i had just enough time to go up to the platforms and back down again before my train arrived. the ride itself was very pretty - not quite long enough for me to read my whole czech travel book which i'd not opened yet, and definitely not long enough for me to meaningfully learn any czech, but mostly, and lots of pretty scenery. we went mostly along small towns and a river. another study in the new/old contrast:
and i didn't yet know how much of this beautiful farmland i'd see in the next week or so:
the main train station at prague is under construction, so all trains are arriving at holesovice, which is a bit north of the city and across the river. the station is definitely not set up as the main station, with just one little tourist office and one little tabac, but luckily i had the inside scoop from marek on what subway to get to his house. i was in early, so i walked from the train station (very confusing roads!) and explored a little. i found this beautiful building
yes, that's a spiral staircase going up the middle! the building feels like a deserted fairgrounds, and i think is where the actual charles bridge statues are on display (as opposed to the fake replicas they have out on the bridge now). there was a nice little park here, with good maps so i could start to orient myself, and i made my way towards downtown. i was definitely out of the tourist sphere here, and it was really nice to be able to approach the city on foot and see its skyline. this is a terrible picture, but it gives you an idea. the city center
and the castle acrss from it
another study in contrasts: here's the prague bike line (actually, i do mean that in the singular, as it was the only one i saw):
i walked around the city a bit. sherry, this one's for you:
and visited the obligatory wenceslas square
where i was lucky enough to come across this amazing display of photos. it turned out i was visiting on the 40th anniversary of the soviet takeover of the city, when they crushed the prague spring of 1968 with tanks and soldiers, leaving 59 dead in the city. this display was photos of protest posters that went up (and usually back down within an hour). some excellent ones here; i wish i had pictures of more of them:
in case you can't read the caption on this one, it says "Radio Vltava announces: we are witnessing how our citizens and the Russian soldiers are embracing".
the city itself is beautiful. i'd never been somewhere with such amazing architectural details, and i loved the city squares (pics of those later) and the curved streets and buildings:
then, on the subway, which made me realize that maybe it's not just the germans who can do mass transit, that maybe it's just new yorkers who make it complicated to tourists, managed to exit the station going the wrong way, and found my google maps of the neighborhood - which had no street names - totally useless. i managed to scrape together three words (kde je spitalska, where is spitalska) for a pair of women with babies in strollers, who said, do you speak english? yes. one of them walked me to my destination, out of her way; she immigrated from russia 5 years ago and likes prague a lot, and has never been to the u.s. anyway, marek made me pasta dinner, and i planned my route for the next day, and then he took me out to a fantastic little local pub for good cheap beer, the sort of pub i probably could never go in as a woman tourist (or even a tourist at all, maybe) but was great to experience - bright lights, old men watching football, heavy tables and benches. marek explained to me that pubs usually only have 1 thing on tap, because you can only really keep one tap tasting good at a time. explains a lot.
