Day 18: So If I Drop A Stone Here, is the Sound it Makes Prague Rock?

I'm writing this post earlier than usual, because the Americans play tonight, and I'll be treating that the same way I treat Mizzou games. As such, here's what I did today.

As I was walking to my hostel, I saw a sign that said "museum" as I walked past. Once I drew level with the museum, I was shocked to see that the museum was a museum of sex machines. I was to exhausted to bother with it last night, but this morning I went over to have a look. It was an... interesting place. Some people are into weird shit, and/or spend way too much time designing elaborate conjugal aids. Also, the things people came up with to stop men from bashing the bishop are... spiky.

After that bit of loveliness, it was time to take a walking tour of Prague. I've seen these at each hostel I've stayed at, and they've been good ways to learn about where you're visiting and see some of the more famous buildings. Prague has no shortage of history and culture, and this was a lovely way to figure out where the key sites to revisit were.

The tour ended near Old Town Square, so I decided to go see the stuff in the Jewish Quarter. I started at the Pinkas Synagogue, which is now a memorial to the Jewish holocaust victims. Eighty thousand names are written in letters maybe 1-2cm high, and they line almost every empty space on the wall. The second level contains art made by children in the Therezin concentration camp. This building is incredibly hard to tour, because there's nothing else in it but the names, and yet you know going in that this is only 1.33% of all the murdered Jews in the Holocaust, and less than 1% of the total victims. Next, I went to the Spanish Synagogue, which is a much happier place. The whole building is done in Moorish architecture, and the inside is a fantastic pastiche of Jewish symbols and the geometric repetitive patterns so typical of that part of the world. They also have a collection of silver from temples that includes various Torah adornments, kiddush cups, and Burial Society accessories. These were allowed to survive the war because Hitler intended to use Prague's Jewish quarter as a museum to show how the Jews lived. Instead, he's the one in museums. I didn't feel like doing much after that, and it draws near to the time to start pregaming, so I'll post more tomorrow.