Prague, Czech Republic: Day 10

We woke up on Prague (Praha) to our tenth consecutive day of beautiful weather and a beautiful breakfast spread in the dining room of the guesthouse. While we ate a slow breakfast of granola and yogurt (not the same as Danish yogurt unfortunately), toast, fruit, meet, and cheese, we chatted with a couple from Ohio. Guesthouse Lida seemed to be mostly Americans and a little bit of the older crowd. Although I probably wouldn’t prefer this most of the time, it was quiet, comfortable, affordable, and was in a good location.

It is always hard to know when you haven’t been to a city before, how important it is to stay in the city centre or not… With Copenhagen it was cost prohibitive and there weren’t good B &B options, but it would have been nice to be closer to the center at night. I found in Prague, because the transportation kept going regularly at night that it really didn’t matter that we weren’t down by the city center.

After breakfast we headed for the metro station a few blocks from the guesthouse and used transfers to hope on a above ground tram that would show us the general lay out of the city, especially the castle quarter of Praha. We got off at a Monastery with a library that had books and artifacts from the 1600’s, and then toured the grounds where there is now a brewery. From the gardens of this area, there were amazing views of the whole city in the Vltava River Valley.

We continued on down the hill to find the Prague Castle in a square of different styles of historical family castles. Within the castle walls there were several beautiful churches, the most renoun and visible is St. Vitus’s Cathedral, which is high gothic in style with all the gargoyles, rose stained glass windows, and high spires. We spent a lot of time studying the windows, especially the one that Alfred Mucha (art nouveau artist) designed for the cathedral that includes a Prague-specific story including King Wenceslas… Aside from the gobs of tourists that were there, it is my favorite church that we have visited. The views from atop the tower were amazing- totally worth the 400+ stairs that it took to get up there.

We wandered around the grounds of the castle afterwards looking at all the defensive armaments from days of yore. When we got hungry enough, we went looking for some authentic Czech cuisine. We found it in the courtyard of a hidden building in a set of stairs. The restaurant “By the Donkey in the Cradle” was great! We sat under a huge umbrella in the courtyard and enjoyed the weather. We ordered a beer, I got some onion soup, a velky salat skurecim masem, or translated “big salad with meats”, and Jff ordered a uzene maso se zelim (smoked meat, cabbage, potato and onions). It was a good, leasurely meal. After a tour of St. Nicholis’s Basilica (very ornate), and chance encounter with a kitty, we headed south to “lesser town”, one of the four quarters of central Prague.

The afternoon involved some ice cream, a tram ride to the top of the hill to the park and the replica of the Eiffel Tower so Jff could visit a museum he was interested in and so I could walk through the gardens (along with terrific views of the city). Once we were back in the valley, we visited the hunger wall monument that was built in the 1400s. We also searched out a memorial to the Czech who died under communism. It was a statue of a man walking down a series of stairs, slowly losing limbs and parts of his life, in order to illustrate the impact of communism on this country that only became free in 1989.

We, and especially me, were exhausted from traveling the day before. We walked through a park along the river, strolled across the Charles Bridge in the evening, and after lots of picture taking and walking, finally caught the tram home.