No time! No sleep! No elevator!

Here I am in the lobby of the hotel (no internet access in my room) at 6:51 am on Friday, May 25th, 2012, at the end of the first week of the Prague Summer Seminar. I've been up again since before 5 am, don't seem to be able to sleep much here. There is the noise from the street, there is the light coming in the room and there is my "I can't sleep in" physiology. The street wakes up quite early here, by 5 am the trams are zipping by in the square outside my window. It also goes to bed quite late, I think the garbage collection happens late in the evening and the night life here in general seems to go on into the wee hours.

This morning we start relatively late, at 9:30 am with a visit the the Faculty of Arts Library and in the afternoon, we will visit the Strahov Monastery followed by a guided tour of the Strahov Library.

I am way behind on my "reportage" but here are a few notes.

On Monday evening we had a three hour walking tour of the old town and dinner and boat tour on the Vltava river. On Tuesday morning, we went to see the Parliament and had a tour of and a lecture about the Parliamentary Library. The highlight was being shown the guest book of the Parliamentary Library that includes signatures of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia, then a signature of Alexander Dubček and also Václav Havel. I was practically in tears. We were all also asked to sign the guest book

The Czechs have done great job of digitizing historical documents, there is about a thousand years' worth available online and the project includes documents from other neighbouring nations.

The afternoon was spent touring the oldest building of Charles University, the Carolinum and also included a couple of talks on the history of the Czech nation. On Tuesday, we also dropped into the public reading room of the American Embassy where we had an interesting impromptu talk from the librarian there. He was brimming with enthusiasm for the work they are doing and was happy to talk to us about it.

Wednesday was a full day of lectures at the school. Again very interesting. We had lunch on site ad after a couple more lectures in the afternoon, we visited the Libri Prohibiti library and were told about Samizdat, literally meaning "self published." During the time of Communist censorship, people wrote or translated many works that could not not be published otherwise. A translation into Slovak of the Lord of the rings was one of the books we were shown.

Yesterday we had a wonderful trip to Klášter Zlatá Koruna and Český Krumlov. On the way there we passed by a place called Příbram where my father spent three years as a political prisoner forced to work in the uranium mines.