This is technically the 2nd day of our trip given that we had a long layover in London and got to hit the city before heading to Prague that evening. We took the tube directly to Westminster Abbey and took the tour. Very beautiful with almost a 1000 years of history, many of the British Monarchs are burried there. Oh yeah, princess kate and prince william were married there. We had a very yummy lunch at Dishoom which was VERY popular Indian restaurant in the Covent Garden area. The wait was 45 mins at 2pm in the afternoon??? Ran into some Seahawks fans at the door! From there we took a leisurely stroll along the streets through Picadilly circus and then onto Buckingham Palace. Didn't see the Queen though, guess she didn't get the memo we were coming??? We then headed back to the airport but our flight was delayed almost three hours. Luckily we had lounge access so we ate and drank our way through the British Airways and Admiral Clubs!
We arrived in Prague at almost 1am and breezed through customs given that we had business class, thank you Samsung! Our driver from Hotel Josef was there and it was so nice having a stressless ride to our Hotel. The Hotel is super swank and right in the middle of Old Town Square which is absolutely GORGEOUS!!!! All the pics are a short walking distance around our hotel.
We caught up on our sleep and had breakfast at noon! They have a great buffet setup and it's all included in the room charge, boom! We headed out for the Jewish Museum in the heart of old town which consists of several locations. We started at the Spanish Synagogue which was amazingly ornate inside and rich with historical displays. Tora shields, spice holders, torah pointers, 300 year old documents etc.
From there we headed to the Pinkas Synagogue which is fairly basic in design but contains the hand painted names of over 80,000 jews who parished in the Nazi Holocaust of WWII. Very moving to see this, but what really took the cake was all the children's artwork on the 2nd story. From 1942 to 1944 the Children of the Tinzen ghetto were able to create some pretty amazing pieces of art considering they didn't have easy access to materials and they were mostly 9-13 years old. Of the approx 8000K kids that lived there, all but approx 242 were eventually transported to Aushawitz where they were mercilessly killed. A single teach was able to save approx 4500 works of art in a suitcase burried in the ghetto.
From there we walked through the Jewish cemetary which is the slightly erie collection of incredibly old and haphazardly arrange tombstones. There are 12,000 headstones but over 100,000 jews burriend there as they often went 10 levels deep! The oldest tombstone was from 1439 and the last burial was in 1787.
After getting lost, which was a fairly frequent occurance walking around we went to the Ceremonial Hall which was all about the scared and ornate rituals of the burial process. We closed it out with a walk through the Klausen Synagogue. A simple building filled with artifact from the Jewish Culture, the top floor walked through a number of cultural trasitions and associated artifact. Birth, Bar/Bat Mitzfaz through Marriage.
We got quite the does of Jewish culture today, Mark and Ellen Stone, our good Jewish friends would be proud! We did make it to Old Town Square for a spell on our way back to the hotel before dinner.
We had a great day and we're just getting started. We miss the kiddos but we know they are having a great time with Gamma and Papa. More to come!
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