First Bad Day

Tom and I packed up our stuff in the apartment in Prague on a fairly timely basis (for me that is). I was ready and packed at 10am. Tom had already made one luggage trip to the illegally parked car down below. He came up to get me and the last load. He grabbed the suitcase, I snatched up the rest, and we walked out the door with my slamming it behind us. Tom said, “Did you get the key?” “No, I thought you had it…. No problem, they will have one at reception.” To make a long story short, they had to call a locksmith at our expense. We were delayed an hour.

We then set off to Kutna Hora, an old silver mining town, with a beautiful cathedral, the Cathedral of St. Barbara, the patron saint of the miners.

It was one of those jaw dropping cathedrals because of its height. You walk in and the vaults are meters above you.

We were glad that we made the detour to Kutna Hora even though we got very lost trying to get into town. Our friend Gyoso, the Hungarian businessman with whom Tom went to Romania, loaned us his GPS. This whole car trip would have been a disaster without it. Getting into old historic towns with small one-way streets and finding a small pension in the old city center is a nightmare. Our GPS, who is now our travelling companion and nicknamed ZsaZsa (thanks to our friend Kathryn) cannot navigate us through these areas very well. So imagine, a driver, a semi-navigator with a map, Zsazsa, and road construction with signs in a foreign language. Not pretty.

We got badly turned around and lost twice trying to get to places around Kutna Hora. It happened again getting out of town—you would think a simple task, but no. Our destination was a chapel that was supposed to be five minutes away, but for us an hour. I jumped out of the car at one point because I was convinced we were driving the wrong way. I jumped out because I spotted this lonely Czech man ambling leisurely down the sidewalk. This is always a mistake because they know no English and I know no Czech, yet we talk to one another as if the other understood. He gestured vehemently and spoke louder to make sure I understood. The one thing we did find out from him was that we were going the wrong way. It was one of those experiences where we circled our destination several times.

Again well worth the aggravation. Tom and I both said that we had never seen anything like it—the Sedlec Ossuary. Part of the problem was that all of the signs said Kostnice, which means ossuary in Czech. This small Bohemian chapel was overrun during the plague with bodies, and the cemetery couldn’t keep up. People began to just throw bodies on the other grave sites until eventually bones began to pile up. In 1870 the aristocratic Schwarzenberg family bought the chapel and asked a local woodcarver named Rint to design something with the bones. He had the bones of no fewer than 40,000 people. The result is astonishing: bone crests, bone chandeliers, a Schwartzberg coat of arms, crosses and four huge bone pyramids.

Oh, I forgot to mention our stop for a quick bite for lunch that turned into a hot stay on a sun-backed terrace while the chef ran out for groceries. We are lucky that we haven’t encountered many aggravations, and we have made a concerted effort not to be ugly Americans (as Tom referenced in his rant). Even given a run of bad luck, we still saw some incredible things.