The journey from Venice to Prague was a rather insane one, as far as travel stories go, though it would later turn out to be quite ordinary compared to what lay in my future .  The most feasible and least expensive way of getting from one to the other was to actually transfer flights in London Stansted, which, I realise, makes no sense from a geographic perspective.  Katherine and I flew out of Venice on the same day, but her flight was in the morning and mine was late at night.  Thinking that the airport would be able to entertain me for a significant amount of time, I arrived at Treviso Airport with something close to ten hours to kill.  As it turned out, Treviso is quite small -- it only had six gates -- and the lone duty free shop was beyond security, which Ryanair does not let customers pass through until two hours before departure.  How I ever managed to waste that much time sitting on an uncomfortable metal bench that day, I am not sure.  After finally arriving at Stansted, I still had to go through customs and, while waiting in line, silently fumed about the UK insisting on maintaining border control even for those passengers arriving from within the European Union.  But that is neither here nor there.  It was past midnight when I met Rachel in the waiting area, around one when I curled up on a bench and fell asleep, and approximately three when I woke up and we made our way to our gate, unspeakably excited -- translation: we were altogether very exhausted -- for our 6:25am flight to Prague.  Needless to say, we both spent the entirety of the flight in a state of pure unconsciousness, though I was awake at least long enough to acknowledge the clear superiority of EasyJet to Ryanair.

Day one in Prague was spent in a haze of sleep deprivation.  We successfully navigated to the our hostel, the Czech Inn -- catch the pun? -- and sorted out matters vis-à-vis Robin.  We were supposed to meet her later that day, but her passport and other important earthly possession had been stole while she was in Barcelona.  Consequently, she remained in Spain for longer than expected, sorting this matter out.  As for Rachel and me, we ventured into Prague's Old Town (Staré Město in the curious, charming, and thoroughly incomprehensible Czech language) to see the much-anticipated Museum of Communism.  The Museum of Communism is a privately owned museum located on Prague's main shopping street, above the city's largest McDonald's, and in the same building as a casino.

Irony, I hear, is a cherished Czech tradition.

The museum recounted the tragic story of the joint Nazi and Soviet (but mostly Soviet, simply due to the USSR's lengthier presence) trampling underfoot of Eastern Europe's only competently democratic state, which was then Czechoslovakia, of course.  The story undoubtedly had a slant -- one exhibit memorably described Leonid Brezhnev as an "apathetic wreck," which, while true, is perhaps harsher phrasing than what a more objective authority might have used -- but such a slant does serve to highlight the decidedly unpalatable aspects of almost half a century of Communist rule.

Our historical appetite sated, we enjoyed an afternoon concert at the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, who performed Debussy's Trois Nocturnes and a symphony by a Czech composer whose name escapes me at the moment.  Alas, we were so tired that we both nodded off at some point during the performance.  A nap at the hostel, followed by a hearty dinner of traditional Czech goulash and an early night, was very much in order.

The next morning, when we felt much less zombie-like, we took the tram to the city's premier attraction, Prague Castle, which is located on in the Lesser Town (Malá Strana) on the opposite site of the Vlatava, the river that splits Prague in two.  Lesser Town is a hillier, quieter place than Old and New Town and has more beautiful red rooftops than can be counted.

Like the Tower of London, Prague Castle contains a number of sites of interest.  The castle itself, an embodiment of the ideal of the dark, dank, stone fortress of medieval imaginings rather than the Rococo flourishes of the monarchical golden age, was the political seat of the Bohemian kingdom, and, here, it is appropriate to editorialise briefly about the inescapable presence of history of Prague.  In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I was conveniently reading while travelling through Eastern Europe, Milan Kundera writes:

In 1618, the Czech estates took courage and vented their ire on the emperor reigning in Vienna by pitching two of his high officials out of a window in the Prague Castle.  Their defiance led to the Thirty Years' War, which in turn led to the almost complete destruction of the Czech nation.  Should the Czechs have shown more caution than courage?  The answer may seem simple; it is not.

