ostrava to prague

We caught an early train to Prague, because our time here is short and there's much to see. After checking into our airbnb on the east side of town, we promptly left to see the nearby National Memorial on Vítkov Hill. The statue out front (the third largest bronze equestrian statue in the world, just fyi) looked out over a wide panorama of the city in a misty sunset. But once we stepped inside, everything went sideways.

When B leaned into the ticket window just inside the front entrance and said we were two people, the man answered, "I can see that," and seemed to be waiting for more information. We bought our tickets and asked if we still had time to go onto the roof; the man answered that we could make it if we hurried, but that it would be more complicated because we didn't speak Czech. Then he and another woman nearby repeated schnell to us a few times, which means "quickly" in German.

The man explained that we needed to go up the nearby elevator to the second floor, or, yes, we could take the stairs. Then we had to cross the ceremonial hall — about 30 m — and look for another elevator similar to this one. We would then have to show our tickets to the woman controlling the elevator — because there was no direct elevator all the way up to the roof, did I understand? I said I did understand, and we started up the stairs.

After enjoying the view from the roof, we proceeded back down into the building. The ceremonial hall was enormous and grand but very dark — in fact the whole building was so dark that I have almost no photos of the interior. We found a history exhibit in another hall, complete with baffling English translations of what seemed like a nationalist and propagandized version of the country's history, as far as we could tell by the light of our cell phone flashlights.

The next room was the size of a chapel, rounded on one side and completely covered in marble. It had an unmarked white tomb, some paintings of ideal communist citizens, and a set of stairs in the very center leading down into some kind of crypt. The first thing we saw at the bottom of the stairs? A Cold War-era switchboard and control desk, of course. A dark hallway led around the corner, past a confusing exhibit about the death of a major Czechoslovak communist leader, and into the "Laboratory of Power".

This turned out to be a large, white-tiled room reminiscent of a school shower or something worse. In the center was a glassed-in exhibit containing a wreath, a bust, some ominous medical equipment, and a figure covered by a sheet on a medical table. Nearby, a red marble tomb sat in a small alcove. It was still pretty dark, and by this point we felt sure we'd lost our minds somewhere along the way.

Eventually, B pieced together what was going on from various poorly-translated placards (link for the curious), but the explanation didn't do much to dispel the overall surreality of the place.

On the way home, we recovered our senses by eating simple open-faced sandwiches on good bread from a nearby bakery, plus a couple of donut holes from the straightforwardly-named Donut Shop.