Wed, July 23: churches, municipal hall, Jewish quarter

After a nice breakfast and multiple trips to the coffee machine, the Apodacas headed out to take Prague by storm (sort of). We began our day by visiting the churches we'd seen on the east side of the Charles Bridge. One of the churches, the St. Nicholas Church, provided a comprehensive account of Praha's religious history. The church itself is known to exist as early as the 13th century. It described the Hapsburg dynasty and the protests against their Catholic rule. Those who favored small independent states over the monarchy rallied for Protestantism, because it went against the Hapsburg's Catholicism. 

We went on to the Municipal Hall, a huge Art Nouveau  building. We saw the Smetana Hall and the clusters of women's and men's parlors surrounding it. 

The smetana hall

The parlors were each decorated with a unique motif. One of the parlors, for example, repeated an oval in every decoration. One of the women's parlors, the confectionary, had a huge brass coffee urn. 

We grabbed a small snack of coffee and desert (and wine for the parents) at the tea room in the municipal hall. Then we headed out to the Jewish quarter. To get there we walked down a street of expensive stores. We frequently stopped at the windows of prada, dolce and gabana, Hugo boss and audemars. 

Jack getting ideas for his next birthday present 

We first went to the Pinkas Synagogue which had the memorial of the Czech Jews who had died in the Holocaust. Of the 90,000 Jews who once lived in Czechoslovakia, only 10,000 were still living in the area after the events of World War II. We saw an exhibit of the art drawn by children at the Terazin concentration camp. We walked around the cemetery, with about 12,000 tombstones and what is thought to be 12 layers of graves.

We saw the ceremonial hall and then went on to visit the beautiful Spanish Synagogue. Sephardic Jews settled in this part of Staré Město after being expelled from Spain (in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue......and the Jews were expelled). The gilded synagogue actually looks like a Spanish mosque. 

Spanish Synagogue

They kicked us out promptly at five, so we decided to walk for a while and then go eat dinner around the area before calling it a day. We walked into the Intercontinental hotel and mom described an episode of Mad Men for us (yeah, I don't get it either), and we saw the cubist apartments and the convent of St. Agnes. Then we went to dinner at a very authentic Italian restaurant called Aldente. We arrived back at our hotel after what had been a twelve hour day. 

An awesome street ft yours truly