Three hundred and twenty years later, after the Munich Conference of 1938, the entire world decided to sacrifice the Czechs' nation to Hitler.  Should the Czechs have tried to stand up to a power eight times their size?  In contrast to 1618, they opted for caution.  Their capitulation led to the Second World War, which in turn led to the forfeit of their nation's freedom for decades or even centuries.  Should they have shown more courage than caution?  What should they have done?

When thinking about European history, it is too easy to forget that, centuries ago, the political weight of the continent was shifted much more to the east.  Prague Castle is an artefact of that time, and the exhibits within it made clear that, once upon a time, Bohemia, even after its incorporation into the Hapsburg domains, was as much a serious player in European diplomatic and political intrigue as, say, France.  There was very much the sense in Prague that the Czechs had their past and their glory stolen from them, an impression deepened after the events of the twentieth century.  Indeed, while strolling around its central districts, I noticed that there are few, if any, outward signs of the German and Soviet occupations.  It was as if those decades were but a parenthesis: Prague (and, by extension, the Czech Republic), the city seems to say, belongs to that nebulously defined place called Europe, as it always has.

But, anyway.  Prague Castle:

That last picture, by the way, is a picture of the room in which the Defenestration of Prague occurred.  Not sure if that is the exact window, though!

Also in the courtyard of Prague Castle was St. Vitus Cathedral, a glorious Gothic creation that was, as far as churches go, love at first sight.

The view from Prague Castle was, to be expected, also beautiful.

It was quite late in the afternoon when we made our way down from the castle and over to the Vlatava, where we crossed the Charles Bridge into Old Town.  Named after King Charles IV, who presided over the golden age of Bohemia, the bridge is a rather impressive structure lined with statues on either side and features imposing gates on both ends.

Prague Castle and Lesser Town, as seen from the Charles Bridge:

Old Town, while being rather touristy throughout, is a beautiful district, perfect for strolling around, window shopping, and people watching.

Meanwhile, Rachel and I each enjoyed a trdelník, a traditional Czech pastry covered in sugar and walnuts.  Most delicious.

We also visited Wenceslas Square, famous for being the site of the Prague Spring protests in 1968.  These days, the only reminder of them is a small memorial to the two Czech students who committed suicide via self-immolation to protest the Soviet invasion of their country.

Our third day in Prague was the day of awesome museums.  In the morning, we went to the Mucha Museum, which Katherine had mentioned when she recounted her travels in Prague.  Although I did not know much about Alphonse Mucha, the iconic Art Nouveau artist, going into the museum, I left it with an appreciation of not only his career as an illustrator and graphic artist in Paris, where he attained great fame, but also of his role in the development and promotion of Czech nationalism.  It turns out Mucha was a more significant artist than I had thought him to be, which is to say that the museum certainly accomplished its aim.

In the afternoon, we visited what ended up being perhaps the best museum I have ever seen: the Lobkowicz Collections.

Rachel and I had passed it the day before while we were leaving Prague Castle, and, after reading glowing reviews of it on TripAdvisor.com, we decided to hand over the Czech crowns needed for admission.  The House of Lobkowicz is one of the oldest noble families from the former Bohemian kingdom -- although, of course, Czechoslovakia abolished noble titles upon its establishment -- and its vast properties and accumulated possessions were confiscated twice, first by the Nazis and then by the Communists, forcing the family into exile.  After 1989, they were able to return to their ancestral homeland and reclaim their belongings, a selection of which is now on display to the public in their former palace in Prague.

The Lobkowicz Collections proved to be so much more than, well, a pile of stuff that happens to belong to a rich and prominent family.  Rather, they tell the story of the history of Europe through the story of the Lobkowicz family with an audioguide narrated by living members of the family and the objects on display.  For instance: the two Catholic governors who were defenestrated in 1618 apparently sought shelter and protection in the Lobkowicz Palace after surviving their fall.  Family storytelling has it that Polyxena von Perstejn, mistress of the house, hid them under her skirts from their pursuers.  Various Lobkowicz princes served as advisors to Hapsburg emperors through the ages, but the 7th Prince Lobkowicz was one of Ludwig van Beethoven's most notable benefactors.  Beethoven, as all music history devotees know, intended to dedicate his third symphony ("Eroica") to Napoleon until Le Petit Corporal declared himself emperor.  What is less know is that this revolutionary opus was instead dedicated to none other than, yes, the 7th Prince Lobkowicz!  As a result of this fruitful relationship between composer and patron, the House of Lobkowicz owns original performance (!) and first editions of Beethoven's third, fourth, and fifth (!) symphonies, in addition to Mozart's arrangement of Handel's Messiah written in his own (!) hand.  Surely the parenthetical exclamation points indicate the giddiness on my part that these musical relics induced.  Rachel can surely attest to the fact that we stood utterly slack-jawed before these manuscripts for something approaching an age.

