Mid-life gap year Tanya and Craig

Parking our van a few kilometres out of the city centre and catching public transport for a few days provided us with more opportunity to take in Prague and its cultural sights. First we headed to the old town Square, where we found a free festival that included music, outdoor entertainment and food stalls. We enjoyed beers in the sun, together with Bratwurst on rye while taking in the music and people watching.  Prague has a vibrant and an edgy arts scene and the band we saw was no exception. They were dressed as members of the delinquent gang in Stanley Kubricks 1971 movie A Clock Work Orange. By chance we had arrived in Prague on the first Saturday of the month, a day when all of Prague's public museums open their doors for free from 7pm onwards. We loved the Fall of the Iron Curtain photo exhibition at the Castle Summer Palace (refer to other blog, entitled Fall of the Iron Curtain). That night we had a meal at U Flecku. Since 1499 U Flecku has ser...

L ike man walking on the moon; most of us have memories of the footage of the Berlin Wall coming down. It is 30 years this November since the Berlin Wall came down.  It is 30 years since the fall of the iron curtain across Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia. Following the ground-swell and thirst for change in the other member states along with the demise of the Berlin Wall, between mid-November and the end of December 1989, Czechoslovakian students and older dissidents bravely led peaceful protests which resulted in the peaceful transition to democracy, known as the Velvet Revolution. The event commenced on international students day [i] (17th Nov) and riot police suppressed a student demonstration in Prague. The students announced a weekly strike, demanded political pluralism, free elections, the resignation of compromised politicians and a true public information system. The event sparked further demonst...

Long long ago when man was just another animal roaming the wilderness, not superior to any other creature and certainly no safer. Man’s daily quest for survival started with the basics: food, water and shelter. On a good day there was time for other pursuits; maybe there was time to make a flint tool or a hide shawl. At night huddled around a fire in a cave man began making art, it started with a hand dipped in ochre or some other medium and then pressed against the cave wall to say “I was here”. From there cave art developed into a narrative of the day’s activities: what man did, what man saw. Man was not thinking how to make things better or what his rival tribe was doing. When he had down time man was reliving daily scenes and telling stories through cave art. Often the scenes depicted were of animals or more particularly of man hunting animals. In France and Spain there are cave art images showing hunters with pointy sticks trying to bring down muscular cattle with long up...