The Jewish Embassy

Being Jewish is awesome. Sure, it has its downsides--no bacon, no Shabbos TV (a major downside during the era of Saturday morning cartoons), and lots of years of all-skirts schooling--but how cool is it when you go to a foreign country and there's a kosher restaurant and you go have dinner and it's full of your people? Or you go to Shul, and everyone's praying in the same language, even if it's not the language or the country? You literally have brethren everywhere, and I've become obsessed with this idea of all these cities seemingly having a Jewish embassy. Sure, it's usually just chabad, but right now we're in Prague and the Jewish-ness, at least on Siroka Street, is just crazy. There are something like 6 shuls, we have two options for a minyan, two options for where to get Shabbos meals (though one is psychotically overpriced--that's where we had dinner last night, which was yum)...and we're in the Czech Republic. That's nuts! And of course, for the next leg of the honeymoon, we'll be going to Istanbul (finally!) where I'm sure that in the midst of all of the unpronounceable words and unreadable Alphabet, nothing will feel like a more welcome haven than Carne, the last kosher restaurant standing. Woot!

So, on the whole, the honeymoon has been pretty freakin awesome so far. Prague is indescribably beautiful--even your neighborhood MacDonald's is in some crazy gold-leaf painted building with stunning architecture. The Spanish Synagogue is fantastic, the Alteneu Shul is super cool, considering how ridiculously old it is, Old Town Square is lovely at night (and we also thought it was the same thing as Wenceslas Square until about an hour ago), there's a Sephora (a Dior 5-shadow pallette is over $100!! Kinda puts things into perspective...), and our hotel is beautiful and we have a massive terrace, on which we just ate a bagel from Bagel Basket and a packaged TastiKake pound cake brought from home. Dinner last night was great and the weather was fabulous (read: cool), although today jumped up to the low 80s and I almost keeled over in the tightly packed Jewish cemetery, and Yoni and I have been drinking Fanta to our hearts' content. Yoni's even let me talk him into buying a couple of tacky souvenirs, although despite the incredible ubiquitousness of gorgeous colored crystal plates and glasses, Yoni has yet to let me even enter one of the "Famous Bohemian Crystal" shops. He's kind of a David Downer in that way. Oh well.

Right now we're at an Internet Cafe called Bohemia Bagel, which has quickly become one of our favorite spots in Prague despite the guy's annoyance that we paid with a large bill yesterday, but frankly, that's just stupid since everything costs so many crowns since a crown is worth about a fifteenth of a dollar that coins disappear in two seconds. Also stupid? Czech people getting annoyed that we don't speak Czech. Why would we speak Czech? They literally speak it in this one country. We don't live in this country. We have no plans to return to this country. Seems like a silly investment of time instead of Spanish or French as a second language, no? (Or in our case, Hebrew, Russian, Italian...) On the whole, we've discovered that we don't like Czech people. Except the guy who hit on me today outside of a restaurant wonderfully named El Gaucho while I was taking a picture of Yoni looking gleeful with the sign. That was sweet.

Hope all is well in America, suckers!