Having rambled enough, I shall simply conclude by saying -- never mind Prague, I do believe the Lobkowicz Collections were one of the highlights of my entire year in Europe.

We remained in Lesser Town for the remainder of the afternoon.  We took a turn around the Church of St. Nicholas, which was a dose of Baroque splendour to balance out St. Vitus Cathedral from the day before.

My favourite part of St. Nicholas were the doodlings, dating back to the nineteenth century, etched into the railing of the upstairs gallery.

Finally, we paid a visit to the Lennon Wall -- not the "Lenin Wall," which is what I first thought it was.  The wall used to be a living canvas for political dissidence.  These days, it seems more an excuse for acceptable public defacement of Prague, but it remains an impressive sight with its clash of incongruous neon colours.

At this point, the weather became unacceptably atrocious -- this would become a reoccurring them during this Eastern European extravaganza -- so we called it a day and returned to the Czech Inn to enjoy one last night in Prague.

Before I begin, I would just like to take a second to thank everyone for their condolences regarding my previous post.  Whether it was via SMS, Facebook, Gchat, Skype, e-mail, or hugs, I really do appreciate the thoughts & gestures -- much love and gratitude from me to all of you.

In a twist of somewhat cruel irony, my grandfather's passing occurred on one of the most beautiful weekends that I have experienced in some time (but perhaps it is not irony: we remember and we continue, for life does not pause for grief).  As was reported in the Guardian yesterday, temperatures across England were high enough to merit being called a "heatwave," which means that, for this American raised in the hot and muggy summers of the East coast and the even more stifling climes of China, Oxford was a most pleasant place to be.  Even though I probably should have been slaving away over coursework, the omnipresent sunshine -- yes, Virginia, there is sun in England after all! -- demanded that I enjoy this weekend, and I ended up doing so in an almost impeccably Oxonian manner.

1. The lawn: Pembroke College, like all other colleges, is in possession of pristine lawn.  Stepping on the lawn is strictly prohibited during Michaelmas and Hilary Terms, but, during Trinity Term, this restriction is relaxed: students make valiant attempts to study while stretched out along the grass, and the more honest among them acknowledge the inverse relationship between good weather and academic diligence and simply give up on the latter.  After wrapping up last week's essays and tutorials, I took some strawberries and a bottle of San Pellegrino down to Chapel Quad and indulged in some leisure reading (which, for me, appears to be a work of serious music history scholarship) while listening to Mozart's "Haydn" string quartets. 

The next day, I was supposed to begin reading incendiary Marxist pamphetls by Engels and Lenin when a confluence of events somehow led me to playing my first ever game of croquet.  While I was soundly defeated, this warm-weather diversion is such an iconic pastime at Oxford and, ultimately, sentimentality insisted that I could not pass up the opportunity.

2. The ball: While there are balls during Michaelmas and Hilary, but they are overwhelmingly held during Trinity, when they can take advantage of warmer evenings.  Every college, I believe, has a ball of its own, which is held once every given period of time (Pembroke has a ball every other year, for instance).  College balls tend to be on the pricier side of things -- the recent Keble College ball demanded a full £75 for admittance -- but the Oxford Union hosts a comparative steal of a ball every term for a mere £45 for members, £55 for non-members.  Thus, a group of friends and I put on our black-tie finery and went to a ball, la!  The affair was not quite as posh as it sounds.  University students are still university students, and they enjoy copious amounts of alcohol in cheap plastic cups, senseless dancing to throbbing techno beats, and taking too many ridiculous pictures to count.  That said, the mere fact that it is an Oxford ball elevates the experience beyond a typical party, and I certainly enjoyed myself immensely.

