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We went to so many museums. One of the Museums we saw was the Tate Modern. I tend not to like modern art, but everyone everywhere said we had to check it out, so we did. The building was amazing (it’s a former power plant, and it is HUGE), but I still don’t like modern art. I can even pinpoint when I stopped caring for modern art. I was in college and since I went to an art school, there was art all over the place. My senior year the college acquired a whole lot of outdoor art. Some of it was clearly identifiable (like bronze sculptures), but some was not (like a shopping cart which had glass bottles filled with pink liquid in them). One day I was walking on the campus and I saw a giant pile of garbage. I immediately circled around it looking for an identifying plaque with the artist’s name, until it occurred to me there wasn’t a plaque because this was a giant pile of garbage. Just regular old garbage, the kind that goes in a dumpster. And it was like a ray of light came out of the heavens and I saw the light and had an epiphany. The epiphany was,

“I don’t have to play this BS game. If something looks like a pile of garbage, whether fancy people call it art or not, it’s still a pile of garbage. Art should require skill and talent. Most modern art requires a PR person to hype it. I’m done with this.”

And since then I won’t go to the Guggenheim or the Whitney or any of those museums. But I made the exception for the Tate Modern for two reasons: One, I was walking right past it, and Two, all the museums in London are free, so no money lost there. Cricket was ecstatic because it had free wifi, so he didn’t mind at all. They have a famous exhibit there right now, the porcelain sunflower seeds. An artist commissioned 100 million hand-painted sunflower seeds and poured them out all over the floor. It looks like this.

And there are signs like this.

And don’t think I wasn’t tempted. They made a little barrier around the sunflower seeds just a leetle too far for me to reach the seeds to take one, and there was a guard posted in the corner makin’ sure the peasants weren’t pilfering the seeds. Shortly after that (when Cricket was done checking his email), we left.

We also went to Greenwich, the home of Greenwich Mean Time. Here’s clarification for those of you that don’t know: There is longitude and latitude. There is a definite latitude line – the equator – to base location and time off of. But there is no definite longitude line. So people invented one, the 0′ line, and it runs right through Greenwich, England. It has been the home of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) since 1884. It is a completely man-made thing, but the 0′ point has to be somewhere, so it might as well be in Greenwich.

They have a lovely museum there with lots of cool clocks and astronomer’s equipment. They talk a lot about how difficult it was for sailors to figure out where they were, how they used the position of the sun at certain times of day or the stars at night. My favorite tidbit of information was one of the harebrained ideas for always knowing Greenwich Mean Time. Some scientist claimed he had the “Powder of Sympathy”, and his plan was to scratch a dog with a knife that had been rubbed with the powder. The dog would travel on the ship going to foreign destinations. Then, every day at noon in Greenwich, the scientist would plunge the knife into the Powder of Sympathy, and the dog, feeling corresponding pain, would yelp, so the sailors would know and adjust their clocks on ship accordingly. The exhibit wryly said, “This was proven not to work.”

This was the super-cool house the astronomer lived in next to the Royal Observatory.

And this is Cricket standing with one foot on either side of the meridian.

The British, much to their credit, are not Puritans, and they sell hard, soft and in-between liquor in the supermarket. This made us laugh. It is a glass of wine. Seriously. An individual glass of wine with a yogurt-style aluminum peel-back lid.

I don’t drink beer, but Cricket does, and he sampled several bottled beers back in the hotel room. Here are a few.

I made him buy this beer after we returned from Greenwich.

Beer ended up being a big part of this trip. I always insist on eating and drinking wherever the locals do, and that meant we were in pubs almost every night. Cricket then got to try two different on-tap beers every night. One of his favorites was the banana bread beer. I even tried a tiny sip, and doggone it, it did taste surprisingly like banana bread.

I tried to be a trooper, alcohol-wise. There was a menu advertising pear cider and the description was mouth-watering (“known for its strong fresh pear notes with a hint of vanilla”), so I ordered it. Unfortunately, it was carbonated, and I can’t drink anything carbonated, so Cricket, being the best boyfriend in the whole world, got a second glass and poured the pear cider back and forth, back and forth, over and over until it wasn’t fizzy anymore. Best. Boyfriend. EVAR. It ended up being delicious, by the way.

And now we’re in Prague. Perhaps the most irritatingly attractive European city ever.

