Kirsten Captures

Long Study Tour: Prague Memory and Identity

Prague

Return to Prague briefly, meet up with Mom in a swanky hotel, entertain ourselves in the first night of Easter festivities in Old Town Square, reintroduce myself to the city… Mom and I enjoy Easter cheer, climb back up to the palace, and find the Infant Jesus in his elaborate dress. We conclude with a concert in the beautiful Municipal House to the sounds of the Four Seasons, Canton in D, and more.

I am so happy relieved to travel with Mom. We explore our past, eat lots of sausage, strudel, and more sausage, drink hot wine and beer, and walk until we can do nothing else but sleep. My feet are sore, but my heart is soaring…

Vienna

Mom and I hop on a train to Vienna.The birthplace of classical music. An overwhelming and stunning city. Everything is just so big, larger than life. The streets are wide and the palaces, museums, and shopping streets are unavoidable. Everywhere you look you can find a monument to some individual, probably Mozart, Strauss, or Franz Josef.

Mom and I are pure wanderers, walking everywhere from street stores, the incredible National Museum (a building built during the A-H empire as a museum), Schonbrunn palace, Schiele and Rembrandt exhibits, and of course the backstreets to our lovely hotel. Vienna is a culture shock.

Exhausted physically and culturally after Vienna, we are excited to get to Salzburg.

My thoughts on the train: “The Austrian countryside slides by the train window in a bath of warm light and rows of green. It beckons me to get out there, become one with the soil and the trees and the legumes, do something with myself, become a farmer. But I must decline although the offer is very good.

I am merely a traveler in this land, a pilgrim to recover what has been lost by my family. Vienna was a center of music, culture, and prosperity. But it was not the same. Prague bridged the past and the present. Let us see what Salzburg has to offer. We are getting closer and closer to the Alps. To mountains and explosions of rock and soil. Let’s go.”