We were up at 6 and got to breakfast at 7:30. The hotel’s breakfast room is actually across the street in an Italian restaurant (Vabene), down a long spiral staircase into the bowels of a gothic cellar from the 13th century. It was the usual European hotel breakfast- yogurt, bread, sliced cheese and meats, fruit, jam, coffee, juice, with the addition of scrambled eggs and sausages.
After breakfast, we met our private guide, Pavla, for a private tour of the Jewish Quarter. Jews first came to Prague in the 10th century and they coexisted with Christmas until the 12th century, when the pope declared that Jews must live separately. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Prague had one of the biggest ghettos in Europe. In 1881, Emperor Josef I eased restrictions on Jews and in 1848 the walls of the ghetto (called Josefov in honor of the emperor) were torn down.Unlike in the rest of Europe, Jews were not forced to live separately in a ghetto and could assimilate. In 1897, the wooden buildings of the neighborhood were razed because they were in such poor shape. They were replaced by Art Nouveau buildings. Before the Nazi takeover the Jewish Quarter was thriving. Of the 55,000 living in Prague at that tome, only 10,000 survived the Holocaust. But because Prague was selected by the Nazis to be the site of a memorial to an “extinct population”, all the artifacts were retained and the synagogues were not demolished as in the rest of Europe. We visited the Maisel Synagogue, now the site of a Museum, the Pinkas Synagogue, now a memorial with the handwritten names of the more than 77,000 Czech Jews who perished in the concentration camps, the Old Jewish Cemetery from 1439, the Old New Synagogue which is the oldest synagogue still in use in Europe, and the Spanish Synagogue with its Moorish design.
(Jewish Cemetery above)
After the tour, we had a light lunch (beer, of course, and sausages and pretzel with pickled cheese), 
before resting up before meeting up with our Rick Steves tour group later that afternoon.
Our group has 26, mostly couples, two solo men and one solo woman travelers, a 3-person family, and two women traveling together- age range 19 to probably mid-70s with most in the 50s – 60s age. Our guide, Katerina Svobodova, has been leading RS tours since 2005. A native Czech, she and her husband own a travel agency specializing in tours of Prague and the Czech countryside. She is very personable and has already imparted quite a bit of information about the life in a Communist bloc country. After introductions, we started out on a walking tour of the Old, New and Jewish parts of the city – just as the threatening clouds broke open with torrents of rain ( deja vu of a yesterday). We ducked into a closed Metro station, under awnings, and into shopping galleries to avoid getting totally drenched. We probably walked about two miles before the rain finally stopped and the sun appeared. Then we walked over the pedestrian-only Charles Bridge over the Vlitava River to see the John Lennon wall (covered in graffiti/messages) 
that was the unsanctioned (by the government) people’s response to his death, honoring his vision of world peace, and to our final destination, Konirna Restaurant, for a typical Czech wedding party dinner- ham with pickled veggies, beef ( sort of like a pot roast) with bread dumplings and a puréed brown gravy, and instead of a wedding cake raspberry sorbet. Nothing green in the meal except for a mint leaf decorating the sorbet! Veggies and especially salads are not part of traditional Czech cuisine. Of course, we had beer again! After dinner, we were treated to an impromptu concert by 2 of the 4 members of the Prague Castle orchestra – the flautist and accordion player ( the same guys in the Rick Steves Prague CD video).
Then a stroll back to the hotel in the now pleasantly cool and dry evening! Tomorrow we have an early start to see the Prague Castle so it’s off to bed!
Camino Musings 