Prague: One

Remember when I promised to catch up on blogging? Well… I never break a promise. Though my life is still a tad too complex for me to call blogging conditions ideal, I want to get things up to speed before I start traveling again. That means I need to get a move on.

It is absolutely insane for me that I am sitting in my family room, in my house, writing about Prague. I’m almost glad that it is happening this way. Jumping back into my life here in America was so easy. The first couple days were really weird, even hard. However, once I had a handle on what country I was in and the fact that everyone speaks English here, the rest was basically seamless. Like I recently told one of my friends, it’s hard to spend a lot of time missing foreign countries when you have a six year old little brother asking you to be the elf princess who uses the magical sword to kill the goblins. (: My life is grand.

Alright. Let’s go back in time.

02.14.2011 – Prague

My day started at 4am. Shower. Last minute packing. Buses loaded by 4:45am. We prayed a rosary and everyone slept for a little while before our first rest stop. After that Tony, one of our awesome RDs, put in Rocky, which was met with much celebration from the guys (and a few of us girls :). At one point my friend Kevin tried to get everyone pumped up about it and ran up and down the aisle making punching motions. I love that man.

Enter video caption here

As soon as we got to Prague Mary, Storm, Emily, and I got off the bus on a mission. We were ready to take over. See, we had just successfully travelled to Innsbruck and back. Naturally, this made us experts in all things foreign country. We were probably a little overconfident. That’s alright. It worked out. We were looking for St. Mary of the Snows church and the Franciscan Gardens. We didn’t find them, but we did take a walk through the capital of the Czech Republic on a beautiful day. Overall, the city was the loudest, dirtiest, and all-in-all the most unfortunately American European place that we’d seen. That being said, the architecture was lovely.

Rumors around Steubie told us that Prague was supposed to have really cheap shopping, because the Czech crown is in really bad shape. However, after stopping at a few street vendors and side shops, we realized that, after conversions, prices are basically the same as anywhere else. I wasn’t about to drop 15 bucks on a scarf, and neither were the the other girls. Storm didn’t seem too torn up about it either, so we moved on. It took us awhile, but we finally got to the Old Town.

We saw a bunch of nifty historical buildings and stuff. I was more excited about the churches, but, sadly…

…most of them were closed for one reason or another.

Right around this time, I came to the conclusion that the best thing about this trip was guaranteed to be each other. That sounds cheesy, but seriously. Looking back, I really didn’t like Prague. The town was too… cold. Literally, yes, but also figuratively. It was a beautiful place, but the the atmosphere was just… not pleasant. It wasn’t wretched, but the people we encountered were cold. I think a it’s just cause the place is such a tourist trap. The natives didn’t like us because we were tourists. Lucky for me, I was in great company. My best memories of Prague are inside jokes and ironies. Like the time we went into a Hussite church and Storm Conney said “You sit on a throne of LIES!!!”, quoting Elf and successfully making me laugh out loud a lot. (:

Another reason Prague was not my favorite… it was HUGE on the party scene. There were clubs (in various states of moral decay) all over the place. The pot and vodka shop kinda exemplifies the mentality that was so off-putting.

There are quite a few reasons why I have distinct memories of this church. First of all, we got into it. At this point in the day, that was a big deal. Secondly, because of the story behind it.

Once upon a time, there was a Catholic church named after St. James. In this Church was a lovely statue of Our Lady above the altar. One night a very bad man broke into the church and tried to steal the jewels from Mama’s crown. Imagine his surprise when the statue grabbed his arm and refused to let go! The guy was stuck there until the next morning when the priest came into the church. No matter how hard they tried, the man’s arm wouldn’t budge. They ended up having to cut it off. When they did, the statue is said have let go. The priest hung the arm in the front right side of the church as a warning to all potential thieves. Now, I’m not saying I totally believe this story. However, there was definitively a 400 year old mummified arm hanging from the ceiling, and if someone made it up, I gotta gives them props for originality.

 

Not the best image, but it’s real.

There were two more reasons that I remember this church. The first: After we left the church, Emily told me that when she first went in and knelt down to pray, the first thing that popped into her mind was “Hi Jesus. I have a sandwich in my pocket.” which just makes me smile a lot. Secondly, when we walked out of the church, this is what we saw:

Yes. Outside of the church was a place called “Fat Boys Bar” with a noose hanging outside. Told you Prague was classy.

We decided to look for the St. Charles Bridge. We got lost, but on the way we found some more amusing things. My personal favorite was some graffiti that said “You smell like ten gypsies.”. It became one of our inside jokes. Just so you know, it can only truly be appreciated in a over-the-top Russian accent. I have no idea why we read the Czech graffiti was read with a Russian accent, but it seemed appropriate at the time.

We finally found the bridge, complete with a beautiful view of the ascetically pleasing city.

Some more walking brought us to the church of Our Lady Victorious, where we got to see the true statue of the Infant of Prague. The church was definitely one of my favorite things about the trip. The walk there wasn’t half bad either. It was pretty, and we saw a woman who had a pom-pom on her hat that was almost as big as her head. I creepily stalked her for awhile trying to get a good shot. It didn’t really work, but she ended up going a different direction than us, so I had to stop being a chester.

Pics from Our Lady Victorious:

We prayed for awhile, which was just what I needed. It was good to sit in a holy place and gather my thoughts, and even better to have a chance to give things over to God. Afterwards we were all a little refreshed. To seal in that refreshment, we stopped at a Subway for lunch. That’s right. Subway. Like I said, it was the most American place in Europe, for better or worse. Actually, Subway, KFC, McDonald’s, and Burger King were all pretty popular over there. How nice of us to share such lovely pieces of our culture.