Today was the East side of the river with Misha. This included the Old Town and the Jewish Quarter. We started our morning with a nice walk across the Charles Bridge. It is amazing to me that this bridge is still in such fabulous condition 600 years after it was built. The views from the bridge are beautiful and many local artisans sell their work on the bridge. They had some nice work and what we were impressed with was that there was no pressure buying. The artists greeted you and let you look without staring you down.

The astronomical clock in the main square was quite a site. Think of a huge cuckoo clock where a quick show comes up at the top of every hour. The best part of this clock is that in order to really be able to tell what time it is they had to put a "real clock" at the top of the tower because today no one really understands the clocks at the bottom. I told Misha that my kids at school can barely tell time on anything but a digital clock nowadays.

The majority of our time was spent in the Jewish Quarter visiting several synagogues and learning about the history of the Jewish people in Prague. The Pinkas Synagogue is the location of the Czech memorial of those who were lost to the camps during WW II. The names of over 77,000 Czech Jews are hand written on the walls with both their birth dates and the dates they were sent to the extermination camps. Behind this is the Jewish Cemetery were there are close to 100,000 Jews buried. Due to the lack of space the bodies were buried sometimes 7 or 8 deep and over the 350 years that this was the only places Jews were allowed to be buried in Prague the ground settled leaving this crowded crooked cemetery.

Finally we visited Old-New Synagogue which is the oldest synagogue in Europe and is still in operation today.

 

Finally, we ended our day with a visit to the underground passages of Prague where we heard several stories of those who were imprisoned there hundreds of years ago before there executions on the Old Town Square. The most famous of these were those Protestant prisoners the Hapsburgs had put to death for not converting to Catholicism. Many of these underground passages have only recently been uncovered.

Once again we return to a lovely snack left for us by our hotel. I think we are getting spoiled.