3. The punt: The punt is a curious little boat unique to stretches of the River Thames in England.  Punting is a quintessentially Oxonian experience: tourists love taking part, though I daresay those of us at the university have a better deal of it.  (One can also punt in Cambridge, but there is a significant difference in how the punting is done.)  Pembroke owns two punts, and, for a mere £10, any member of the college can reserve a punt for two-hour blocks as many times as he or she would like.  Few things in the world can compare to drifting down a river and past beautiful stretches of countryside, sunlight filtering through the leaves, and pausing for a Pimm's cup (a quintessentially English drink) though punting itself is a decidedly less serene experience.  The punt is propelled and steered with a rather unwieldy and heavy pole -- or so it seemed to me -- and, without proper technique, one ends up going around in circles or constantly bumping into the river bank.  I got to try my hand at it for a little while, and it is rather more difficult than it looks.

In sum, Oxford in the springtime is divine indeed.  And, because good weather is often associated with greater magnanimity, let me offer you an impeccable musical accompaniment to strolling around in the sun:

♪ Camille -- La Demeure D'Un Ciel

My grandfather, 胡军, passed away earlier today.  My mother had told me just under a week ago that he had been hospitalised for kidney failure, and, while hospitalisations have been a feature of his medical past -- unavoidable once you pass the age of eighty, I suppose -- this one was serious enough to merit my father going to the Chinese embassy in New York City at an absurdly early hour one morning to apply for a visa on a very short notice and flying straight to Shanghai after a conference in Manchester.  When I last spoke to my father two days ago while he was still in England, my grandfather had already lost consciousness.  I guess there is some comfort to be found in the fact that my father was at least able to be there at the very end after spending the majority of his adult life in a foreign land.

There is a part of me that recognises he has lived a very long time compared to the standards of his countrymen, raised three sons to adulthood, and triumphed over the shifts and vagaries of history; when he was born, the People's Republic of China was but the distant dream of student idealists.  I recall his constant, quiet presence in our Toronto household.  I was only four, five at the time, and he, with my grandmother, would teach me how to write characters, recite classical Chinese poetry (床前明月光，疑是地上霜...), take me for walks around the neighbourhood.  I recall the exhortations to 别客气，你可多吃点啊 when I would sit down for meals in his home and the gentle fall in his voice when he addressed me as 乖乖, that unchanging epithet for a little girl even as she outgrew it.  About the man, I know so little, and what I do know is mostly sad: he grew up in poverty, he worked at a train station, he had married another women before meeting my grandmother, he was beaten during the Cultural Revolution, his older sister committed suicide at around the same time.  Despite all of this, I know that his lot in life has immeasurably improved since, if only speaking from a strictly standard-of-living viewpoint, and that he has been well loved by his wife, by his children, and by his grandchildren far and near.

I was never close to my grandfather in the sense that he was a particular confidant of mine -- that we only saw each other less than ten times in the twenty years during which our lives overlapped most likely contributed to that -- but I wonder if my strong affinity to my heritage, which never quite waned even during my adolescent fits, is entirely due to his and my grandmother's role in my upbringing.  I last saw him in the summer of 2008, and, for some months now, I've wished dearly to return to China this summer.  I have missed him by only a few months.  But I think back to two years ago and remember how, for the first time in my life, I could speak to him in Chinese with the fluency that is my birthright, his gift to me before I was old or conscious enough to understand the love & care that accompanied it, so I hope that it is not too much for me to pray that, in the end, he was able to see in me the granddaughter he had raised me to be.

I encountered a number of adjectives used to described Venice before I actually got there -- romantic, dramatic, melancholy, and decaying come to mind -- and I suppose it lies somewhere at their intersection.  As soon as Katherine and I stepped out of the train station, we were instantly greeted with this sight:

The water, the warmth!  It seemed to me a floating relic of an earlier time, when it La Serenissima was one of the great crossroads of the world and a commercial power in its own right.  Nowadays, because cars and buses cannot navigate Venice's winding alleys and waterways, it is a quiet place -- at least, when one steps away from the tourist sights -- littered with sun-drenched public squares and private courtyards.  The house in which Katherine and I stayed, though nominally part of a hostel, overlooked one of those courtyards --

-- and was by an old woman with little grasp of English, and our (private!) room was quaintly furnished.  It was all very Italian, remarked Katherine; in other words, could our accommodation have been any better?  (To be fair, the shower was rather weak, but I suppose one cannot have everything.)

