Czech Republic

INTRODUCTION ASSIGNMENT TO CZECH REPUBLIC READ PAGES 1-32 IN RICK STEVES READ PAGES 297-298 in Rick Steve’s' Rick Steve’s’ Reading Assignment 1. Identify three travel points that Rick Steve’s recommends Bohemia, Moravia, and small Silesia. 2. Discuss the transition process and thinking of parents compared to younger children who did not live under Communism rule by discussing the freedom of having babies. In communist times, it was routine to be married and start a family by the age of 22. Everyone had basically the same job with little hope of career progress. Children were the only way for people to project their dreams because parenting was subsidized. But after the fall of communism in 1989, many more options were available to young people. Young Czechs embraced the new freedom: Everyone wanted to travel, work at a multinational company, and marriage was no longer the expected “next step.” Shacking up was no longer a problem. You needed money, not a marriage certificate, to get a place to live. More and more young adults waited until after 30 to get married and fewer Czechs had children. 3. Explain how a country such as Prague went from Catholicism to Protestant origin. The word catholic means “universal.” The Roman Catholic Church—in many ways the administrative ghost of the Roman Empire—is the only organization to survive from ancient times. For more than a thousand years, it enforced its notion that the Vatican was the sole interpreter of God’s word on earth, and the only legitimate way to be a Christian was as a Roman Catholic. Jan Hus (c. 1370–1415) was a local preacher and professor who got in trouble with the Vatican a hundred years before Martin Luther. Like Luther, Hus preached in the people’s language rather than Latin. To add insult to injury, he complained about Church corruption. Tried for heresy and burned in 1415, Hus became both a religious and a national hero. While each age has defined Hus to its liking, the way he challenged authority while...