Our Prague Spring

By: Laurel and Matt Talley

  
   
{The following is a copy of an e-mail that Laurel sent out to friends and family after a trip to the Czech Republic. I have added some of my own comments, links and pictures to her text and I gave her final edit rights before I posted it. A proper trip report for this journey would be hugely long and boring as I tend to rant and get lost in the details of rock formations, historic construction techniques, and bathroom humor. As I have a full time job that encroaches on website updating and writing and because there are two and a half other stories in the works, I just don’t have the time to do the Czech Republic justice. I am truly glad that she is willing to contribute.}
   
Dear friends and family,

I thought it was time for another "what we are up to over here" email. It's a long one filled with good stuff, so read it when you have a minute.

Matt and I have finally finished fixing up our apartment and unpacking, just in time for our first house guests who will arrive next Friday {July 2007}. Our good friends Sarah and Dave from Oregon are spending the summer traveling around Europe. We met up with them two weeks ago in the Czech Republic for an amazing six-day vacation. There is an event that happens in Prague every four years called the Prague Quadrennial (PQ), where theater people from all over the world exhibit costume, stage and lighting designs, give presentations, teach workshops, host parades around the city, and lots of other things we didn't even have time to see! Sarah is one of my friends from the costume design program and was exhibiting a number of her projects at the show. She and her husband Dave rented an apartment for the two weeks of PQ and of course we decided to go visit! In addition to seeing some truly amazing art at PQ, we also spent three days touring the city. After having travelled to many of the great cities of the world (San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, London, Berlin and Paris) I would have to say that Prague is the most beautiful city I have ever laid eyes on. {Prague is almost beyond words. The city has been scrubbed clean since the Velvet Revolution. Shops, bars, and cafes bloom out of every corner and nook of retail space. Even more than the intact architecture; the small details of craftsmanship found all over the city are inspiring. Prague is a city of complex and artistic wooden doors. While it sounds mundane, these doors are each a gem in a sea of them. The millwork carpenters in Prague would make a fortune teaching their methods and skill to those in the rest of Europe. It seems that I spent a good portion of the trip snapping pictures of passageways.}
   

 

One of the fantastic Prague doors

 

A guilded window at St. Vitus Cathredral. Click on for a larger image.

 
My little city of Hamburg is beautiful in its own way - so green, lots of parks, and two beautiful lakes in the center of the city. But WWII did a lot of damage here, and consequentially most of the buildings have been rebuilt and so are not more than 50 or 60 years old. Prague on the other hand was virtually untouched by the war and the architecture on display was incredible. The skyline was filled with spires from churches, cathedrals and gorgeous old buildings and a huge castle on the hill flanks the city. We spent one morning exploring the castle and its surroundings, including a gorgeous cathedral (St. Vitus) very reminiscent of Notre Dame in Paris, and a side street of Tudor-style apartments called The Golden Lane. Dating from the 15th century, it was originally known as the Goldsmith's Lane because of many smiths employed by the castle, church, and royal family resided there. The apartments, which were once living quarters for an entire extended family, are smaller than the average living room, and have now been converted into a dozen little shops and an extensive armory collection.
   

Gauntlets in the armory store.

A chastity belt made for a woman that includes a phallus... Umm, I guess to deter would-be suiters... Click on for a larger image.

The St. Vitus Cathredral.
We also visited the Mucha museum - if you aren't sure who Mucha is, you must Google him immediately - his work is so beautiful. We saw lots of originals as well as a concert hall downtown that he completely designed, from the stained glass windows and the mosaic tiled floor to the lamps, china and silverware in the restaurant. {Mucha did a couple of really nice lithographs for bicycle advertisements and I really would have liked to buy the Cycles Perfecta one from the museum, but their stock of Mucha prints is somewhat limited.}
   

Alfons Mucha's famous Art Deco bicycle ad poster

The tomb of a revered nun inset in a wall nook of a church
   
The Czech Republic is known for its puppets and marionettes and Sarah is thinking of doing her graduate work in puppetry, so of course we traipsed into every single puppet store and puppet museum we found. Some stores only offered cheap touristy stuff, but one store had some amazing hand carved wooden puppets. It was here that we found a flier for a puppet making class taught by one of Prague's masters. Sarah and I took the class one afternoon while our boys roamed the city taking pictures and drinking a lot of delicious Czech beer. {We weren’t total alcoholics that day: we also climbed to the highest point in the city, talked about economics of Eastern Europe, investment successes and losses (stupid Lucent Tech…), discussed the world of cyber business, and swapped stories of home renovation as we opened one cheap tasty beer after another...} When I lived in Eugene, Sarah and I used to spend hours in her sewing room making projects together and it was wonderful getting to make art with her again in that beautiful city.
   

