Leaving my review of yesterday's tour here because 100 Spires partners with Walkative! in Prague, and I can't find the latter's site on yelp:
I don't expect my Prague guides to have encyclopedic knowledge of every aspect of Prague's history, past or present. But I do think it's reasonable to expect the guide for a tour titled, "Old Town, Jewish Quarter and Charles Bridge tour," to know something about the Jewish Quarter. I also expect him to at least mention the Holocaust, especially after having just devoted considerable time at the Jan Hus statue to touting Czechoslovakia's record on both religious freedom and atheism. Instead, on Tuesday April 4th I had Andrew, a self-professed ancient history major whose primary question to our group once we'd reached the Jewish Quarter was to ask if we could guess what kinds of prices apartments there are fetching these days(!)
When I responded that the more important question, to my mind, was why there was no public memorial to the 88,000+ Jewish residents of Prague murdered in the Holocaust, he shut me down and spoke instead about the statue of Kafka in front of the synagogue, urging us to rub the statue's body for good luck, and making a smarmy remark about ladies and rubbing. That was when I quietly departed the tour and canceled the two other Walkative! tours I'd booked for the next two days. I was particularly disappointed having enjoyed super smart, personable Walkative! guides in Barcelona (Filipa) and Berlin (Will). Also because the tour was so clearly full of smart, interested people who could easily have gelled more as a group if given the chance. Btw, the picture I've attached is from the inside of the Spanish Synagogue. You can see it by attending a musical event there or taking one of the tours on offer from the Jewish Museum.
I think it's worth mentioning that Andrew asked his how-much-do-you-think-people-pay-to-live-in-the-Jewish-Quarter question after he had taken us to the back of the Spanish Synagogue to state, incorrectly, that "This isn't what you'd expect a synagogue to look like" and refer to Jewish religious services as "mass"(!). Five minutes of online research might have informed him that "Moorish" architecture is precisely in keeping with the design for a Spanish, or Sephardic structure and finds its echoes in the design of nearby Berlin's internationally known mid- nineteenth century "Neue Synagoge."
I'm done with Walkative! in this town. read more