Prague Day Two

Our second day in Prague was much, much nicer than our first. We got a pretty late start, after deciding to let James and everyone sleep in until 9 if they wanted. Not all of us did, especially since the rooms were super bright in the morning, but we definitely had to wake James up. We had bought milk and cereal from a local market the night before, so we also had breakfast in our room before heading out.

We bought a day pass for the public transportation. It is a 24-hour pass and it worked out very well because we were able to use it the next morning when we needed to get to the train station for our train to Buapdest. Chris decided that instead of taking the trams into the main part of town, we'd take the metro. This meant that instead of catching one of the buses literally down the street, we walked up this bizarre hill full of mud and slugs before getting to the metro station. It was exhausting, but allowed us to continue our pattern of seeing all of Prague except for the parts that people rave about.

Fortunately, that didn't last long. The metro pretty much dropped us off in the Old Town area and we were finally greeted with the scenic views of Prague that you see on the postcards. We started our tour of Prague in the Old Town Square, where we were greeted with the aroma of all of the different foods cooking in the square. We were like the group of kids from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Even though it had been pretty much an hour since we had gotten our foods, our tails wagged with delight and we ended up having a mini feast in the middle of the square. It was great. We sampled everything from Czech goulash, to this delicious Slovenian gnocchi dish, to Slovankian honey wine (so so good). We were in our heaven.

In fact, we were so engrossed in our food that we missed clock show that happens on the hour. The area around the Astronomical Clock in the town square does this little routine every hour. It's a really short show, one of those blink and you miss it deals. By the time I was able to pry Mia away from her goulash, we had missed it :(

After we finished eating, we made our way to the Charles Bridge. On the way, we stopped through several of the touristy shops, and I had to drag Mia away from a few of the marionette stores that were selling Messi marionettes (along with the rest of Barca). Personally, I think it'd be fun to do my own reenactment of Nsync's Bye Bye Bye video with a set of Barca marionettes. Too bad they would be such a pain to bring back.

It took us a while, but we finally made it to the Charles Bridge. The Charles Bridge is this huge pedestrian bridge that crosses over the Vlatava River. While crossing the bridge, you get a fantastic view of the Prague Castle and the other areas surrounding it. There are giant bronze statues that line the bridge, including one of St. John of Nepomuk, a priest who the Queen at the time confided all of her secrets in. When he refused to tell the king her secrets, the king had him tortured and thrown into the river. They also have a small bronze marking showing where he was thrown into the river and you're supposed to touch it to get your once chance to make a wish. Shouldn't take you too long to figure out I wished for.

All in all, the bridge was pretty impressive (albeit incredibly packed), not just because of the epic views you got of the city and the river, but also because it was built in like the 1300s.

Once on the other side we bought some water and made our way up to the Prague Castle. It would have been a painful walk up, so we took a tram up. Once there, we watched the changing of the guard and watched Mia and Jimmy try to take jumpining pictures next to the guards.

We then made our way through the St. Vitus Cathedral, which was gorgeous both inside and out. We wandered aroudn the castle grounds for a little longer. There are some great views of the city from up there. We also tried Czech sweet bread (really good) before making our way back down to the Little Town area (the area under the castle)

We walked around the Little Town streets for a while to get to our next destination: the Lennon wall. When John Lennon died, locals in the city spontaneously started writing tributes to Lennon all over the wall. Each night, the police would try to remove the graffitti only to find that it would immediatley be redone. According to my Rick Steves book, it eventually became a bit of a symbol of freedom during the communist days and is still covered in Beatles-related graffitti today. It was fun trying to play spot the Beatles song with the lyrics scribbled all over the wall.

From there, we made our way back over the Charles Bridge and back to the Old Square. We were initially going to have dinner in the same style that we had our lunch and dine off of street food, but decided that our tired feet would better appreciate a sit down restaurant. It was some touristy hotel restaurant. There was good goulash so I was happy.

After dinner and dessert on some gelato, we made our way back to the hotel and got back around 6:30. That gave Chris and Jimmy a chance to clean up their stuff and have some down time before the taxi picked them up to take them to their airport hotel. Because they were leaving from Prague so early the next day, Umma thought it would be better for them to spend the night at a hotel by the airport, rather than our rather inconveniently located hotel. It worked out well for them and I think they were happy to be in a shower that was not so awkward.

Once they left, Umma Mia and I went on another laundry adventure. We went to an address given to us by the woman who worked at the reception. In her defense, when I looked up the place online, the address she gave us matched the one online. There are no conveniently located laundromats near where we were, so we took a tram up to the right area. We found what we were pretty sure was the street and got to the correct address. All we found was an old door covered in graffitti and no sign of any laundromat. We confirmed with several people walking by that we were indeed on the right street. There was a comic book store, which would have provided some solace to our failed laundry trip, but it was closed.

We got home and cleaned up our stuff, got some blogging in, and went to bed early in preparation for our early bus ride to Budapest.