Prague/Praha

The trip started with me wading through the rowdy Oktoberfest crowd that just let out in order to catch my 11:45pm bus. Unfortunately, the bus was 40 minutes late, and instead of sleeping on it, I just laid there uncomfortably, arriving in Prague at 5:30am. If I could have preserved the 5:30-7:30am time period, Prague would have been perfect!


As it is, Prague is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Europe and one of the most visited cities. It definitely showed. Streets were swarming.


I began by walking up the hill to the old Prague Castle, dating back to the 800s or something ridiculously long ago like that! There was an alchemists' tower where they tried to turn other elements into gold and the guards still do the formal changing of the guard every hour. Unfortunately, they were filming a movie in part of the complex, so I missed out on that.


Not to worry, I eventually made my way through the winding streets to the hill/park area where I met an older gentleman who kindly gave me directions to the miniature Eiffel Tower on the hill and then, realizing I was from the States told his whole life story about being born in Prague, growing up in NYC, moving back to Prague, doing business in Boston, and how his boss was stealing from the company!! Quite charming!!


Next was a walk across the famous Charles Bridge (appearing in films like Mission Impossible) where several street vendors sell jewelry, photos, drawings, music, etc. I ended up in Josefov, an area of the city that used to be a Jewish Ghetto. The interesting thing about Prague is that it was largely untouched during WWII (supposedly because Hitler wanted to preserve it as a sort of museum for Jewish people), and therefore has almost all of its original architecture.


The older part of the city has the famous astronomical clock tower and St. Nicholas church, where Mozart played the organ there - I think they said it has 25,000 pipes!



Then I took a stroll into the "New City" area with lots of shopping streets and the major museums. From there I went down to a place I can't spell (Czech is full of words with letters that have strange symbols over them, making it difficult to remember any sort of names!!) and toured the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul. This was up on a huge hill with a massive wall around the entire complex and an old cemetery. It offered spectacular views of the city!!


Finally, my bus wasn't until 11:55pm that night, so I figured I might try and catch a Czech movie, but the one I thought was a movie was an opera and the other Czech movie didn't have English subtitles. Bummer.

All in all, Prague is beautiful, but I guess I'm not entirely sure what the allure is over some other cities in Europe.