Prague Day One

I finally made it to Prague! We went for 5 whole days and I actually feel like I saw a good amount of the city. A friend of my parents, Inka, has a beautiful apartment right on Parizska street (the Parisian street) which is the high-end shopping street. She lives right above Tiffany's and across the street from Jimmy Choo and Gucci. I was good though and stayed out of Tiffany's. The apartment is also about 50 feet from the Old Town Square - location, location, location. Everything was within walking distance.

We started off our first day with a walk across the famous Charles Bridge to St Nicholas Cathedral (on the way to the castle), Prague castle, and St. Vitus Cathedral (in the castle). The Prague castle is the largest ancient castle in the world. We walked a lot on this day!

Here's the tower at the start of the Charles Bridge. Martin is in most of my photos, wandering around or looking patient, as always. Before you look at the pictures I have to tell you to be prepared for a lot of gloomy photos! We saw the sun for about 3 hours total over the 5 days we spent in Prague. Thankfully the Charles Bridge looks best in gloom and fog:



The castle, seen from the bridge:





A glimpse inside St. Nicholas Cathedral:



A commanding view of Prague from the castle:





These cylinder-shaped cinnamon-sugar rolls are baked and sold all over Prague. They're pretty tasty but the best part about them is that you can smell them baking all over the city.



The St Vitus Cathedral, which is located within the castle walls, has some impressive stained glass. As usual, it's not easy to get good pictures of it. But I tried. You will have to go there and see it for yourself; it was beautiful and there was a lot more of it than what you see below.



The outside of the cathedral:



An area squished between the castle walls called the Golden Lane. The houses were postage-stamp sized. They were built in the 16th century for the castle guards and in the 17th century were occupied by goldsmiths, which gave the street its name. After the goldsmiths the houses were occupied by poor people and criminals and several famous authors such as Kafka. Today they are souvenir shops and a museum.



Our typical Czech lunch. Pilsner Urquell beer, of course. And ham, potato dumplings, and cabbage. There was a lot of ham eaten on this trip which I enjoyed because it's something I never get to eat since nobody in my family likes it. And in Prague it's ubiquitous.



After lunch we visited the Senate gardens which had some owls and peacocks. We found the garden because we were searching for this big gray area we could see from the castle. It turned out to be a dripstone wall, I think created for the owls as they were sitting inside the pockets in it.



After the gardens we fought our way through the crowds back across the Charles Bridge, had a siesta back at the apartment, then headed out for a beer on the Old Town square followed by dinner.

There were always many street performers on the square in the evenings. Magicians, musicians, dancers, big bubble blowers, and one night a really lame guy dressed as a native american who just stood around and beat a drum. We didn't get a picture of him but he was definitely one of the worst street performers we'd ever seen.