Finally Prague

We have been talking about Prague for ages and David kept on telling me about all the different things he wanted to show me there - one day. Well, changes of travel plans can have something good about them as well: even though we missed out on Moscow and St. Petersburg, we are now in Prague. In golden Prague, in glorious Prague, in artistic Prague...



Many of you have already been here so you will recognize the pictures and you'll know that we did, of course, all the touristy things there are to be done in Prague: We spent hours strolling through the streets of the old city centre with the hundreds of beautiful houses to look at, we watched the astronomical clock on the hour when the 12 apostles appear, I drove David nuts visiting every single shop selling marionettes (even though our budget didn't allow us to buy one...), we crossed Charles Brige a couple of times enjoying the views over the castle and observing all the different artists, we did, of course, visit the castle itself with its amazing cathedral with the even more amazing stained-glass windows, we saw the ancient house of Kafka, we visited the old Jewish quarter with its synagogues and the old cementry, we couldn't go past the announcements of all those different concerts and theater performances without seeing one, and, due to the bad weather, we even visited a Mucha museum (famous Tcheque painter). Wow, I am getting out of breath writing all of this but we had the "problem" that our host had to leave at 7 am every morning to go to work and we had to leave the apartement at the same time and couldn't come back till 9 pm, so for us we had some very unusually long and tiresome days discovering the city. Of course, I couldn't but find Prague beautiful. It even made me a little sad thinking about the fact that we could have many more beautiful cities like this one, hadn't we had the bombs of WWII. Well, Prague was a feast for the eye, I didn't know where to look first, and it was also a wonderfully lively place with music at every corner and people being really, really creative about what to do with their lives and their artistic talents. The atmosphere here was great.



In my eyes, the city had only one major disadvantage: hundreds of thousands of tourists! And then writing that, I mean hundreds of thousands. It was just incredible. We had been getting used to traveling with quite a number of tourists because since our arrival in Eastern Europe, we had been confronted with traveling during high season for the first time, but nothing was like Prague. You litterally couldn't walk through the streets, you had to drift with the flow of the tour groups. Wherever we wanted to go, we had to line up and wait to get in, to file from picture to picture in the museums, from window to window in the churches, ..., hundreds were assembled around the clock on the central plaza, on the campground our tent was about a meter away from all the other tents around it... it was hell. Seriously, I don't know how the locals live with it but I don't think I could cope with such an infestation of tourists almost all year long!



We still tried to make the most of our time here and I am sure I will come back here again a couple of times to appreciate the city even more. It's fabulous. Nevertheless, we are quite relieved as well, that we'll be leaving for Theresienstadt and a national parc in "Bohemien Switzerland" tomorrow. Hopefully, we'll get away from the crowds for a while! And then.... Germany! We'll make a stop-over at Dresden and Leipzig to visit some friends of mine and then.... see you soon!