Angels of Lviv

The beautiful and amazing cemetery in Lviv was full of beautiful angels.

Not enough time...

....spent in bakeries and sweet shops.  These cakes were delicious though.,  They were kind of like a rhubarb cake filled with plums and berries. 

They had a charming wreath made from their egg shells.  The thing Nathan ordered was a cinnamon and sugar coated dough coiled around a hot rod about 3 inches in diameter to bake it just before you bought it.  My snitch was yummy and I regret not getting a picture of the making, but it was after dark. 

Art Nouveau

Prague was the home of art Nouveau artist Albert Muche.  The hotel room was decorated with a print.  A Municipal building is home to some of his art 

and so is the cathedral at the palace.  The Muche window at the Prague Palace Cathedral depicts events important to the introduction of Christianity to the Slavs.  It shows St. Cyril and St. Theodocius (sp?) and their stories flanking the story of St. Ludmilla and her posterity accepting Christianity.

Art Nouveau influences showed up in the iron work in various places, this one in Lviv.

In Cracow there was a most beautiful church decorated in an Art Nouveau style with interiors too dark for pictures.  The walls flowered and flowed with pansy's and daffodils and lilies.  It was incredible.  The window below is from that church - St. Francis, I think it was.  The window depicts creation and is much better than the picture I took of it.  The model for the creator was a beggar from the streets of Cracow.  That touched me - to think that even the most beggarly of us have been created in the image of a divine being and in this case the creation was turned upside down to create an image of the divine using the image of man.

On our way into town from the train station on a Sunday morning we were stopped by a beggarly man.  He knew who we were - most likely because David and Nathan were wearing their white shirts.  He didn't know us but he knew something about us because of how we are dressed.  What do we know about one another because we are in the image of God?

Marrionettes

Prague may be known for marionettes.  It rained while we were there, so we didn't see any street performers with puppets. So all we saw were in stores and they were starting to look all alike.  But I liked these guys with their stiff springs instead of strings.  Children could enjoy not having tangled strings.

One shop had puppets that resembled characters from literature and public figures.  I especially liked this combination.  Imagine what a story of Jack Sparrow, Don Quixote and Vladimir Putin might be like.

We did manage to get to a Black Light Theatre show in Prague.  I nodded off through about half of it, but enjoyed what I was capable of staying awake for.  The MC tellings us to keep our cameras off and turn off phones did a great job of imitating Americans and Germans who probably made up most of the audience. Black Light is dance and mime with costumes that light up under black light.  One of the dance scenes I liked had a woman dancing through the holes of this big green flexible swiss cheese like costume of another dancer.

Eastern Europe Under Construction

Here a little sidewalk repair is in order.  Prague was in good repair, but the renovation work is always happening.  It was nice to see this kind of repair that can be done on a small scale because the walks are made with small cobbles.  The streets are paved with a larger stone.

One stop we would have enjoyed was closed for renovation with this barrier showing what we would have seen.




 Other places have nets over the entire facade of the building to prevent debris from falling into the street.  This net has lost some of it's effectiveness. 

 He must have had a great smile.  People kissing were also removed from this net.  Dormitory style decor I suppose.

 
Construction hides inside as interior rooms are dug under to build cellar and vault restaurants and clubs.
This one is inside the B&B we stayed at.  They are expanding by going down.

 In Lviv the tram tracks were all torn up for part of the route.  A significant inconvenience for it's citizens, but they are preparing to host the European Cup in 2012.  Lviv has not had the influx of tourism that Prague and Cracow have had and is in need of repair and restoration in many places.  The place we stayed was supposed to be 14th century building that had once been part of the church complex and the lowest picture below shows the restoration that was going on just down the alley way. 

 

Red Tile Roofs

A large part of Prague's charm is it's red tiled roofs.

There were other ways of getting around than our feet, which were hurting.  We took the tram up the hill to the Strahovsky Monastery and walked down to the castle and into the old town where our hotel was. 

 

Other people tried these novel ways of seeing Prague.

The Monastery Library was one of my favorite spots of the trip.  Again, no interior pictures allowed and I was sorely tempted to cheat on that one.  They just had hall monitors everywhere so there wasn't much opportunity.  The amazing interior room was in the process of renovation (another theme of the trip), but they let you step into the construction doorway so you could see the extraordinary painted ceiling and the stunning rich redbrown woodwork of the walls and moldings.  The inside of the bookcases was painted a sky blue color that coordinated with the ceiling.  There was a wide hallway filled with display items collected by the monks over time. that connected another beautiful room full of books.  The second room also was not accessible except with your eyes.  NER thought a study station created to allow many books to be out and accessible via rotating shelves was just what he needed.  It did look pretty useful.

The hallway was more amazing than one would think at first glance.  One of the hall monitors provided a guide to the hallway written in English for us to read.  Elephant trunks, a Dodo bird, many kinds of apples were among the goodies preserved by the monks. One wall was books, beautiful books, all bound in white or variations of white.  Perhaps shaded by the amount of use they got.  They were medical and chemistry and law books of their day.  The "best" books were at the end.  They had a collection of books about trees.  Each book was a box made to look like a book and made out of the wood of the tree (with the bark still on it) and containing sample leafs and nuts or fruits of the tree.  I suppose thirty or more trees were represented. For those of us that love trees and books.... These were delightful!

Time and Times Past in Prague

We just returned from an amazing two weeks in Eastern Europe with NER helping us get around.  We may have been able to do part of this without his help, but I don't think we could have survived or experienced Ukraine the way we did without his language skills and know how.    We visited Prague, Cracow, Lviv and Kyiv with a few hours in Amsterdam on the way home. 
It will take several posts to share the fun.  I will try to not share the fatigue.  There was plenty of that as we adjusted to the time difference and traveled by overnight trains with middle of the night border crossings.  These destination cities have also become destinations for parties of young people well into the night.  One place we stayed provided ear plugs, a thoughtful and useful gesture.

Prague was beautiful, amazing and overflowing with tired tourists.  Some of the pictures do not tell that story as we got up early to avoid crowds.  We were well tired by our last day there.  The first day and first thing was a trip to see the clock.    

  
I love that the feast days and the zodiac co-exist on this face of the clock.
We got there just as the apostles were coming out of the window for their hourly tour.  We went back another early morning to understand the mechanisms and information provided by this beautiful timepiece.

No family vacation in our family is really complete without a stop in a cemetery.  In Prague the cemetery was the Jewish Cemetery that is part of the Jewish synagogue tour.  This cemetery was used for centuries.

   You don't get to take pictures in the synagogues but it is rather interesting and the first one we went into had written on the walls the names of people who were killed in the holocaust of WWII.  People still leave tokens on the headstones, perhaps for family but perhaps to remember and honor the victims.  This unknown woman was a French speaker.

 

This building was the building of the burial society and housed artifacts related to burial - not as gruesome as it might seem.  As you can see the crowds are increasing.