Prague & Budapest Vacation: 15-23 March 2008

During Spring Break we went to Prague (Czech Republic) and Budapest (Hungary). We left Saturday afternoon, but due to the thunderstorms in the Southeast, we missed our 7 p.m. connection to London and had to spend that night and Sunday in Raleigh. We finally made it to Prague on Monday afternoon.

Prague is a beautiful city, called the city of a thousand spires. Unlike most cities in Europe, it was not bombed during the world wars. It maintains the architecture from the last 1000 years. We stayed in “new town” (built in the 1600’s). Most of the streets are narrow and made of cobblestones. The weather stayed around 0° C with occasional snow flurries, but we still averaged 7 miles a day walking.

Most of the sites were within walking distance (30 minutes). Tuesday, we toured several churches. The Church of St. Nicholas (Baroque) has beautiful sculptures. St. Vitus' Cathedral (Gothic) has scores of beautiful stained glass windows. It also contains the grave of 'Good King' Wenceslas. St. George's basilica (Romanesque-built in the 900s) has frescos. (The churches were happy to let us take pictures, not so for the museums.) After we toured the Royal Palace, we wandered lost for a while before we found the alley which led to the entrance of the National Gallery housed in Sternberg Palace.

The next day we saw the Astronomical clock in Old Town, the Museum of Decorative Arts, the Old Jewish Cemetery, Wenceslas Square, the National Museum, and a different St. Nicholas Church.

Budapest has a more modern downtown with 6 lane streets and wide sidewalks. It was a much larger city and the sites we wanted to see were farther apart. We mainly used the subway and taxis. We also met fewer people that spoke English in Budapest than Prague. Our hotel, Novotel Centrum, was first class. It provided a hot breakfast buffet with all kinds of meats, fruits and breads in addition to typical breakfast fare; we dined well.

We spent Thursday afternoon admiring the many paintings and sculptures at the Museum of Fine Arts located in Heroes' Square. Then we took a taxi to the new Palace of Arts on the Danube River to hear the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. It was superb.

Friday, we toured The Hungarian National Museum. It details the history of Hungary with art and artifacts in individual halls by century beginning a few 1000 years before the birth of Christ. We found it interesting to see the shift of power in Hungary and how the boundaries changed every several decades. Afterward, we saw the Holocaust Memorial at the Great Synagogue. The huge sculpture of a weeping willow is a memorial to the 600,000 Hungarian Jews killed by the Nazis in World War II. Each leaf on the tree is inscribed with the name of a person or family who died.

That evening saw Wagner’s Parsifal at the State Opera House. The opera house was beautiful: marble columns, gilded vaulted ceilings, murals, and chandeliers. We were in one of the private balconies on the seventh level. It would have been great, but we were in the second row. When the people in front of us leaned forward, we couldn’t see anything because of their heads and the drapes of the balcony. The first act lasted slightly longer than two hours. We decided that not 'seeing' a 6+ hour opera would weigh on our patience. So we left after 2 hours.