Meags: We set off this morning planning on starting the day at Prague Castle and stopped off at the Church of Our Lady before Tyn on the way. We spent a little while here doing exactly what we did all day yesterday…looking around with our mouths wide open. It was very ornate. (S: Ornate is an understatement. It was ORNATE. CAPS REQUIRED. We had a long conversation about religion after this church…)

We finally pulled ourselves away from the church to then go on another detour on the way to the castle, the Jewish Quarter. The cemetery has something like 12,000 tombstones all jostled together, with graves layered 10 deep in some places. With the overgrown greenery on the tombstones and the sunlight poking through the trees, the cemetery was surreal. We visited the Ceremonial Hall afterwards, which described the death societies that prepared bodies for burial with old tools dating back a few hundred years. We left the hall feeling pretty good and having just learned a lot about Jewish life in Prague.

Sav: The cemetery was incredible, I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. I heard someone say as we passed by that it’s the most visited museum in the Czech Republic! Next we went to the Pinkas Synagogue which was rough. Neither of us were expecting it to be a memorial and we both left feeling sick. This is a complete and intentional understatement because a blog seems like the wrong place to describe this feeling.

Both of us quite silent, we decided to go for lunch to take a breather, and it turns out it was exactly what we needed. We got some more coffee and near the end of it the song “Bad Touch” by the Bloodhound Gang came on and we both looked up at the speakers, looked at each other and burst out laughing. We couldn’t stop and all of a sudden the tension we had both been feeling dissipated and we felt totally new.

M: I’m listening to the song again writing this post and still laughing about it. We finally wound our way up to the Castle and stood in the rain waiting to get in. This was fine by me, but Savanna and her not-waterproof rain jacket were less impressed. (She shook her fist at the gods of Amazon today.) The wait was worth it though – the Castle is huge and we could easily have spent a whole day there. Sadly the audio guides were sold out so we pieced two and two together with the couple interpretive panels around the Castle. I had a little PoliSci nerd moment in the castle when we got to the place where the Defenestration of Prague apparently took place. Savanna’s level of interest in this was close to zero, so she found the only chair in the place to sit down and wait for me to finish my moment (S: my feet hurt!). I love being in the middle of all this history! We also visited St. Vitus Cathedral, St. George’s Basilica, Golden Lane then walked around the grounds for a while.

I hate to admit this being a Yukoner, but we were very cold at this point. We have been wanting to try these doughnut-like things filled with ice cream for the past few days but it was just too cold. Instead we got one filled with Nutella, and you can never go wrong with Nutella. It was tasty and we were covered in chocolate by the end.

S: I had a funny moment where I awkwardly asked the donut lady to take my chocolatey napkin from my chocolatey hands because there were no trash cans around. Suffice to say she gave me a particular kind of look that reminds you that you are indeed a tourist. We grabbed some Irish coffee and laughed about how to say Worchester Sauce for more time than either of us would like to admit, then dived into the shopping streets. Meaghan bought some much needed gloves. We passed by a super loud concert on the way to dinner, and Meaghan said something about not wanting to sit near the bass and my brain got stuck on a loop of imagining her as an 90 year old lady shaking her fist to the youths to get off her lawn and turn down that racket.

M: Yep, that sounds about right! We all know I’m secretly an old lady. We had some Czech food for dinner tonight! I had a spicy goulash and Savanna had some pork collar. Both were delicious. We spent a long while lounging around and laughing before heading out to buy some Czech chocolates for dessert. Savanna held up three chocolate bars, read them out to me and asked, “Which one do you want?” The answer was of course, “All of them.” So here we are eating a lot of chocolate, yet again. We might never go home.

S: Yeah, because we won’t fit through the door of the god damn plane.

S&M