Kutna Hora and the Superbowl

So this past Saturday my program forced everyone to meet down the street at the lovely hour of 9am, a time nobody wants to be up on Saturday morning. But we were all meeting to go to an important town in the Czech Republic about an hour outside of Prague called Kutna Hora. Kutna Hora is important and is a major tourist destination for a number of reasons. It was once a seat of power for Bohemia, part of the Czech Republic, and King Wenceslas was elected there. Wenceslas was probably the most famous Czech King and one of the largest squares in Prague is named after him. However, Kutna Hora is most famous as a silver mining town. Once silver was discovered, a number of mines were opened there and silver was mined and made into coins. This brought great wealth to the city, part of the reason it has been so important in Czech history. During the summer you can actually venture down into these mines to see exactly what it was like to work in one of them. But they are shut down during the winter so we didn't go into the silver mines.
Instead, we visited two main destinations: First, we went to the Church of Saint Barbara a massive gothic church that was built in the 14th century and is now under control of an order of jesuit priests. A jesuit college is actualy located right next door to this church.
After we finished walking through this church we made our way to lunch and then finally moved on to the main attraction. The thing we all really wanted to see was the Sedlec Ossuary aka "the bone church". This is a small roman catholic church, with a basement like nothing you have ever seen. The basement contains somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 bones all arranged artistically throughout the basement chapel. Though this may sound a bit disgusting, all of the bones are incredibly well maintained and the artwork is simply unbelievable. This made waking up in the morning worthwhile.

On the top you can see an extremely ornate chandelier that is an amazing work of art and is created from nothing but bones. When you look at it, it is hard to image that someone could have pictured something so intricate made entirely out of bones before it was actually completed; much of this chapel gives this same impression. On the bottom you can see Saadia, Melinda, Natalie, and myself (all of us here in Prague from Georgetown) in front of several towers adorned with skulls. Suprisingly, they aren't too creepy and when you walk around this basement you can't helped but be amazed at it, despite the fact that everything is made of bones. Or I guess you are amazed because its so artistic and everything is made of bone. All in all, seeing this church made the long day worthwhile and it is a must see for anyone in Prague that has time to make a pretty short trip outside of the city (Maude will be going to see it in a few weeks on an NYU trip).
To finish up this post I'm going to talk just a little bit about the superbowl last night. I went to Jama, the same bar that I watched the inauguration at, with about 20 other CIEE students. The game didn't actually start until 12:30am here so I only stayed for about half the game but it was still a good experience. There was a good mix of Steelers fans and not steelers fans. I don't say Cardinals fans because nobody really cared about Arizona, a lot of people just didn't want Pittsburgh to win. It was unfortunate that we had czech class at 9am the next morning so I couldn't watch the entire game but it was fun to be able to watch part of the game, despite being so far away from home; and to be able to enjoy some good beer and some good american burgers and wings. Below is a little video of the opening play of the game and a quick view of all the people that were there watching the game from CIEE.

At about half time I knew I had to go since I had to get up early the next morning. The public transportation in Prague is great, so I walked down the street, got the night tram, and rode home to the tram stop right in front of my flat. It was a good night even though I missed a pretty dramatic ending to the game and suprisingly wasn't too tired the next morning.