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2010 Trip: Prague Day 2

5 minutes
June 12, 2010

25th May 2010

I met up with Lenka at 10:30 at the bottom of Castle Hill. Surprise, surprise, it was raining. We joked how I had not been able to escape the rain since I left Bucharest. The ability to influence European weather patterns seems to be a speciality of mine.

As we reached the entrance to the castle itself, we looked out over the slightly sodden city. It was a beautiful sight - gothic church spires rear above the streets and narrow alleys cross the Old City, intersecting at haphazard angles. In the forground the Vltava river snakes across the town, crossed nearest to us by the famous Charles Bridge that we would reach later in the day.

Europe, it seems, is constantly under repair. The path we walked up had just been renovated and just inside the castle, the Alchemists Street (full of tiny brightly coloured hovels) was also undergoing extensive repair. This seems to happen everywhere, though occasionally one catches a break and finds a site where the scaffolding has recently been removed. Sometimes restoration is done without sufficient thought about the “improvements” that are being made to the building and it just ends up looking tacky and hideous, but usually the old buildings are improved with a bit of TLC.

The castle is, apparently, the largest castle in the world. This is a very loose definition of castle, however, as the buildings here are very much of the palace-castle rather than being major defensive structures. The castle consists of a series of four courtyards that have housed a variety of dynasties of royal families. These days it is a mecca for tourists featuring museums, art galleries, palaces for the visiting, and a magnificent Gothic basilica. The prices reflect this - 350 koruna to enter all of the buildings, then one pays an additional 500 koruna to hire an audio guide which actually provides directions around the buildings (though it turned out to be less necessary than claimed).

The castle is also home to a the Czech president and a surreptitiously placed flag, if flying at full mast, indicates his presence. But he is just one man against the entire population of the Czech school system (well, almost…) who decided to visit on the same day as us. I am led to believe it is usually this busy, if not more so. The highlights were probably the museum, which contained a vast exhibition of the history of the palace over the past 1200 years, the window of defenestration (which as one might guess, was actually used for the purpose), and the basilica. This is the first Gothic cathedral I had visited on this trip and it was particularly impressive with huge flying buttresses, a nave as long as I have seen, stunning stained glass (which I love!), tombs of saints (including our good friend King Wencelas and another with over two tonnes of solid silver used in its construction). Surprisingly, the exterior of the building was also under repair, but apart from really awesome gargoyles, it also featured some beautiful circular staircases on the outside of the building, one could (if one worked there) literally climb the buttresses themselves!

Around mid-afternoon, we left the castle and headed up the hill, grabbing a roll for lunch on the way. We stopped to hear the famous bells at the Loreta church chime before heading to the large and still operational Strahovsky convent. The buildings in this area look almost Spanish with whitewashed walls and clean arches. We sat in the sun (which had finally graced us) and chatted before visiting the library of the cloister. With baroque ceiling paintings and one of the most impressive collections of books and assorted sets of preserved flora and fauna, the library was a treasure. Unfortunately, you guessed it, the main room of the building as covered in scaffolding and under repair.

We walked along to the crest of the hill behind the castle, through forest and well maintained park land. Here we came to a miniature Eiffel tower, which we climbed. It was still a good few hundred steps to the top! There was a stunning view across the city, we could not only see the Old Town far below, but also look out at the suburbs, the newer apartment-block cities that cover the horizon in every direction.

We headed down and down further to the river, where after visiting some huge bronze babies with no faces (as one does), we wandered across the famous Charles Bridge to the Old City. We wandered through the old Jewish quarter, which I had missed the day before, and finally found some Chinese food for dinner, which was very tasty (and cheap!).

Lenka and I parted company and I walked back to my hostel, crossing over the river. There were beautiful views of the illuminated castle and golden shivers of light on the water below.

A few random notes on Prague and Czech. Prague has a reputation throughout Europe for being a beautiful, yet dark and foreboding city, and it certainly fits it’s own stereotype. The narrow streets are a contributing factor, but more strongly, many of the old buildings (especially churches) are not cleaned (inside or out), so over hundreds of years they have developed a patina of soot, darkening them.

The standard of living here is fairly comparable to that of Budapest, they are both fairly well off countries, but not in the league of Western Europe. These countries are working hard to reach such a level, but certain movements within the EU do not help.

The current example, about which people here (and even more so further east) are particularly bitter about, is the bankruptcy of Greece. The EU has agreed to bail out Greece, but this means that those countries in the East, with far lower living conditions than Greece, are forced to pay for it. Understandably, this does not go down like a spoonful of sugar.