Toreador, En Garde!

Today was a really cool day in Prague.

The day started out with some walking around and stopping in a few art galleries and souvenir shops (Ooooh shiny!) After that we met up with Lauren again!

We stopped by the big TV tower to wait for Lauren to get off of work.  We headed to a park that had a beautiful view of the city.  Then we headed to Czech Sochi.  That was really cool.  I now have ideas for hosting a small Olympic village in Virginia for the next Winter Olympics :)  They had a small ski slope with jumps, a large ice skating track, two ice hockey rinks, a cross country skiing trek, and a few other little event places.  I liked seeing the people excited about the games!

We then walked to a place to have dinner with Lauren and Ondrej.  That was fun and Lauren told a story about how she had accidentally showed up an hour late to a show so we checked our ticket and realized that we were going to do the same thing if we had kept on thinking the show was at the time we thought.  Thankfully we checked and we were able to make it to the show on time.

The show we went to see was Carmen by Georges Bizet.  That was AWESOME!!!  It was the first opera I had ever been to.  It was so good and there were a few songs I recognized (Thank you Looney Tunes!) The set was really cool with the entire stage rotating and they used that well to show movement through different scenes.  The music was outstanding.  The recognizable songs would be Habanera and the Toreador Song.  When they play the Toreador song in Act 4 as all the toreadors are coming into the main square and there is a big festival for them, I got chills seeing it all.
It made me really want to get back into doing things on stage :)  It also made me recognize that I was a fan of operas.  The State Opera was also very beautiful which only adds to the experience.

Here are a few pictures from the day.

Lauren, Ondrej, Me, and Rosalie (left to right)

Best view of the city.

Chandelier in the Stadni Opera (State Opera).  Beautiful ceiling too!