Aside from driving Mikey so long that I wish he was a little faster and roomy enough to let me change gears without touching Riad’s hairy leg, the main event of today was visiting the strangest church I can imagine. Instead of the usual stained glass and flowers, one of the Czech town of Kutna Hora’s churches is decorated with human bones.
Yes: real human bones. Not just a couple, either: the official estimate is in the tens of thousands for how many people’s parts are resting here. Most grotesque was the huge chandelier that featured every bone in the human body. It’ll be hard to ever look at a cherubim the same way again after seeing one holding a human skull. As far as logical explanations for this absurdity go, the best I got was that a mine collapsed and killed 40,000 people, the local archbishop assigned a half-blind monk the task of figuring out a large amount of new mortuary space, and the monk’s taste in interior decorating was much more Hannibal Lecter than Martha Stewart.
And then there was driving, driving, and some more driving. The novelty of the Autobahn wore off hours before I finished, but Mikey still made it back to Berlin to serve as bed yet again.