On May 9, 1996 Fran and I returned from a trip to the Czech Republic.

We went with a small tour group arranged by a retired doctor who is originally from Slovakia; her husband is Czech. Both came along on this trip.

Getting there and back was fast but gruelling-- departure 7 PM Sunday night April 28 from Dulles Airport in Washington, an hour's stop at Boston, arrival at Zurich, Switzerland at 10 AM, after a short night in which we lost 6 hours due to the time change. A 4-hour wait in Zurich, then a 1-hr. flight to Prague, arriving downtown at the Hotel Opera mid-afternoon quite exhausted.

The old parts of Prague are filled with centuries-old buildings, including Prague Castle, where President Havel's office is. Many buildings went unrepaired under 40 years of Communist government, and since the Communists were evicted in 1989 enormous energy has been unleashed. On every block there is a combination of unrestored buildings with rotting window frames, black grime from pollution, and chunks of missing plaster, plus one or two buildings covered with plastic or scaffolding where restoration is going on, and three or four buildings already restored to the splendor they knew in the Renaissance, with painted and plaster designs in bright colors.

After that first day we spent two additional days in Prague, wandering about with and without the tour group.

A visit to the Jewish quarter was quite moving; while one synagogue still functions for Prague's small remaining Jewish population and Israeli tourists, others are now museums. Many of the artifacts from the old ghetto were preserved during the 40's for Hitler's planned museum of the "extinct" Jewish race. In one synagogue, the walls are painted with lists of Czechoslovakian Jews who perished under Hitler. Another of the museums has children's paintings from the Nazi concentration camp at Terezin. Each painting is labeled with the child's name and date/place of birth, plus either the word "survived" or the date and place of death if the child ultimately died in a concentration camp (as most of them did).

Cultural events seem much more important in Prague than in the U.S. In a public square, students hand out announcements of the daily concert at a local church. On our second night in Prague we went to a performance by the excellent Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. For the third night we bought opera tickets from a scalper, paying less than $12 each - which was twice the face price of each ticket, for a gorgeous production of Verdi's Nabucco. Nine or ten different operas were scheduled for Prague's two main opera venues in May.

The popularity of cultural events has been noticed by pickpockets, who, we discovered, congregate in subway stations when events have let out: hence "the night we mugged the pickpocket." After the orchestra concert we took the subway back to our hotel. I had just stepped out of the train and I saw a young man running from another car of the train, chased by a member of our group. The pickpocket dropped the wallet, but our macho gang of aging tourists tackled him anyway. Picture a terrified young Czech pinned down on a subway platform by four rough, tough, business-suited Americans (of whom I, at 54, was the youngest), all calling out "Police, police." The police not arriving and the wallet having been recovered before we beat the guy's hand against the floor, we let him go. (Female tourist: "It's a good thing he didn't have a knife or a gun." Male tourist: "Ooooh, I didn't think of that.")

The next night, after the opera, Fran was the object of another pickpocket's attentions, but that individual fled after an unsuccessful attempt and shouts of "Pickpocket!" from our group.

Leaving Prague, our group spent a week driving through the countryside (lush in many places, but polluted and overfarmed in some) and visiting attractions in outlying areas.

We stayed two nights in Marianske Lasne, better known abroad by its German name, Marienbad. This was in the Sudetenland, which had been populated by a mixture of Germans and Czechs for several centuries under the Austro-Hungarian empire and the first Czechoslovak republic; the desire of the Germans for Anschluss and Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland created enormous bad feeling with the Czechs and resulted in what we would now call ethnic cleansing, the removal of the entire German population immediately after World War II. The area is right on the Czech border, so under the Communist regime big portions were abandoned to military pursuits. Now it is being revitalized and the big German tour busses seem quite welcome.

We "took the baths" at Marianske Lasne. I believe the staff were a bit uncomfortable with us because they see the waters having curative powers and everything is set up like a medical institution, with people bringing doctors' statements when they check in, and being prescribed various treatments. The 12 of us got a package rate of a shower, a back massage, and 1/2 hour in a pleasantly heated mineral pool without an attempt to either diagnose us or cure us. I guess our dollars were persuasive! It was a bit like going to a chiropractor and saying, "I don't believe in what you're doing, but can you do it to me anyway just for fun?"

We toured a centuries-old brewery in Ceske Budovice (pronounced, I think, "Ches-keh Boo-dyo- veet-seh"), whose German name was Budweis. You can imagine that Anheuser-Busch would dearly love to own a brewery in this town so they could actually sell beer from Budweis, but that is not (yet!) possible; and I understand that it is illegal to sell American Budweiser beer in Europe.

In a Moravian town not too far from the Austrian border and Vienna we visited a wine cellar for what turned into a late-night party with a local musician (a lawyer) playing and singing folk songs. We were invited to sing American folk songs which made us quickly conscious that this is not something we do much any more. We bravely trotted out "Where have all the flowers gone" and promptly blew the sequence so that we had the flowers gone to graveyards before the young girls had picked them.

Driving back toward Prague, we spend two nights at a "castle," more what we would call a country estate, with a portion now become a small hotel. Formerly owned by a German noble family, the land was confiscated by the State in 1948. Since the former owners were not Czech, it will be privatized (property confiscated from Czechs is being returned to them). For a day I speculated on whether it would be financially viable to run a hotel here. It has a 40-acre park, and part of the main building is a chapel where the village holds its Sunday morning services. The farm that used to support the estate is now a separate entity. I finally decided that whoever bought this might find that they had acquired the social obligations of nobility without the income!

While at the castle we attended a piano concert that had been put together for members of a travel club that our local tour guides manage; the travel club caters to the arts community. A young law student was our pianist, and our 12 Americans were the guests of honor. The concert was in an upper room of the estate, which had been converted by the Communists to a forestry school. Unfortunately, the nice-looking grand piano had not, I think, been tuned since 1948. A couple of notes did not play, several others were quite off, and some of the remaining vaguely on-key notes did not respond to the damper. The pianist, who I am sure was quite mortified, played valiantly through the list, stopping only for one piece which was totally dependent on the bad notes. We then all retired downstairs to the local wine cellar.

On our last day we were back in Prague and went to the main square to photograph the changing of the hour at the famous City Hall clock, when animated figures move and a door opens to reveal a parade of saints. Most shops were closed to celebrate V-E Day, now celebrated on May 8 in line with Western European usage, rather than the May 9th that the Russians celebrate. We found an open bookstore that sold books in English, and I was able to pick up two books of plays and an autobiography by Vaclav Havel, the playwright imprisoned by the Communists who is now President of the country. That handled the matter of what to read on the plane home, and on the 9th we began the day with breakfast in Prague and ended it with dinner in Columbia, having added an extra 6 hours to the day somewhere in between.

Fran tells me that I've left out a monastery, a swamp, three castles, two factories, a hereditary duke, nine medieval villages, and seven cathedrals and churches, one of which was decorated entirely with human bones. She's right!


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