Walkabout in Prague

The Municipal Building


More Art Nouveau opulence at the cafe inside the Municipal Building


I!m at the internet cafe again and just lost the last 20 minutes of tyzping in my blog session. I!ll give it another try.

We got up early this morning to meet a guide for an introductory walking tour of Prague. Turns out we had nearly two hours to kill before the walk began,so we took a stroll over to Charles Bridge. The Bridge spans the river Vltava, known as the Moldau in German. The bridge is lined with statues of saints and is one of the ost picturesque spots in Prague. I snapped a few photos then we decided we§d better find out where the metro station was and figure out how to buy a ticket.

We followed directional signs to Metro line A and found it without much of a problem. Buying tickets, similarly, was easy. We only had to go two stops to the the top of Wenceslas Square in New Town. Wenceslas Square is not a square so much as a boulevard and New Town is not all that new, having been founded sometime in the 13th Century. And Wenceslas was not a king, but a Duke of Bohemia. He was a good man, murdered by his brother.

We saw some rather striking Art Nouveau architecture along Wenceslas Square and the new Marks and Sparks building, from which in the 1980s the Velvet Revolution was launched. The Velvet Revolution is so called because Communist rule was overthrown in Czechoslovakia without violence or bloodshed. From New Town we walked to Old Town and the Jewish Quarter. We walked down Pariska Street, designed to resemble a Parisian boulevard and they!ve got the upscale boutiques to go with it. We saw some beautiful gothic churches and Franz Kafka!s birthplace. We were amazed to learn that the Czech people did not know of Kafka or his works until after the Velvet Revolution. The tour ended at Charles Bridge and by this time the bridge was crowded with tourists, street artists and buskers. We were so glad we had visited earlier withut the crowds and the clutter.

It is bitter cold today. By the end of our two=hour tour my toes were nearly frozen, so we stopped off for a quick bite to eat. In the afternoon we browsed in the shopping area. We went to one of the Christmas markets, but it was rather small and did not have many interesting stalls. We went shopping in Kotva, a five=story Dept. store. We were told it was a Russian Dept. store by someone who had visited here about seven or eight years ago, but we think all the Russian stuff must be gone by now. What we saw was either imported from elsewhere in Europe or made in the Czech Republic.

We went to a chamber orchestra performance in one of the baroque chapels in the Old Town. We heard some popular classical pieces by composers such as Mozart, Vivaldi, Chopin and Dvorak. The music was lovely and the acoustics spectacular.

We had dinner at Pelikan Restaurant, said to be a Russian restaurant, but I!m beginning to think all traces of the Russians are gone from Prague, cuz there wasn!t one Russian item on the menu that I could tell. The food was good but not spectacular.

During the course of the day, we also stopped a wonderful cafe in the Municpal House. The decor was Art Nouveau straight out of the 1920s.

We both really like Prague. The architecture is fantastic. There are so many interesting cultural events. The streets are very clean. The people are friendly. And the food has been pretty good. Though menus are heavy with meat dishes I!ve had really lovely fresh salads with delicious tomatoes. Better tomatoes than I!ve ever gotten in the U.K.