Prague - Aug 4th

Walked over to the National Museum. Lisa through her excellent reading of the guide book discovered that the museum is free the first Monday of every month and we hit the jackpot by planning our trip right!!! It is actually a great natural history museum from the way I remember the Carnegie 40 years ago. A very big (not quite as huge as the St Petersburg Geological Society) rock collection shown in row after row of old wooden and glass display cases, similar prehistoric display of archeological artifacts, fossils, animals both skeletons and stuffed. When you go check out the complete Fin Whale Skeleton, the ‘real’ Wooly Mammoth, and of course the rocks. The special exhibit was done for the year but they did have a recursive display of the history of the National Museum. They had a video showing many of the Czech dignitaries that laid in state there and also an old movie that was made in the museum about the museum (catch the recursion???).

When we were done we went outside and it was raining. After waiting a bit we decided to don our raingear and try to find the Wittman travel agency. It was just a few blocks away but we couldn’t find it. But we did find a section of Prague that was not nearly as touristy as the section around our hotel. Stopped for pizza in an underground tunnel that wasn’t half bad.

Next stop was the Mucha Museum. Very cool guy that I didn’t know much about but I do like the Art Nouveau that he was a key contributor (in fact he decorated the Municpal Hall where we saw the concert the previous night). We had seen some references to Sarah Bernhardt (restaurant, posters, etc) and now we know why.

Next on the plan was a visit to the Jerusalem Synagogue. Very beautiful and in the Spanish style with an art nouveau twist. You see it was built around 1900 when that style was popular. The separate door to the women’s section was closed as the women’s gallery was being renovated.

Guess what, it was then 20 minutes before 5PM and we still hadn’t witnessed the Astronomical Clock. So a quick walk to Old Town Square and we watched the 6PM display (they don’t seem to adjust for daylight savings time) with couple of thousand other people. Pretty cool but not as mind boggling as thought it would be.

Next, I had been trying to find a Boingo wireless site that was easy access to the hotel( they want $40 a day for internet access at the hotel). What we found was a very nice wine bar but they no longer had wireless access. We had been looking forward to some beer so we headed off looking for a place that had tables on the street, good prices on draught beer, good food, and free internet. Not easy to find but again Lisa’s research had discovered a Pilsner Urquell Cisco?? with a location near our hotel. Turns out that it was all of those but the internet connection didn’t allow me to connect my work VPN. We did do a Skype call to our son Sam, check our other email, had a ‘little’ beer, a cheese plate and a beef rib. We would recommend this place as a good reasonably price place to hang out.

We had wanted to squeeze in a concert in the Spanish Synagogue but what looked like a short walk on the map turned out to be a nice ½ hour tour of the Josenov section. At least we know where to go to visit the other synagogues in Prague.