Tuesday December 26: Prague
A Full Day of Walking
The repairman didn’t fix the A/C. If anything he made it
worse. We didn’t want to stay up any later, so we just went to bed. I slept OK,
but I sweated a lot.
Today has so far been a rather successful (but busy) day. We
got up and had breakfast, where we saw a lot of our shipmates. We then put on
our jackets, got our cameras and such, and went down to board the buses. I
carried a fanny pack containing umbrellas around all day, which guaranteed that
we wouldn’t need them.
Our bus first took us up to the
castle.
When I first got off
the bus, I was afraid that I was rather overdressed (heavy fleece shirt and
heavy down jacket) and was going to be too warm, but in very short order I
started feeling chilled, so I put on my hat and zipped up my jacket. I think
overall, this was the correct clothing to be wearing. I think if I had on my
red fleece, I would have been cold at times.
Our guide had a tendency to stop and talk about something,
and then to continue walking with no audible clues. This meant that if you
wandered a short distance off to take a picture, you might return and find the
guide and the group missing, as they had moved on. Since with the audio system,
she was effectively talking into your ear, you couldn’t just follow the sound
of her voice. At one point, Amy and I both lost the group, and we had to scurry
around until we saw someone we recognized, and could then rejoin the group.
Then we drove down towards the old town and left the bus for
the rest of the morning. We wandered through the town, following our tour
guide. We crossed over the Charles Bridge, and at one point, we made a short
stop at a particular coffee shop. This was nominally a toilet break, but a lot
of people got something to eat and/or drink. When we saw that they had macarons,
we got three of them. I should have gotten a coffee, but I got a hot chocolate
instead. The problem was that everything was terribly sweet, and I was dying
for something that wasn’t sweet for contrast. I got a chocolate one, figuring
that chocolate is always safe, but it turns out that the lemon one was the most
tasty.
We then went down into a basement Christmas gallery. It was
actually more like a small Christmas Market, but instead of food, it had
Christmas crafts. Amy saw some things that she had been looking for, but when
she went to buy them, she found that they only took cash. We were not going to
be in the country long, and we weren’t planning on doing a lot of shopping, so
we hadn’t bothered getting any cash. We were planning to use credit cards for
anything we needed to buy (primarily meals).
There was only about 15 minutes (or less) before we were
supposed to move on, so I ran out and tried to find a nearby ATM. I could not,
given the short time we had available, so I had to go down and tell Amy to come
up without buying anything.
On our way to the next stop, I hit up an ATM. It seemed to
take soooo long to process things. I could hear the guide, around the corner,
counting people and finding that she was one person short (me), and Amy
explaining that I was at the ATM. Finally it finished, and I dashed around the
corner so that the group could continue.
We ended up passing the Museum of Sex Toys. I imagine that
going in would have been a rather cheesy experience (as would visiting the
Museum of Torture, which we saw somewhere else there).
We ended up in the main square just below the
astronomical clock.
We had about 15 minutes before the top of the hour, when the clock made
a little show. We got a good location and waited to see the show. Amy and I remembered
eating lunch at the restaurant on the plaza when we had visited Prague on our
first sabbatical trip.
After the show, we were surprised that the square behind it
contained a Christmas market, and the surprising part was that it was still
there and functioning, even though it was the day after Christmas. We had 30
minutes there to wander around on our own.
After that, the plan was to walk to something square and
catch the bus back to the hotel. Amy and I gave the guide our audio boxes, and
bailed out of the tour. We retraced our steps and went back to the basement
Christmas gallery. There was an entrance fee, so I waited outside while Amy
went in and bought the stuff that she had been interested in. I found out later
that she had explained that she had been there before but without cash, and
they let her in without charging her the admission fee.
We needed to have an early dinner (~5:00) as we had "Prague By
Night" starting at 6:45. We didn’t want a big lunch followed by an early dinner.
At the Christmas market, there was a place roasting hams on a turning spit over
a wood fire. That seemed good, so we went there and got a ham and a hot wine.
That wasn’t as bad as I expected.
We continued on in the same direction that the group had
taken (using Google Maps to help navigate). After only a short distance, we
ended up at the
tower where we had seen the musicians playing the previous night.
We decided to return to the hotel via the same way that we had gone to
dinner the previous night. Just outside the Red Stag, we ran into Tracy and
Matt again. I can’t count the number of times that we’ve been wandering on our
own and randomly run across them. We continued on to a train station, where we
saw what looked like a
professional photo shoot
of two female models.
At this point, our plans took a sharp left. Amy had been
wanting to visit the Jewish Cemetery during our free time. I managed to find it
on Google Maps, and I discovered that it was basically on the opposite side of
the Christmas Market from where we were currently. So we turned around and
retraced our steps yet again, went through the market again
(and saw that the big tree was now lit)
and continued out the other side.
