our tour guide told us that this was because Hitler wanted to keep everything the way it was and to one day show the world what the Jewish race was like and that he got rid of it. Luckily he did not succeed! (haha) There were four synagogues and only one of them is still in use, the New Old synagogue, the one that my dad and I went to on Yom Kippur. The rest of the synagogues became museums about the Jewish race and the history of the Holocaust. It was very interesting to learn more about the Jewish people and the Holocaust and the Jews in communist Eastern Europe. Another great site that we saw was the old Jewish cemetery. It used to have twelve layers of graves and people buried in it. This is because the Jews were only given a small area of land for their cemetery and it was believed that all the Jews had to be buried there. The tombstones were just slabs of rock with Hebrew inscriptions on them and a symbol which referred to their job or self (EX: grapes were for knowledge and there was a symbol for a doctor…) Since this cemetery is know a tourist site and part of the museum, most of the tombstones have been brought up to the surface and are laying all over. Apparently there are about 12,000 tombstones and some people think about 100,00 or more Jews are buried there. It was very interesting to see! Overall, I loved Prague and I think it is so interesting! Yesterday was our last day though and I am headed to London now to visit Abbie! My next blog post will be from London J