One of the many illuminated manuscripts that we saw in Prague

The Prague Orloj, a medieval astronomical clock that is mounted on the southern wall of Old Town City Hall
   
After four days in Prague we took the train into the Bohemian Forest. (Well, given that the train system is still verging on a holdover from the Communist era, it ended up being one train, standing in the rain for an hour, a bus, and two more trains...) We went to the medieval town of Cesky Krumlov, and to say it was spectacularly lovely and indescribably beautiful just wouldn't do it justice. Literally, the four of us wanted to move there and never look back. {Dave and I looked at the local real estate costs and figured that at the very least we could buy a place outright near the city for what we currently had in savings. Earning a living to keep the lights on would have been the problem… What does one do in a historic Czech city if one doesn’t speak the language or have a marketable skill aside from pounding away linux code on a keyboard and being able to text message at thirty works a minute?} We arrived just as the sun started to go down and as we walked from the train station to our hostel, we came around a bend in the road and saw the entire little town cast in golden light. This town looks like it hasn't been touched in 600 years, and plenty of the buildings are even older than that. Because our train took so long, we lost the reservation at our hostel but we were very nicely directed to another place to stay downtown.
   

The 13th century Ceský Krumlov Castle on the Vltava River

A view of Ceský Krumlov form the castle bridge
We arrived during the town's annual Festival of the Five Petaled Rose, the yearly medieval festival celebrating the history of their town. Losing our reservation was a small miracle, because we found ourselves staying on a little island peninsula behind a giant green door, with fruit trees and flowers by the river in our front yard and a waterfall in our backyard, in a house built in 1550 owned by an 80 year old Czech woman and her little dog Philippe. Oh and can I mention that this amazing place to stay comes with a private kitchen and only costs $12 a person per night? {The owner of our house didn’t speak a word of English, but she did speak a few words of German – probably left from the bad ol’ days of German occupation in the 40’s – so a bit of conversation was possible. Even with our limited communication, she was very sweet and accommodating to us. Our apartment on the upper floor of the house was decorated between 1930 and 1960, which made it akin to a visit to your grandmother’s place. Doilies covered every flat surface and the ceramic figurine population of the apartment outnumbered the guests by three-fold. There were old leather-bound books in Czech lining a sitting area and the art on the walls was a mixture of medieval art reproductions, prints of Czech scenery and, like every proper Catholic home should, a cross on the wall in every room, and a framed picture Pope John Paul II on the table with an image of Pope Benedict XVI cut out of a newspaper - wedged into the lower right corner. Because of a back injury, Dave [and Sarah] got the room with the bed and Laurel and I slept on a pullout couch/torture rack. It was possibly the most uncomfortable bed that I have ever laid upon – really, but it was made bearable by the warmth of my wife, the history of the house, and lots of good mead.}
   

The house that we stayed in while visiting Ceský Krumlov and the waterfall that ran beside the house in the deep cut on the right that separated it from the rest of the town.
   

Laurel, Sarah, Matt, and Dave (holding camera) relaxing in our room before a night of heavy mead consumption at the town festival.

Laurel smiling and laughing at the Krumlov Castle
   
The festival was wonderful, with many people dressed up in medieval and Renaissance garb, music, street food, crafts, armed guards, horses, etc etc etc. We went to three puppet museums in the small town, including one housed in a church built around 1300. {In the last year I have been to more puppet museums that I thought existed in all the world. True, some of them were very cool, but after a while one Water Spirit marionette looks like any other…} There is also a HUGE castle on the hill, of which we toured only a small part. We also saw fireworks over the castle on Saturday night, watching from a walled garden park surrounded by women dressed in beautiful Elizabethan gowns and men playing the mandolin.
   

One of the better dressed festival participants.

Dave, Matt, and Laurel at the festival.
   
It was hard to come back after such an exquisite vacation but not too hard to say goodbye to our friends, since all we really had to say was "see you in two weeks!" Matt and I truly love Germany and can't wait to show off Hamburg to our friends. When we agreed to move here we mostly came for the experience of a new place and the close proximity to so many amazing places we want to visit. We didn't expect to fall in love with Hamburg, but we definitely have. It is such a green, beautiful city that reminds me a lot of my home, Eugene. Everyone rides their bikes here; including 75-year-old Oma's with their walkers strapped to their baskets (I kid you not.)
   

Laurel and Sarah, waiting in the rain for our bus/train in the Czech Republic

Laurel and Matt in the Prague train station.
 
Matt is enjoying his work with Airbus and we have made lots of new friends! There is a huge expat community here and we have met lots of people organizing book swaps, meetups, English pub trivia (Matt LOVES pub trivia), and going out for different kinds of food. {Almost every kind of food imaginable except there is NO decent Mexican food in all of Hamburg – none, nada, zip, zero. It is my only culinary complaint about our new home.} We have also met some lovely people. A couple that lives near us, Henrik and Britta, are about our age and speak fabulous English since they have both spent a little time living in Australia. We hang out at least once every weekend, sometimes to play German board games {Die Siedlers Von Katan is the Shiz-nit!!}, all in German! They are great practice for us. I have also been going to aerobics in German with Britta, which can be quite interesting. I am working up my courage to go to German yoga...

Please write and let me know what is going on in YOUR lives!
My love to you all,
Laurel and Matt
 

Marionettes and more marionettes from one of the five puppet museums that we visited on this trip - really five...

Matt and Laurel smooching at Krumlov Castle.