My Travel Adventures

I made plans to meet an old friend at the Hvězda Game Reserve, a popular park near the edge of Prague, which takes the name Hvězda (meaning “star”) after the star-shaped summer palace at its centre. I proposed the venue since I had never been to Hvězda before, despite the fact that the walls of the summer palace are a very familiar sight to anyone who commutes to Prague from the west.

The weather has been too ugly to do anything pleasurable outside. I spent a little less than two weeks studying for the GREs, which was not as disastrous of a plan as I thought it would be, and spent another two weeks finalising the grad school applications I have not yet sent. By Christmas, I received my first letter of admission, which really take the stress off during the holidays. In the meantime, my internships have kept me busy and it looks like they will lead up to another internship I recently obtained.  

This weekend, my sisters and I made an excursion to the nearby town Lidice, which was destroyed during the Second World War as retribution for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The Lidice massacre is noted for its completely arbitrary nature as an example of wartime collective punishment. The entire male populace of the town was executed, and the women and children were sent to concentration and extermination camps – only a few “racially eligible” children were placed with SS families.

Autumn is usually very grey in the Czech Republic and one is lucky when more than one weekend during the entirety of November and December turn out to be sunny. The good weather allotted for this gloomy period fell on Saturday, which is why my sister Naty, our dad, and I made a long trip around the sights just to the west (and northwest) of Prague.   We made our first stop at the castle Oko ř , whose golden walls above frosty fields we saw in the warm glow of the rising sun. The castle was founded in the latter half of the thirteenth century, but it is unclear by whom. It switched hands numerous times and was heavily damaged during the Thirty Years’ War, but it’s final transformation into a ruin was caused by the dissolution of the Jesuit order, who had been the castle’s last owners.   We continued north-westward for a little over half an hour to stop by the unfinished Cathedral of Our Lady in Panenský Týnec. We were the first people there, much to the annoyance, it appeared, of a