Friday, February 15, 2013

Kunta Hora

This past Saturday, our program took us on a mandatory field trip to Kunta Hora. It's an hour and a half  outside of Prague and used to be an old silver mining town. Our first tour on the agenda was about the silver mining. I thought it was going to revolve around the silver miners and mines themselves, but it ended up just being a tour of the main building where the leaders (I can't remember their title) lived and some coins were made. It was a little on the slow side, but it was fun seeing a reenactment of a silver coin being made. The guy preforming/making the old coins loved his job--he got beyond excited when people took pictures of him and started smiling after people clapped. We also got to keep a really small coin as a souvenir. 

After the tour we went to a looking point where we could see the St. Barbara Cathedral. It was the next place we were touring, but since the group was starting to get grumpy and hungry when we found out lunch wasn't til 1:30 we were given a little break to go grab something or walk around. I ended up getting my first hot chocolate of the semester. I heard that the hot chocolate was much thicker here and more like melted chocolate so I was really excited. Sadly, after the first sip I burned my mouth and throat and became very disillusioned with the drink. At the very least it was warm to carry around on a cold day.



After our break, we headed over to the cathedral. Technically, it was only a church because they never got a bishop to come to Kunta Hora, but it was built to rival the cathedrals in Prague. There was a little look out tower/building where you could go to to take some picture of the church and the surrounding town.




The best part of the cathedral were all the different scenes in the windows. These actually weren't stained glass; an artist painted each window with oil paints.

After a slightly lengthy tour of the cathedral, we finally headed over to lunch. The program had provided us lunch at a local restaurant and we were served a pre selected vegetable soup, chicken and potatoes, and dessert. The restaurant and food was really warm and the food was pretty good. Very simple and very Czech.



After lunch, the group started to get excited because we were heading to our last stop and the stop that everyone had been looking forward to the whole day. We went to Sedlec Ossusary which is a church that is decorated with tens of thousands of human bones. Apparently it had an extremely large cemetery and when industrial construction needed to happen, and artist decided that it would be better to honor the dead then to build over them. The church was really cold and eerie, and while the skulls didn't actually bother me that much, seeing the crest made from knee caps and spines freaked me out. It was definitely the best and most interesting part of the trip. My friends and I wanted to take a picture in the church, but it felt a little odd smiling in front of human remains.


We slept on the bus all the way back, and I spent the rest of the night making dinner and heading to the club Mecca with my roommate and a few friends!

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