EASTER!!!!!!

Last year, during my first spring away from home, Easter kind of snuck up on me. Honestly, I had no reason to notice that it was coming. Here in Prague, though, there was no way I could miss it. A couple weeks ago, Easter markets started popping up around town. Over the past week, they have continued appearing and growing. Painted eggs, brightly colored streamers, and Easter chocolate seem to be everywhere, along with these decorated sticks called “pomlaska.” Boys/men are meant to use these sticks to wake girls/women up on the Monday after Easter by lightly hitting them. The “beating” is supposed to encourage youth in the women. In return, the girls/women are supposed to give the boys chocolate or painted eggs. My Czech teacher insists that it is a fun, light-hearted tradition, but I feel that Easter egg hunts are more egalitarian. As David and I have said for the past few weeks, they get REALLY in to Easter here.

We went to visit some of the famed Easter markets, which take place predominately in Prague’s main squares. Old Town Square and Wenceslas Square are crowded and touristy under normal conditions. With the markets, they basically morphed into surging throngs of people punctuated with colorfully decorated trees and sections of perfectly groomed tulips. It was odd to notice how radically different these spaces felt, especially as compared to the first times I visited them a few months ago. At the market at Old Town Square, David and I spent a good 30 minutes* picking out a set of five painted eggs that are beautiful. We had fun decorating his apartment with them that evening.

Our painted Easter eggs

The next morning, David and I attended an Easter service at St. Vitus Cathedral. We had looked into a few different services, some in Czech, some in Latin, some in English. We ended up choosing the 8:30 service at St. Vitus because we felt it would be such a quintessential experience of Prague. It definitely was, but it also turned out much differently than we had expected. I was thinking the service would be extremely crowded. I was even worried that we might not be able to find seats. This was definitely not the case. We sat on the front row, in a service of less than 50 people. I assumed that the service was emptier than I expected because of the generally atheistic nature of Czech society. After asking my Czech teacher, she agreed and added that many citizens of Prague also spend spring weekends at weekend cottages in the country, and thus would not have been in Prague for Easter.

Outside of St. Vitus on Easter Sunday

View from our seats at St. Vitus

Stained glass at the back of St. Vitus

People filing in for the 10:00 Easter service

David is on Spring Break this week, and I had yesterday off for Easter (they get REALLY in to Easter here), so we went hiking at Divoka Sarka, that enormous park that I found my first week here. It was as big and beautiful as I’d remembered, and we loved wondering around, soaking up the tranquility outside of the bustling city. Afterwards, we went to our favorite Indian food restaurant for a late lunch and headed back to his apartment to do homework. I’m in classes most of today but tomorrow, we’ll both be off again and we’re going to go on a day trip. We’ll be taking a train for about an hour and a half to a town called Cesky Krumlov. People have been telling us to go there since we arrived. All I know is that it is a UNESCO World Heritage site and there is a castle, so I’m sold. I’ll post pictures later

We also tried a Mexican food restaurant to ease our homesickness. The restaurant was great. The decorations were like many places in Austin, and the food was delicious. I'm not sure it made us less homesick, but we had fun nonetheless.

Super tasty mango margarita

My chicken enchiladas with verde sauce, rice, and beans. Basically it was like Maudie's Skinny Sheryl's. Their portions of rice and beans are adorably small compared to Maudie's though.

David's beef tacos, which were extremely tasty.

 Much love from Prague!

* “A good 30 minutes” is now an inside joke for David and I. While in Salzburg, we went to the Panorama Museum just before it closed. The museum exhibit contains just a painted panorama of the city, and a few scenes from around the world. We had about 25 minutes before the museum was to close, but the man at the ticket counter heavily encouraged us to come back another day because we would need “a good 30 minutes” to see the paintings. We went back the next day and spent about 20 minutes there.