Amy had wanted a funnel cone,
and so she stopped at a shop and got one.
We eventually got to the Jewish area and found the cemetery.
We got tickets and went inside. Amy was incredibly moved, almost to tears. I
have to say that I was rather indifferent. It was sort of like the cemetery we
visited going from Paris to the boat. There were lots of grave markers, and a
lot of dead bodies. The main difference is that one was arranged in a very
ordered manner, and the other was very haphazard and chaotic. But I have no
personal connection with either cemetery, so I was rather indifferent to each.
Afterwards we visited the inside of a very old synagogue.
To return to the hotel, we went straight to the river and
then followed the river until we reached the hotel. At that point, the full (or
nearly full) moon was up and popping in and out of clouds. I got some hopefully
good pictures of various buildings with the moon shining overhead.
When we got back to the hotel (maybe around 4:30?) we found
that the A/C hadn’t spontaneously started working. But with no heat running, it
had cooled a bit to a somewhat tolerable temperature. I didn’t bother calling
reception to complain again, but I did open the window a bit, as the inside
courtyard seemed a bit cooler than our room.
We got changed a bit (and I switched from my boots to my
sneakers, which my feet were definitely happy with), we got Amy’s phone on a
charger, and we went down to have dinner at 5:00 at the hotel restaurant. The
main reason was that it was close. Amy got the trout, which in hindsight was
probably the way to go. I was afraid that the trout might have a lot of bones,
so I got poached salmon. It came with a caviar sauce, which meant it was
covered with a small number of fish eggs. Amy wanted to try one. I wish I had
my camera ready when she tasted it. The face that Amy made was priceless. She
hadn’t expected it to taste like a capsule full of fish oil.
I checked my fitness tracker, and it estimates that we
walked more than 10 miles that morning. I clocked in 12.8 by the end of the
day. There is no way Amy could have done this a year or two ago.
We got changed for our evening program and headed down. I didn’t
bring the umbrellas this time, and I didn’t bring my big camera or
point-and-shoot. The SLR would have been almost useless without a tripod. The
iPhone seems to do much better in low light situations than the other two
cameras. (On this trip, I’ve taken many more pictures with my phone than on any
previous trip.)
I was concerned that we didn’t have our audio boxes, but
they gave us new ones for the tour. In hindsight, this made perfect sense. We
kept them on the boat, but on the boat, we kept them in chargers. Here, we had
no way to charge them. So rather than using it for the morning and evening and
perhaps running out of charge, we turned them in after the morning tour, and
for the evening tour we got ones that had been recharged.
This was a smaller group, so we got a smaller bus instead of
the normal big ones we’ve been using. There was maybe 20-30 of us only. We
drove across the river and over to the area under the castle. We got off and
meandered under the Charles Bridge and over to a small island (which was only
separated from the mainland by a canal). Our guide talked about interesting
things in the area, but we also got a bunch of pictures out over the river.
I wish we had had some “free time” to explore this area on
our own, or that it was a bit closer to where we were staying. (After we got
back to the hotel, neither of us was particularly interesting in walking all
the way there and all the way back.)
We reboarded the bus and went up the hill to some sort of
monastery brew house. It wasn’t clear whether it was run by the monastery, or
whether it had at one time been a monastery, but now it was a brew pub. Our fee
for the tour included a beverage there. Fortunately, the interior was not
smoky. They had a selection of beers which were apparently quite good. I don’t
like beer, so I got a glass of wine.
Afterwards, we went down to a small patio, where we had a
good view of the
mini-Eiffel tower (1/5 scale),
and the river and areas of
Prague along the river.
We got back on the bus and road it to the Hilton. Our guide
described it as the biggest hotel (building) in the country, and I can believe
it. On the elevator ride up, we met some folks who were flying home (or maybe
leaving the hotel) around 6am. There seem to be large numbers of our companions
with fairly early flights. When Amy mentioned that we didn’t need to leave
until after 11am, they told us not to rub it in.
We got back around 9, which was a bit early for going to
bed. It did, however, give me time to write up the day’s events while they are
hopefully still fresh in my mind. Since we have a fairly late departure, we
plan to get up, have breakfast, and then to pack up our suitcases. If we had
one of those early flights, we would have to pack up tonight, get up at the
crack of doom, and head out half asleep.
I think this has been one of our most successful days, even
though were not on the boat. We were busy most of the day. We spent a lot of
time on foot, which is much better for photos than sitting in a bus. Better
yet, it never rained on us!
This marks the end of the fun part of the trip. The trip
will end tomorrow, but tomorrow is all of the “not fun” stuff—packing for the
flight, going to the airport, and spending a very long day in airports and on
planes. The only saving grace is that we’re traveling from east to west, so
rather than trying to sleep in a cattle-car seat, we instead get a very long
day, and then when we get home, we can almost immediately crash.
