Day 16 - May 31st - Mucha Museum, Hard Rock Cafe

         Today we went to the Alphonse Mucha museum. None of us had ever heard of Mucha, but after going through this small museum dedicated solely to him and his work, we were all converted. His style was so unique, and so consistent throughout all his work. We were really sad we couldn’t take pictures inside, so we ended up buying a few posters and postcards and stuff afterward. Mucha as an artist had a very normal background story, which actually makes him fairly unique in the famous art world; he had a normal childhood, got married, had a family, etc. He was also unique because he was pretty much good at whatever form of art he tried. Most of what we saw were lithographs, some were paintings and drawings, he also was an architect and interior designer, he was a singer, he worked with a theater design company, he worked at a magazine and did illustrations, he illustrated books, and he designed jewelry, carpet, postage stamps, banknotes, wallpaper, and theater sets, among other things. We were all pretty impressed.

Seasons series

Times of day series

This is a building he designed

   Yesterday we walked past the Hard Rock Café there near the central square of Prague, so today Suzanne insisted on treating us all there. We were pretty excited about that, knowing that we’d finally get some familiar American food again. The funny thing was that what impressed us most were the free refills and drinks filled with ice…. oh how we had missed that. After hanging out in the Hard Rock Café, we did a few more jumping photos in front of it, in which I look like a fool - of course. Jumping pictures just aren’t my forte. 

        We then wandered around and got a little lost, we found some very cool souvenirs, including some cheap black market Mucha posters, jewelry, a lot of marionettes (apparently a Prague thing), matroyshka dolls  and other cheap stuff. Then we walked into this store that had a ton of nice stuff, like handmade matroyshka nesting dolls, expensive chess sets, beautiful nativities, and other very cool things that I wanted so bad but were just too expensive. Having shopped enough for one day, I decided to try to find my way back to the apartment with Heather and Suzanne while the other girls looked for the John Lennon wall. For the rest of the night we gathered our stuff for packing, as we were leaving pretty early the next day for St. Gilgen, which is a tiny lakeside town high in the Alps of Austria. 

I'm starting to get a pretty awesome tan line...