Day 10, Prague

We are really starting to get the hang of this traveling in European cities thing. We woke up this morning, had our breakfast at the hotel. At 11am we were picked up by the shuttle that would take us to our boat tour. We enjoyed this beautiful weather while drinking a glass of wine and some beer (Gramma had the beer) and floating down the Vltava River. We found this boat tour much more enjoyable than the one we did in Vienna. But Prague is just beautiful from all kinds of angles. I took lots of pictures of buildings I hardly knew a thing about. It really is impossible not to say, "Wow, look at that building" when you're here.
Tonight's show was Dvorak's opera, "Rusalka," at the National Theatre. We had seats in the fourth row, and although Gramma thought the opera was too long and the seats too close, I really enjoyed it! The characters didn't really draw me in like the ones from the other performances we've seen, but the costumes were way cool and the music was nice. I guess there's so many elements that go into an opera that if you're dissatisfied with one thing, there's always something else that can make up for it. Gramma was disappointed that they only sang the special aria once--"Hymn to the Moon." Last night I REALLY impressed Gramma when she was struggling to remember the tune to that aria, and I simply googled it, found a video of Renee Fleming singing it. Gramma's hip in lots of ways, but not hip to the internet age. She thought I was some kind of magician. Anyway, you know how this You Tube stuff works-- after you finish with one video, you're immediately directed to a thousand other related videos. So after we watched Renee Fleming sing the famous aria, then we watched a Russian singer sing the famous aria, and then we got to Frederica Von Stade singing it... and if the people staying in the room next to ours could hear through the walls, they must've thought we were going crazy with that tune over here. Anyway, it was nice to be so familiar with the melody so that tonight when it happened in the context of the opera, it sounded totally comforting.
And Gramma's right, it was a bit long. Three acts, two intermissions. It's like a baseball game with 18 innings, so you have the 7th inning stretch, and then a 14th inning stretch. And somewhere around that 14th inning you're thinking "okay already, get on with it." But like I said, I thought it was all pretty good-- or at least pretty to look at and listen to.
Tomorrow we'll spend most of the day traveling back to Italy. We'll fly into Milan, and then we have to make our way to Turin, which will involve a bus, a train, and a taxi. There's no telling if I'll have internet access at the next hotel. Our travels are about to get super fancy, because Friday is the start of the Metropolitan Opera Guild tour. We'll be staying in the best hotels, eating at the best restaurants, seeing Verdi's finest....
Ok, so during one of the intermissions tonight at the opera, I asked the woman next to me (she was from San Francisco) what else she had seen in Prague. She says, "Oh just this one so far." And I see that she's referring to the opera performance, so I say, "No, what have you seen, like in general?" And she's all, "Well we saw an interesting Hungarian opera in Budapest and then there was Othello..." And finally I just had to say, "Lady, I don't think we're speaking in the same dialect here. You're talking in opera language, and I just wanted to know if there were any sights around Prague you'd recommend!"