holy roman empire, batman!

"The holy roman empire is neither holy nor roman nor an empire." This was my nightmare sentence from a history book of long, long ago. What grade I was in I can no longer remember, but I do remember that that sentence numbed my mind to the extent that I just couldn't get past it to the next paragraph. It has haunted me ever since.

Along with technology, I have always considered awareness of history to be on a need-to-know basis. Many is the time I have dismayed my parents with my casual ignorance of famous names -- Juan de Whatever is how I relate to them. It's all just trivia and I could care less.

But when I'm in the place where it all happened, that's another story. I want to get a general idea of what really happened here, because being here makes it real.

So here I am, in the center of what was once the Holy Roman Empire, and for the first time I have actually absorbed some history that your average college graduate probably took in a long time ago. FYI, the "Roman" in there refers to Roman Catholic, (which is why it wasn't exactly Roman), and the Empire ... well, I still can't tell you why it wasn't an empire. Nor can I tell you much about the Habsburgs, King Charles IV, Duke Wenceslaus or the connection of all these with Vienna, though I now know that they're intimately related. This, I consider, progress for one so historically-challenged.

But I can tell you about Thomas Masaryk, the much-loved spiritual father of Czech democracy, the country's first president from the end of the first World War, 1918, and for the next 16 years. There's an important little square in Tel Aviv named after him, and I wanted to know to know why. What was the connection with the Jews? A guide took us on a 2-hour tour of Prague Castle, and I asked her about this, but got nothing substantial. It appears to me that he was just appreciated and loved by so many for his integrity, which included years in exile until the communists could be routed, that Jews from his part of the world wanted to commemorate him wherever they ended up. Maybe there are more specifics, but I'll find out later, I suppose.

Anyway, Prague is luscious. Prague has cool breezes and the Vltava river running through it and HUGE old buildings with mammoth spires everywhere. The weather so far has been perfect, if changeable. Cool, then sunny, most of the time partly cloudy. But rain is forecast for the rest of our visit. That'll be okay; I think we're pretty tired of walking anyway.

Prague, sadly, has no bargains, bummer for the shopping addict. Nothing is cheap, nothing is even cheapER than home. I'll buy a couple of tchotchke mementos anyway, some of them are quite cute.