Europe, Post 8: New Year's Day in Prague

We have just arrived back home after our wonderful trip – although I'm only halfway through telling you about it! I'll continue telling you about our adventures whenever I can fit it in around work, study, and everything else that being home involves!! You'll also be able to see more photos and videos in the previous Europe entries as we upload them over the next few days. Here's the blog entry I wrote a couple of days ago but did not have net access to post until now...

Writing this while driving through the French countryside on the 6th, en route to Luxembourg...

On New Year's Day, we awoke in Prague after a pleasant sleep in to discover it was snowing! It was the first time either of us had ever seen proper snowflakes falling. They were shaped like tiny flat little stars, about 4mm across, drifting slowly and gently down to the ground. Gorgeous! So we didn't get our white Christmas, but we got a white New Year instead. :)

We decided to take one of the many walking tours advertised in the brochures at our hotel, meeting at the Astronomical Clock in Prague's Old Town Square at 2pm for a 3.5-hour walk around the city's old quarters. However, by the time we got up and going, had breakfast, waited around for trams etc, we actually missed our tour so decided to explore by ourselves instead.

In the Old Town Square, we discovered it was the last day of their Christmas markets. The market stalls were in little wooden huts with greenery and gold Christmas lights along the edges of their red roofs. The square also contained a tall Christmas tree and was lined with interesting old buildings, and in the centre was a high platform for taking photos and enjoying the view from.

This was the setting of an hour or two of contented wandering around, buying some souvenir gifts and trying a few new foods. We had roasted chestnuts (not that great), langosé (a deep fried pastry base with tomato paste, garlic and grated cheese – quite nice), and trdlo (a wide spiral of pastry coated in sugar – yummy!).

When we first got off the tram, we had passed a sign advertising a free concert at 4pm in one of the grand old buildings lining the square, St Nicholas' Church. It would be a performance of Christmas carols from around the world by a high school choir from the USA, the Madrigal Singers from Queensbury High in upstate New York. Well, we decided to check it out, and this turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip, and made us quite glad we had missed our tour!!

They were brilliant!!! There were 22 choristers, equal numbers of boys and girls, and they performed beautiful Christmas carols in at least three different languages and in multiple parts. The boys wore suits and bow ties, and the girls wore long skirts and short sleeved shirts that they were very obviously freezing in despite the heaters nearby.

These kids sang like professional adult singers – it seemed absurd that they were teenagers and this was just their extracurricular activity!!! They didn't use any written music or instrumental backing, and, in the entire hour or so, I didn't hear a single wrong, missed, uncertain, or off-key note. A couple of times they got soloists out the front, and there was one round sung by a trio consisting of the lady conductor and a mother-daughter pair who were on tour with the choir.

The acoustics in the old, round, high-ceilinged building were fantastic. There would have only been a hundred or so people in the audience, and we were in about the fourth row. The videos I took don't sound anywhere near as good as the real thing, but hopefully they give you a bit of an idea!

Click here for a video of Go Tell It On The Mountain.

Click here for a video of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Afterwards, we went up and congratulated the conductor and she told us that the choir rehearses every morning from 7am before school, plus one night a week, as well as whatever practice they do on their own. So perhaps that level of dedication goes some way towards explaining their phenomenal talent! Anyway, I really think it was some of the best singing I've ever heard – very, VERY impressive!!

...Now continuing this whilst driving between Luxembourg and Delettes, France, where tonight will be the last night of our trip...

After dark (as the sun currently sets at about 4pm over here!), we wandered around the markets a little more while the vendors were packing up. The square was very pretty at night with all the lights and the big Christmas tree.

From 6pm there was a massive fireworks display near the river, this time an official one, which we could only just see the top of above the buildings around the square. Just beforehand, we had seen thousands of people lining the Charles Bridge to await the display.

Once it was over, the enormous swarm of people who had been watching the fireworks began to flood into the Old Town Square to eat and listen to the opera-like vocal duets we had been watching on a temporary stage in the square, so we headed off and strolled down some of the nearby streets. We came across the old Jewish quarter, which is another area that our walking tour would have taken us through. We also saw the Prague Castle lit up on the other side of the river.

Then it was back to the Sport Hotel for a lovely sleep. The next morning we did a bit of shopping in the precinct mentioned in the last entry, before driving back into Germany for our night in Munich... which would be spent at the exact same youth hostel we had stayed at with Jim, Jenny, Merity, Fraser, Ash and Tish in June 2006!