Beautiful Praha - part 1

When people talked about Prague as the most beautiful city in Europe, I thought they were kidding. How can a city compare to the likes of Rome, Venice etc. but I could see what they were talking about once I got there. It is most definitely one of the prettiest cities in Europe if not the prettiest. The different thing about Prague is that even the bad areas aren't really bad. They are still slightly downtrodden old, pretty buildings.

As soon as we made our way into the city, we knew we had our work cut out for us. We had two days and plenty to see. We took a bus from the airport to a nearest tram stop and took the tram to our hotel. It took a total of about 45 minutes from the airport to get to our hotel which was 5 minutes walk from the castle and we even had a castle view from our hotel room [Pic]. The hotel building itself was still owned by the castle authorities and reflects the architecture of the castle.

We put our stuff down, freshened up and after a half hour rest, we were on our way to explore the city. We had a bunch of things to see, the castle, the lesser town, Charles bridge, the old town, the Lennon wall, the dancing building and the Jewish quarter.

We started off taking the tram to Charles bridge and walk over to the old town from there. Charles bridge, constructed about 800 years ago, was the only bridge over the Vlatava river and used to connect the old town to the castle. Its a pedestrian bridge with painters and different vendors trying to ply their trade and of course a ton of tourists :-). Looking up from the bridge, the castle on top of a hill makes for quite an imposing sight.


Anyway, walking over the charles bridge we made our way to the old town center. We spent the afternoon just walking through streets after streets of pretty buildings, canal-ed streets looking like venice, nice cafe's and designer shops etc. The atmosphere, although extremely touristy, seems very chilled out and relaxed. Storekeepers paying the right amount of attention, broad smiles all around and people eager to help. English isn't spoken very widely though and we did struggle to communicate with the locals. Well, I even got offered some dope , well the guy was speaking Czech so I guess I don't really know. He should really get some classes on identifying his target customers right.

While in the old town, we caught a street stage show being put on by cultural groups from the various countries. The Italians kept their show lively and us captivated and dancing whereas the polish dancers bored us enough for us to be attracted by other lures and we walked on.

The Old Town was the original place of settlement of Prague. In its north is the Jewish quarter, south is the crazy quarter with slightly more downtrodden buildings. To its west is the river and the castle and to its east... well more of Prague I guess. The old town square has been the heart of the old town for about a 1000 years now. It houses the very gothic Tyn Cathedral and the Astronomical clock. It's about 700 years old and still running :-) and the swiss thought they made good watches.


We got on to the trams and the busses after that to take a tour of the rest of the city. The outskirts and the places not usually frequented by the tourists. Again, the city impressed. As I was saying earlier, there aren't any bad parts to prague, well none that we could see anyway. After dark, we came back to the old town to take a look at the town and the castle at night and the sigh was just mesmerizing. It took the word picturesque to a whole new level.


Grabbing some dinner in the form of a pizza slice and a falafel sandwich, we turned in for the night. Well ,I hadn't slept the night before and Anusha hadn't had more than a 4 hours of sleep so we both were pretty knocked out for the night.