Friday 15 & Saturday 16th Jun
How I love Prague, it is a very interesting city, a mix of interesting old buildings, Gothic and Renaissance, newer modern ones and communist era functional office and residential buildings. It is well served with a good public transport system, trams run regularly around town, as well as buses and the Metro, so you never have to wait long for your ride. It has a charm that makes you marvel at the dramatic setting, interest you with the variety of high end fashion retailers and then wonder about the crumbling facades of the older utilitarian buildings that line the streets as you wiz by on the tram.
We a lovely couple of days exploring the city. On the Friday we left about 10am and caught the tram into the heart of the city to Wenceslas square. Here we wandered up to the Concert Museum and ended up buying tickets to that nights concert in the Hall. One of the last to be played before the building was to be closed for renovation. It was to be played by the Czech Strings Chamber Orchestra and would be playing for about 65 mins, music by Mozart, Vivaldi, Liszt, Dvorak, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. It looked to be a good program and the idea of having a night of pleasant music in an Historic building was something to look forward to.
We then decided to book a Prague City tour with Martin Tours that would take about 2 1/2 hours and would be mainly riding in the bus with a bit of walking in the Palace precinct. With Astrid having problems with her knees and Jenny experiencing some shortness of breath with Asthma this was a good option rather than trying to walk everywhere. We had a few hours to wait for this though so we decided for a bit of exploration and found ourselves in a small back street outside a Restaurant/Pub called the Tlustá Koala, or Fat Koala. It had a quaint English Pub look and at first we were only going to have a drink but decided on having our lunch there, making it our main meal of the day so we didn’t have to worry about a big meal later when we were going to be at the concert. We enjoyed the meal of local food, Goulash, and Chicken with a soft cheese filling and cranberry sauce. The service was slow but the food was good and as it was quite a warm day we were happy to sit a while in the cool interior and have a quiet rest before heading to our meeting place for our tour.
After lunch we made our way back to the Wenceslas square to board our tour bus. Apart from an Indian couple we were the only other English speaking people on the bus. There were Czech people and some Russians, so our guide had to explain everything 3 times, but either English is a much shorter language or we were given the abbreviated version because it seemed that the information we received from him was much shorter. The bus drove quickly passed the sights and through the crowded streets, with hardly a time to have a good look or take any photos. We stopped at the Palace area and had a wonderful view of the city and river before walking to the Palace grounds and St. Vitus Cathedral, then we followed the streets down towards the river where our bus picked us up. It was then a quick trip pass the Charles Bridge to the Jewish quarters where we again left the bus and walked to the old town square which was the end of our tour. We just missed the movement of the Astronomical clock in the Old Town hall tower but we had enough for the time and made our way back to Wenceslas square via a coffee shop for a iced coffee and shared cake.
We made our way to the Concert Museum and while we waited in foyer met another couple of Aussie travelers, a couple of ladies, they were also on the European discovery trip getting around by car, train and aeroplane. We enjoyed a wonderful concert and then met them again outside and walked back down the square chatting. We decided to have a drink and something to eat together, which we bought from one of the many roadside stalls that line the square. Choice which are usually, sausages and bread, or schnitzel and bread, with sauce and or onions, beer is cheap here too, not much more than soft drink. We shared our meal sitting on benches in the middle of the square while we exchanged travel anecdotes and other personal information. We left the ladies to get our tram ride back to camp, the latest we had been out and luckily we had our gate key as everything was shut up for the night.
Saturday we woke up late and had a quiet morning catching up on blogging, emails, skype and doing a bit of reading. It was quite hot and humid, the 212-year-old temperature record of 25.9 degrees Celsius measured at Prague’s Klementinum in 1800 was beaten with 27.7 degrees we found out later, but we decided to leave for the city at 3.00 pm hoping to avoid most of the early tourists. We only had two sights in mind to see, first the Charles Bridge and then the Astronomical clock in action. We arrived at the Charles Bridge and found it to be quite busy, which is not supposed to be unusual. We walked across to the other side and found a quiet, shady spot to have a drink and wandered back to the other side. We then wandered up towards the old town square where it was obvious that we were not the only ones waiting for the chiming of the clock. While we waited be decided to have an ice-cream dessert, which was very welcome and it was a cool quiet spot to wait the 20 min.s until the clock did its thing. After this it was time to walk back to the tram thought the shopping streets and back to our camper.
A quiet night was spent watching some TV and then to bed for the next day we are back on the road to the next camping spot in Rural Czech Republic.