Venice is a city that lends itself well to wandering, as it is situated upon a collection of small islands linked together by an apparently infinite number of canals and bridges, each one as picturesque as the next.  An unavoidable consequence of this is that getting lost is a frequent occurrence, though there are signs that guide hopeless visitors to the major landmarks and Katherine and I acquitted ourselves quite well as navigators, I think.

Thus, on the first day, we wandered.

We passed by the Rialto Bridge, with its stalls upon stalls of Venetian wares -- the most well known of these are carnival masks and class, of course -- and lovely view of the Grand Canal.

Eventually, we made our way to the famous St. Mark's Square.

St. Mark's Basilica is right on the square, as is St. Mark's campanile (bell tower).  Curiously enough, the basilica is very Byzantine-influenced, something I was not expecting from this part of the world.  I imagine that would probably be a result of the cultural interchange that occurred in this area some centuries ago, but I am very, very from even being the least bit versed in this area of knowledge.  Katherine and I would actually visit the basilica a day later, as I believe it had closed by the time we arrived there.  I have no pictures of the interior to share (though rest assured that it likely had more gold inside than even St. Peter's), photography being strictly prohibited and all that, but the mosaics on the façade are well worth a lengthy staring session!

The Doge's Palace is directly adjacent to the basilica.  Katherine and I were feeling a bit cheap and elected to not go inside, but we did enjoy marvelling at it from the outside, as well as the beautiful pink-tinted lamps on the square.

En route to St. Mark's Square, Katherine put her fantastic Italian skills to work and picked up some fresh strawberries from a little food market.  We ate these strawberries while sitting at the edge of the square and watched gondolas drifting by.

As the sun began to set, we made our way back to the hostel and enjoyed a pleasant dinner at a local restaurant.  On the way, though, the light was absolutely fantastic for photography, so I hope that you can forgive a few more gratuitous pictures.

Day two began with something more modern in nature, the Collectzione Peggy Guggenheim.  As I learned, Peggy Guggenheim was an avid collector of modern art, which she kept in her supremely enviable house in Venice.  She is now deceased but her art remains, and the house has been refashioned into a delightful gallery.

Could you imagine having a view like this from your home?

Having had our fill of futurism and surrealism, we boarded a ferry -- Venice's preferred, if expensive form of transportation at €6.50 for a one-hour pass -- to the nearby island of Murano.  Along the way, we sailed down a significant stretch of the Grand Canal and took many a picture!

Murano is the original site of Venetian glass production, though, like the rest of Venice, it is a wonderful place just for general purposes of strolling and admiring.

We passed on the Glass Museum to visit a Church, the Basilica di Santa Maria e San Donato, which had a beautiful mosaic floor and Byzantine dome over the altar.  Again, no photography was permitted inside, so here are some pictures of the outside.

Afterwards, we made our way back to St. Mark's Square via ferry, managing to free ride most of the way until we heard that tickets were being checked (we simply alighted at the next stop, which was some random little island whose name escapes me, and sunbathed on a barge until the next ferry came along, where we bought new tickets upon boarding).  We returned so that we could see the Bridge of Sighs (fun fact from Wikipedia: Oxford also has a Bridge of Sighs that connects the two halves of Hertford College -- I can boast of having walked through it! -- but it bears a much closer resemblance to the Rialto Bridge), but it turned out there was not much to see.  Scaffolding is an unavoidable part of touring Europe, which, after all, is very old in some places, but I dare say the Venetians took it to an entirely new level by covering almost the entire bridge with bright blue advertisements for Bvlgari and Julianne Moore's face. 

I mean, really.

The indelible memory that I will keep of Venice, though, is as follows: after concluding all tourist-y activities for the day, Katherine and I wandered back to the edge of the square and, our feet dangling over the sea & algae, we laid down on the warm stones and basked in an almost unbearable perfect sunshine.  Perhaps this ought to go without saying, but, sometimes, a holiday is simply that: a much desired parenthesis of repose.