Prague Revisited

After waking up and eating breakfast at the hotel (a breakfast which could only be described as "weak sauce"). We used the metro line to get back into the city center, or just south of the center in order to meander northward and hopefully stumble upon things to see. Holy Crap! Most of the day was spent in this "northward" progression and the first part of we really had no clear goal, so we just ran into things. Every building around every corner had this really neat and unique architecture to it and half of them had awesome sculptures just in the middle of two people's bedroom windows, and I felt like it had to have some equally unique and neat history behind it, but since none of us knew a single thing about the history of Prague we had no idea what to think of anything. I wanted to take a walking tour so that we could get some of that information from a local while seeing the sights but the idea didn't take. It was actually frustrating to me to be seeing all this really amazing stuff and not knowing a single thing about it beyond "ooh, that's pretty." It felt as though I wasn't actually there, but instead took a look at someone else's snapshots of their tour through Prague. This is almost the exact reason I'm writing all of this right now. All I have taken from Prague is pictures and personal experiences, no cultural exchange, no further understanding. So I'm trying to preserve those aspects I did get to hang on to.

Eventually we decided on going into the direction of the castle to see how far we'd get before fatigue set in. Before we crossed the bridge to get to the proper side of the river though we ran across a building which I could only assume to be a museum that was littered with statues, of who I could only assume to be philosophers, striking the most majestic poses ever. Only pictures can truly explain just how majestic this was. But let it be known, I want a statue just like one of these on my tombstone. Don't even need a grave really, just the statue somewhere. On our ascent towards the castle we ran into what I think was the sort of garden in front of the current Senate building. It had, again, some really awesome statues, fountains, and a crazy looking wall that I still don't understand beyond the pictures I took.

The road to the castle was a little on the steep side but once we got to the top, surprise surprise, it was amazing and huge. We all went back into picture mode since we again had no idea about the history of any of this stuff. We went picture crazy on the gates, a church on the inside of the gates, and everything else we stumbled across. At the top we kind of just sat around for a little bit to let our minds be blown. I'm still not even sure whether we saw the actual castle tower or not. When I first started exploring Prague I thought to myself that as nice of a city as it was I don't think I could bring myself to live there. It seemed as though it could really start to get to you. But then at this area I started to change my mind. The city can seem a little crazy, but they still have places around that retain their peaceful qualities. Not a whooole bunch, but just enough to make it seem livable.

We started looking for a place to eat while heading towards the general direction of the metro. Our food solution was to stop in two different restaurants along our way, each time ordering one meal and splitting it three ways. Worked out well I'd say, as we got to try some fairly varied things from completely different restaurants. On our journey back to the metro we kept on running across more awesome-ness of the city but by this time it was too dark for pictures to come out. For example, the Charles Bridge, which is an old gorgeous bridge with tons of statues lining it took us nearly half an hour to walk a tenth of a mile because of our (mostly failed) attempts to take so many pictures. After that we headed back to the hotel (although first had some sausage type thing at a little stand that I think we'd all rather forget about). Sitting here now I am positive that two days was not enough to see anything here. I feel like a day could have been spent in the castle alone, not just two or so hours. And the first night we were here we passed by other interesting things that we didn't come close to finding again but we didn't stop to explore because we were being hurried to go eat. In the end I think it serves as a small taste of the city and I'll have to come back at some point to really see the rest of it. There was simply no way to get as much out of it as possible in two days.

Shane
7/31/07