Locked in Love

Yesterday was another gorgeous, sunny day in Prague. I spent the morning at the Kampa Museum, a small modern art museum. It has a few terraces where you can walk outside and get a beautiful view of the Charles Bridge and Prague Castle. Right now, it has drawings of Mucha, Klimt and Krupka, along with contemporary Central European artists. I happened upon a free day; they were celebrating their 10th anniversary. Bonus!

At 1:00 I rushed home, ate lunch, fed Leo his hundredth sausage with cucumber, tried to convince Reed to come with me, and ran out the door to meet Elliott and his students at the foot of the Charles Bridge.

One of Elliott's English classes consists of 15 & 16 year olds, and about 10 of them wanted to spend their afternoon giving us a tour of their favorite parts of Prague. As Leo exclaimed, "I can't imagine wanting to spend my free time outside of school with my teacher." Well, as we know, Elliott isn't just any teacher. He's warm, funny, approachable (one of his kids asked him if his red hair was natural!), and just plain inspiring.

I wait for Elliott and his crew and soon see him waving, and am quickly surrounded by a group of smiling, vivacious teenagers, sticking their hands out to shake mine.

Our first destination is near the Charles Bridge where the tradition is to declare your love by locking a padlock on a bridge railing and throwing away the key. The story goes that your love will last as long as the lock lasts (but as an earlier Fulbright tour guide told us, Prague workers come around every few months and cut off the locks, leaving room for new ones; would like to think that's not true, but...). One of the girls, Hana, stops us all and says they have a surprise for us. She hands me a little box and in it is a gold padlock. So Elliott and I find a spot and lock it to the rest. I felt like it was our wedding day and we were stomping on the wine glass. The kids even provided a sharpie, so we could write our initials on the padlock and maybe find it again when we show our friends Prague (are you coming, friends?).


Second stop, the John Lennon Wall. We had to pretend we hadn't seen it so as not to disappoint our tour guides. The kids told us the history of how young people began writing on this garden wall after hearing of John Lennon's death. Each night, the Communist regime sent workers to whitewash the wall, and each day the young people wrote again. Truthfully, it's not too exciting. If you look hard enough, you can find images of John Lennon and maybe some lyrics, but it's mostly "we were here" type graffitti and worse. There's a guy strumming the guitar and singing Beattles songs. We added to the graffitti mayhem by writing a small heart with our initials. One of the kids got the ingenious idea to stick the sharpie in the netting of his floorball stick, so they could reach up high to write their names (look closely at the pic below and you can see the upstretched arm and pink floorball stick).


Last stop, through Old Town Square to Wincelas Square to treat the kids to pastries at their favorite pastry shop. Can't remember the name, but believe me, I can remember how to find it again. We selected some chocolate banana cake that sounded a little gross, but was delicious, a cheesecake, a cake with rasberries, panis, and something else that was traditional to Czechs and equally yummy. The kids chose their favorites and were genuinely surprised and grateful that we would treat them.

My favorite part of the tour was to talk to the girls and find out what they liked to do and how teenagers spend their time. They asked me if kids still said, "Duh." Apparently, it was all over a YouTube video. They wondered about Range Rovers and talked about the states they'd like to visit. We had a fun conversation about our favorite serials. A few sweet moments (forgive the pun) was when Elle was talking about how much she loved drawing animals, especially unicorns, and Hana said how amazing her animals were, which clearly touched Elle. And when we were eating pastries, Cristina said something about being fat and the two other girls quickly went to her defense, saying she wasn't fat, she was beautiful. And she was, as were they all.