day 17 - august 21st (part 2)

i walked along the top of the hill over to the castle. here's a pretty corner of it


the castle gardens were lovely, groomed, and blooming

here's proof that i was there

there's this amazing technique of decorating walls called sgraffito, which means putting on plaster and then carving it away in a pattern. every town had at least one of these, and here's a bit of a little outbuilding on the castle grounds:
the clock tower (yes, that's gilt)
intricate gilding and painting
gargoyles!! flying buttresses!

i left the castle without paying the overpriced entrance fees to the insides of any part - a 6 oz cup of diluted lemonade cost me 60 crowns (or about $3!) and wandered out to some of the other pretty buildings on this side of the river. incredibly intricate sgraffito:

the pretty loreta, currently the foreign ministry and previously the SS headquarters, and also the site of one of prague's famous defenestrations

does anyone else think maybe it's just a little sacreligious to make a smiley face out of a menorah and stars of david?
just another regular old building with flowers in all the windows.
on the back side of the strahov monastery, an unexpected statue

a tile by a door (for mom!)
the super cool petrin tower, a miniature of the eiffel, at only 299 steps up and only 50 crowns, one of the best deals in prague, with a 360 degree view. also, it had the most amazing little free museum in the basement, which i discovered by accident when i went to the bathroom, and is worth a post of its own, which will follow.
i think this is the coolest graffiti i saw. the eyes, nose, and mouth are drawn on cement repairs to a wall.

coming down through the beautiful gardens on petrin hill, i stopped for a few hours to write postcards, and discovered this little gem of a tennis court tucked away and mostly hidden by greenery. it reminded me of the basketball court i found in berlin, at viktoria park.
at the bottom of the hill, these beautiful flowers in a very busy little park
at the other end of which was a disturbing memorial (i think to those killed by stalin, although it could have been holocaust)
one of david cerny's many prague installations, and sadly the only one i saw
a very prominent display of maybe 100 beautiful photos, a goodplanet.org display called alive!, i think curated by yann arthus-bertrand. these were right across from the municipal house, in front of the fancy-pants mall at namesti republiky, and got a lot of tourist and local attention. photos are worth checking out.i wandered back through the old town, stopped for a lovely pizza and beer, and made my way home for the night.

day 17 - august 21st (part 1)

today i got up early and set out for a long walk around prague. here's the beautiful municipal house which lonely planet calls "Prague's most exuberant and sensual building". i didn't go in, but did admire the outside, and dodge the folks trying to sell me tickets to concerts that night. (but don't worry! i came back later! i was totally wrong to have skipped it!)


a gate in old town and, in the heart of touristy old town - this picture is for corinna -
today was the anniversary, so there were live archival footage being screened in the square, as well as photos. there were lots of folks looking, but helen thinks (and she's probably right) that i was one of the few tourists.

now i wish i had more of these photos.

i walked in the early morning through all these pretty squares with bright bright paint


found a delicious ricotta and raspberry danish for breakfast, after having overcome my fear of interacting with locals and my ignorance of czech (almost everyone spoke czech, english, and german, at least. that's a dissertation for you: how is it that the shopkeepers were almost always right in their language guess? and why were they wrong for me often? seriously - somebody go start interviewing them.)
i loved this curved-facade church

and this is the way prague does street signs (street name big, district small). also the way i remembered the location of the shop selling beautiful hand-painted plates and bowls that i wanted to go back to later on. (that worked beautifully, by the way, and was the moment i realized i could take pictures of things instead of writing them down or saving them and lugging them around.)i found these amazing ceramic dolls in a window display - these pics are for mom! sorry i didn't get you one.


and this neat leaded glass window (also for mom)

i stopped by the incredibly helpful and friendly CzechTourism shop, where a very nice girl loaded me up with all the maps and train and bus schedules she could, and then wanted to chat about my trip. this was the first moment i really realized that biking alone for 300 km in the czech republic was out of the ordinary ...


the entrance to the charles bridge, which i got to much later than i hoped, due to all the neat things i saw on the way, and thus got to experience what lonely planet describes as being "in the front row of a Linkin Park concert for all the room you'll have to yourself".
and a view of the castle from the bridge

off to the other side, the pretty vltava, which was full of these little dams and also tons of kayakers and canoers and rafters who didn't seem to mind them.

on the bridge, believe it or not, a jazz band with a banjo! and they weren't bad, either. dad, this one's for you. sorry i didn't buy a cd - i went back to look for them later but they were gone.
a beautiful door:
and a beautiful statue on the entrance to a bridge
prague's TV tower, seen from the top of the hill overlooking the city, letna gardens.

also up here, on the path up, this super cool girl:
and once i finally got to the top, an amazing diy skate park. there were probably 20 teenage boys hanging out up here. what a view they have!
and in the spot where once stood the largest statue of stalin once stood, there is now a giant metronome. this apparently was also the site of prague's first rock club in the 90s. go reappropriation. and go skater boys.
the day is not done - next up is the castle - but this post is long enough, so i'll split it into 2.

day 16 - august 20th

today i traveled from berlin to prague, after a nice breakfast at home with daniel. the berlin train station is beautiful and so easy to navigate and buy tickets:
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.