The architecture was NUTS. It was like being in a fairy tale, with dragons and princesses and everything. My heart actually hurt a little.

Even our generic hotel couldn’t avoid the Grimm’s fairy tales vibe. This was the picture that was over my bed.

“In Czech Republic after woman has been defiled in the middle of the road she chops off man’s head. Enjoy your stay in Prague.”

Also in my hotel bathroom? This.

Beer Capital of the World, indeed.

The great thing about visiting a primarily Catholic country is that there are festivals and celebrations all the time. Every saint needs to be venerated in some way, so the main square usually has something going on. When we were there it was Easter. And the Renaissance Fair thing that Europe does so well (being that they had the Renaissance, of course) was out in force.

First, you see that church there, the white one with the greenish turrets? The Czech Republic is known for glass, specifically lead crystal glass, and they had a GORGEOUS chandelier in that church. My picture totally doesn’t do it justice.

Okay, back to the Easter festival. First of all, there is a clear color scheme for Easter in the Czech Republic, and that is yellow, green and orange. So everything was decorated in those colors.

There was also an eight-foot-tall easter egg made from twigs covered with those ribbons. And the best thing was people were taking pride in the crafts and traditions that they have been doing for centuries. There were people selling small glass and ceramic things and painted blown goose eggs and this forger? Pumping up the heat on his forging station with his foot, like a Singer sewing machine.

And then there was the food. For both Budapest and Prague, the food is pretty much the same. It’s stick-to-your-ribs, meat and potatoes stuff. There were people selling gingerbread cookies that they had decorated with fine lines of white glaze, and tons of sausages, and this baked good that I called a turtleneck because apparently vowels were in short supply the day they named this thing.

How it works: You wrap a strip of raw dough around a wooden dowel, and then the wooden dowel rotates over a roasty-toasty fire. I think they may sprinkle sugar on there too. Then, they slide it off the wooden dowel and you eat it. Along with this, there was what I considered the piece de resistance: The pig roasting on a spit.

I didn’t include a picture of the pig from the front because, frankly, it was kind of gross and wee bit barbaric-looking, but the cool thing was that it was run on wood. And when the roaster ran out of wood, he chopped some more. With that axe can see. Oh my God, it’s so medieval and authentic.

On one of the sides of the square is one of the hot sights in Prague, the astrological clock. I’m not really sure how it works, but it does work and it sure does look complicated.

At the top of each hour, one of the four figures next to the clock, Death, rings his bell and shakes his hourglass. And those two windows open and the twelve apostles swing by. It’s great. Here’s a close-up of Death.

The four figures around the clock are the most-hated things they could think of: Death, Greed, Vanity and a Turk. That’s a whole lotta hate for Turkey. I guess the Czech Republic did not particularly enjoy being ruled by Turkey when this clock was made.

But wait! This is not the only cool clock in Prague. Prague has one of the finest Jewish Quarters of any European city. That’s mainly because Hitler wanted to preserve it exactly as it was as a museum of an extinct race. So it is relatively untouched. In the Jewish Quarter there is a clock that runs backwards because it has hebrew letters on it.

The Jewish Quarter has the really cool cemetery as well. The Jews were allotted only a small amount of space to bury their dead, so it’s a really dense cemetery. Let me explain: when the Jews ran out of room, they put another layer of soil over the graves, moved the pre-existing gravestones up, and buried another group of people. In some places it is twelve people deep. The cemetery was in use from the 1500s to the end of the 1700s, so up to 100,000 people may be buried there.

Another thing about the Jewish Quarter is that throughout the ages, Jews have had to wear identifying garments when out and about with Christians. At one point it was a yellow sash. For a long time, it was a yellow pointed hat. The Jews took this hat and incorporated it into their architecture, so one can see it all over that part of town.

My mom and I partook in the local ethnic cuisine throughout our stay in both Prague and Budapest, and one of the places we ended up in was something between a mad scientist’s laboratory and Applebee’s. It was covered with alchemy symbols and gurgling, lit-up giant fake Bunsen burners and well, you can see for yourself.

And, in keeping with the Crapplebee’s design motif, they also had musical instruments on the wall. No skis or fake-o vintage team photos.

They served green beer. Really. Green beer. I don’t drink beer, but my mother does, so of course I forced the green beer on her. She said it tastes like ear wax, but more bitter. So as tempting as it might be, don’t drink the green beer.