Prague Part II - Saturday night and Sunday morning

Prague castles is up on a hill. After failing to find the tram that goes up, we ended up walking up the stairs. By this time it was nearly 6pm. Everything was closed although there were still a lot of tourists around. We enjoyed the view of the city and walked around the castle a bit. It doesn't look like a castle. Just a bunch of modern looking building surrounding a big church - Church of St. Vitus. After wandering around for another couple of hours we headed down, found a Chinese place, and had dinner.

By the time we reached the Charles Bridge again, the sun was setting. We took some pictures and continued walking around the river. The sunset was nice and we sat on a bench facing the river. This was the start of another interesting part of our trip - chatting with fellow Americans. Prague was filled with tourists. We saw many Americans, Koreans, Germans, Chinese, Japanese, Australian etc. There were two people sitting next to us on the bench and they were from Oaklahoma. This was the last part of their missionary trip to the Czech Republic. They stayed in a little town and helped build houses and such. They said that everything there was half the price in Prague. We talked about many things and they said that there were fireworks last night along the bridge. They were sitting there to see if there were more fireworks tonight. One of the guys is actually an environmental scientist and works with contaminated groundwater, essentially brownfield redevelopment. That's what I'm supposed to be doing this summer as well so that was cool. At around 10:15, it was getting really dark and we decided to leave for our hostel. I really enjoyed their company but it was getting late.

Sunday. We had to check out by 9am so we got up at around 8am. The hostel didn't provide breakfast so we had to find our own. I brought bread and cheese with me from Berlin and had that. We got some snacks and drinks from the stores around the hostel since everything was a lot cheaper than the tourist attractions. It was a nice neighborhood. We were able to leave some of our things at the hostel so we didn't have to carry around big backpacks. Although my bag was a lot lighter since I brought 1.5 liters of water with me. I've figured out that I need 1 liter of water a day while traveling.

We took the subway back to the river and walked over to the Old Town Hall. Another big tourist attraction. We saw another St. Nicholas church. I've been to so many St. Nicholas churches lately, it's quite amazing. We went in and sat down for part of the service. Very friendly church. The priest even said a few things in English. We then walked over to the famous Astronomical Clock. The clock was huge. Bigger than I thought. We then walked into another church that wasn't visitor friendly at all. They closed off all the pews and had Silence written all over the place. We rushed out at 11am to try to see the Walk of the Apostols on the clock. But we missed it and decided to keep walking around Old Town until noon.

We walked around and saw the Spanish Synagogue. They charged for admission so we didn't go in. We didn't have time to go see all the Jewish sites anyway. We had lunch at a pastry shop and I tried some local sweets. I'm still not sure what I ate but it was good. We went back to the clock tower at noon. The place was filled with people. The "show" was pretty short and not much happened. Jingwen was so disappointed. She said that there is a clock tower in Switzerland that had a show that went on for like 10 minutes. But that one wasn't religious and had dancing animals and such.

After this we wanted to take the subway to Prague Castle but got stuck in a shop with really cute toys. They had many wooden dolls that were really cute. Jingwen got this mouse doll after changing for Czech currency from me. I had just changed 10 Euros that morning. We walked and came across a street with many stalls selling the same kinds of toys. We found her mouse nearly half the price. So she ran back and returned the more expensive one.

We finally took the subway and went across the bridge. We walked up the hill again and was able to go into the church. That was free. Everything else cost money. We didn't have the time or money. I had no interest in them anyhow. Jingwen climbed up the church tower. I was too tired and saw in a courtyard and ate my snacks. I thought I had climbed up enough stuff for the weekend. We finally found the tram and took that down the hill. We got back to our hostel at 3:30pm and had just enough time for us to get a little food from deli before rushing to catch our 4:34pm train back to Berlin.