Trip to Prague - January 1999

Part Three -- or Interesting Stuff I Saw Over There

A townhouse in the Old Town

Prague is a unique city and everybody who has been there knows it. My intention here is not to list tourist attractions. You can explore some of the links on the bottom of this page to do that. I want to show you a few pictures showing the mood of this ancient medieval city in the middle of winter.
Prague has changed profoundly since the fall of Communism the most probably between 1990 and 1993. Since our lastvisit in 1994 I noticed another wave of improvement. Restaurants and retail operate smoothly just like in any other western country.

... an outright
scary experience

Prague is known for its cultural life. The amount of daily happenings could only be matched in the U.S. by New York or San Francisco. Every night, there are many classical music concerts. There are innumerable museums, art galleries and exhibits to be explored. All this is happening withing walking distance of one another (unlike in Houston, for example, right?). In addition, there are now many cozy little Italian cafes and pizzerias eveywhere in the Old Town and in Mala Strana. After Mozart or Vivaldi one can finish the evening over espresso and cheesecake.
Walking through the Old Town, I came across this: the Museum of Medieval Torture in the Coloredo-Mansfeld Palace adjacent to the Charles Bridge. Interesting and scary.

...an eerie
Kafkaesque experience

Another unusual attraction I found was the "St. Michael Mystery", an eerie and Kafkaesque multimedia show depicting Prague History. The show is in a baroque church called St. Michael's. I had never been inside before; the building was closed for decades and nearly condemned. However, someone with a lot of money had the vision to buy the structure and restore it. It serves now as a multipurpose venue for various exhibits, one of which is the current St. Michael's Mystery. It starts with a walking tour through several rooms, each of which is set up with various Prague themes (inside the Astronomical Clock, the Jewish cemetery, Nazi occupation, the Communist years), followed by a hellish elevator ride, followed by a 6-track Dolby Digital big screen multimedia documentary movie.
Check out the link on the bottom of the page. If you go to Prague in the near future, go see this. It is a bit of Hollywood and Disneyworld (made by Itec Productions from Orlando) but a very powerful experience.

...a Russian experience

I also saw a nicely restored early 1960s Volga (that's a Russian Car). This model was made in the USSR in the late 1950s and early 60s and touted as a crowning achievement of the Soviet automobile industry. However, it look remarkably like this '54 Ford. Click on the link and see how good the Soviets were at reverse engineering... :-)

Pertinent links:
1.- The Ultimate guide to Prague
2.- Prague from A to Z - The Total Guide to Prague
3.- Prague Information Service page (good photography by a friend of mine)
4.- The St. Michael Mystery
5.- ITEC Productions
6.- Volha buf page

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Last updated on April 5, 1999

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