 Remy and Dion farewell their cousins who are in the reflection |  Tomash and Roman |
Dion and Remy went back to see their cousins for a night out to local pubs and disco halls to meet their cousins' friends and just hang out.
Karol and I started our day sending back 4 small boxes of clothes and books. We all brought too many clothes and bought extra things. The shopping in Prague is excellent value and the quality brilliant - cotton, linen, cashmere. Actually everything is reasonable price wise. Karol and I mentioned more than once what a gouge it is in Australia for clothes and food.
Karol and I started our day sending back 4 small boxes of clothes and books. We all brought too many clothes and bought extra things. The shopping in Prague is excellent value and the quality brilliant - cotton, linen, cashmere. Actually everything is reasonable price wise. Karol and I mentioned more than once what a gouge it is in Australia for clothes and food.
This looks like Karol waiting at a train station - wrong - it's the post office. That's the thing with this wonderful city. History, architecture, art, music - it's all ever present and it's normal. It's not revered with distance. It's just part of every day life. It's not from the past like a fossil is, dead now, once alive. That list of cultural things lives on in an everyday way here. Every night we've heard wonderful music in amazing old buildings. But it was cheap, performed by a handful of people who looked like they had just popped in after dinner and were on the way to a late night drink, or to pick up their kids. The audience is maybe 20, maybe 50, maybe 5 people. No big deal it's only for an hour. An hour you spend transformed by the pearls of genius from Bach or Mozart or from some other obscure musician who lived here we've never heard of.
The old part of the city has 3 distinct building styles that I can gather. Not in equal measure in terms of quantity. There are dark spooky gothic buildings with spires and turrets and gargoyles. The stone is black with time, then there are lighter, more classical (in the greek sense) baroque buildings. They are the leaps forward from the medieval, god fearing darker ages to the Renaissance that re discovered the brilliance of the Greeks, their concepts of human proportion and the art and equality of the soul. There are fewer of these. Even fewer are the next style. The early 19 century leap forward with what's called the Art Nouveau style. The new style. The style influenced by the past, but absorbing the new technologies across art, construction, energy. This is where I nod to Alfonso Mucha.
The old part of the city has 3 distinct building styles that I can gather. Not in equal measure in terms of quantity. There are dark spooky gothic buildings with spires and turrets and gargoyles. The stone is black with time, then there are lighter, more classical (in the greek sense) baroque buildings. They are the leaps forward from the medieval, god fearing darker ages to the Renaissance that re discovered the brilliance of the Greeks, their concepts of human proportion and the art and equality of the soul. There are fewer of these. Even fewer are the next style. The early 19 century leap forward with what's called the Art Nouveau style. The new style. The style influenced by the past, but absorbing the new technologies across art, construction, energy. This is where I nod to Alfonso Mucha.
 Alfonso Mucha |  random pediment on Prague building |
The boys had earlier returned from a Bohemian sojourn with their cousins, so we all went out for dinner in the Restaurant on the ground floor of the Municipal House. It proclaims to be the most beautiful Art Nouveau Restaurant in the world. Mucha’s work is also on the walls there. This was our last night together in Prague and our last night together for a week. Dion and Remy were off to Berlin by train in the morning and Karol and I, off to the Normandy region of France by plane. We’ll meet together again for our last week of holidays in Paris. After dinner Karol and I went to a small concert hall at the Municipal House and listened to a chamber orchestra playing Mozart and Handel. This was accompanied with period ballet by a couple and also opera with a soprano and a tenor. Loved it. The small hall was once a cellar but later converted to a dance hall for the raging Czech party goers of the 1920’s. The music may have been from long ago but it seemed anything but ‘resurrected’. It was just another bit of music being played, danced and sung by the natives of an old city very much in the present.
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