Prague - July '06

Although completely abused by the english stag and hen parties, Prague was still on our list of things to see. We joined Eugene and Heidi at Heathrow on friday night, and arrived at our hotel in Prague just before 1am. The taxi ride from the airport gave us our first view of the famous castle, which dominates the night sky.

Our hotel was superbly postioned, 10 minutes walk from both the Charles Bridge, and Wenceslas Square. After a brief, boring breakfast we made our way through Wenceslas Square (which is essentially a big high street), to the Old Town Square. This is most famous for it's astronomical clock, which plays a little tune every hour, and has little dancing figures and a skeleton ringing a bell. Tourists flock to the site to witness the event, which to us was about as interesting as a bug flying into the windscreen. The square is really pretty though, and we made our way to the top of the tower, which gave us a birds eye view of the whole of Prague.

Our plan for the day was to take in a walking tour of the city. We did this for 3 reasons, described below:

1) We like walking
2) We would take in a bit of the history
3) It included a free beer

The walk began at the Old Town Square, and we made our way through the backstreets of Prague to the Jewish Quarter, learning quite a bit along the way. One interesting thing that none of us had heard of before ( and may interest you) was the following. When a building has 2 towers, as quite a few in Prague do, and the one is bigger than the other, they are meant to represent Adam and Eve. After passing through all of the synogogues of the Jewish Quarter, we made our way to the Charles Bridge. By this stage we had been told to watch out for pickpockets about 5 times, and apparantly now we had arrived at the hotspot. I think Prague must have a pickpocket university, and it seems to be a fairly popular profession. The walk across the bridge was great, but one can't help feeling a bit like an ant, walking with it's entire colony across a twig. We then jumped on a tram, and headed up the to the back of the Prague Castle, which is positioned on a hill, looking out over the city. We walked through the St Vitus Cathedral, which for Jacks and I was one of the highlights of the weekend. The stained glass windows are unbelievable, with intricate detail and contrasting colours. We had now reached the end of our tour, and realised that we were pretty hungry. Our guide had earlier told us of a cheap local restaurant, so that's where we headed.

Lunch was great, and I tested some of the local flavours which included pork and dumplings. Jacks had more limited options (in a country that likes eating animals), and had a salad. The beers were cold and cheap, and we took time to take in the relaxed environment and cool breeze. This breeze turned into a shower, and we made our way back to the hotel to prepare for an evening out on the town.

This began at another restaurant, where we again found ourselves eating. This time I went for the deer, which surprisingly was extremely tender, and full of flavour. Heidi, as she often does, demanded that everybody had tequila's for dessert, and this set the tone for the rest of the night. A few pub's and beers later, we found ourselves at a pub called 'Dog's bollocks', and this was the last stop of our evening.

The deer must have been slightly off, as the next morning I woke up with a bit of a headache, and was feeling lethargic to say the least. Jacks, Eugene and Heidi were feeling the same way, so I concluded that it might actually have been the tequila. We decided to get out of Prague, and caught a train to Katne Hora, a medieval town, 1 hour east of Prague. After arriving at the station, we walked about 10 minutes to the Sedlec Ossuary or 'Bone Church'. This is a chapel that was built in 1400, and became a very popular burial ground because of what the local's believed was 'holy soil'. In the late 19th century a local monk (who was half blind), was given the task of decorating the interior of the chapel. He made the fairly strange decision of using the 40,000 sets of human skeleton's as material. The result is a bizarre bone filled church, with a chandelier made with every bone in the human body, and many other weird and wonderful creations.

We arrived back into Prague late afternoon, and after a quick lunch we strolled back to the hotel along the Vltava river. Jacks and I left Eugene and Heidi (who were spending another night), and made our way to the airport for our flight back to London. We had a really fun weekend with some good old mates, and can definately recommend Prague as a destination, not only for cheap beer, but more importantly for the history and architecture.