July 23 Today we got up and we left Cesky Krumlov and traveled to Sedlac Ossuary the Bone Church in Kaunda Hora. Outside of the bone church there was a lot of graves.
Inside the church there was chandeliers made of bones.
Most of the decorations were made of skulls, arm and leg bones, as well as hip bones.
The ossuary contained 60 000 peoples bones. It was a cold place under ground. Although the church was first built in the 1100’s, the decorations have been redone many times, the church as it is today was built in the 1700’s. It was a Cistercian Monastery, founded in 1142, however many of the bones were from the great plagues that ravenged Europe in the 1300’s – about 30,000 people died and were buried here then. The other major source of bones was the Hussite wars in 1421. There were another 15,000 buried in Sedlac during the wars. In the end of the 1400’s the cemetery was too big and the whole area was dug up and the bones were assembled into the first set of decorations.
The Bone church was so cool, it was a little bit creepy, but I liked it too. My mom showed me what part of the body all of the bones came from. My dad showed me the people who died by having an axe in their head – like seriously dad???
After we went to the camp site. The campsite is just outside of Prague – It is on the Vltava river, which is the same river we rafted on a few days ago – it is much bigger now. There is an amazing white water training center here for the C1 and K1 boats to train on.
It is so cool to watch them paddle down the rapids. It was an amazing day. July 24 Today we went to the Prague Zoo. We left at 8:15. It was a very hot day. We saw elephants, tigers, cheetahs, seals, alligators, and more.
The animals were really playful and looked very happy. The elphants especially looked happy – they have two new bay elephants and they were playing and rolling a big wheel around, it was so cute.
We saw a shoe bill – it was the coolest bird ever.
They also had a bat cave where the bats just flew around your head everywhere – it was freaky!!
There was a neat penguin display and they put on a seal show.
There was a huge playcenter. We played on it for 1 hour.
My mom thought we should do a school project – so we each had to choose our own projects. We did projects on are favorite animal. Liam did the elephants, Brendan did the gorillas and I did the cayman. What an amazing day.
July 25
This morning we got up and it was already 26 degrees – it is so hot out we are melting – Liam said he wanted winter back. We took a tram ride into Prague City Centre, it was fun – a tram goes along the rail lines. It was so hot that we just kind of melted – so we saw a few sights:
The astrological clock – which was built in 1411 and can tell you the date, time, month, sun position, moon phase, and I think some other things.
The main square: which had the old town hall, St. Nickolas’ church, and a few other huge buildings.
And finally, St. Charles Bridge, which was the first bridge across the Vltava river. It was originally a wooden bridge but flooding kept destroying it – so in 1357 a new stone bridge was built. It is a beautful walking bridge and has many huge statues that line the sides of the bridge. When we were there they were cleaning the statues, you could see that some were bright and clean and light coloured and others were black from hundreds of years of pollution. It has two big towers, one on each end that could be shut with huge gates originally to keep people in or out of the city.
We were pretty tired, so we got a quick lunch and headed home – it was 36 degrees in the afternoon, and we are all really hot and tired!
Tia and Mari
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