Day 2

April 29, 2008 (Day 2)

Today we walked all over Prague. Seriously. George P and Vladimir were our guides (I’ve started called Vladimir “Vlad the Impaler” because of his knack for wanting to start out as early as possible in the morning.) We started out at George P.’s office in the Business district of Prague, and from their took the subway to Wenceslas Square. Wenceslas square is a really cool monument to…well, I’m not really sure what it’s a monument to, but it’s got a guy on a horse and I think he’s name is Wenceslas. It’s right in front of the Czech Museum of Natural History (which I’ll get into later). Anyways, we walked down Wenceslas Square taking in some of the beautiful architecture. One of the interesting things about Prague is that as a city, they didn’t have much money. So instead of building new buildings over the years, they’ve just built on top of the buildings they had. (George P’s interpretation of this was “Prague is like an ogre. It’s got layers”). So the architecture is very interesting as you will have Romanesque, next to Gothic, next to Art Deco, next to modern brand new. From there we walked through a little shopping center to a monastery and the beautiful rose gardens that surround it. After that we walked to Old Town Square where we saw the Prague Clock Tower (with a clock that is so intricate and beautiful it not only tells you the time, but also the Zodiac sign for the day, the saint of the day, and the position of the planets.) We kept on walking into the tourist shopping/museum district. We were able to visit a few stores. One of my favorite was a store that sold nothing but puppets and wooden toys. I thought the puppets were really cute, but they didn’t hold a candle to Folkmanis. One of the things we learned in the store however is that there is a very popular children’s cartoon TV show featuring a weird little mole. Since then, we’ve seen that Mole everywhere! After that we kept on walking, walking, walking till we got to the Embassy district. We got to see a bunch of Embassies (although never the American one, b/c it was a little farther away). We got to cross the Charles Bridge (where apparently, underneath the bridge there is a water goblin named Josef who steals the souls of all who drown in the Vltava river and keeps them in little pots. The Czechs have a very weird fairy tale history.) and see all of the art being sold. We got to the other side where our guides told us about a large historical flood that covered up all of the buildings, include a mortuary. Since the mortuary was flooded, all of the bodies floated out into the streets. After the floods resided, the mortuary was deemed unusable for that purpose and was turned into a café. Yes, that’s right- if you go to Prague you can eat in Café Mortuary (technically it’s call Café Mornice- which means mortuary in Czech). After we cross the Charles bridge we were able to see the Czech museum of Modern Art and the gardens surrounding it. Finally we got to eat lunch! I had a traditional Czech dish: beef sirloin in a cream citrus sauce with bread dumplings and beef noodle soup. It was REALLY good! I’m loving Czech food. After that we walked all the way up to Prague castle, and got to walk around the cathedral of St. Nicholas. We didn’t get to go into Prague castle, but we might get to do that when we return to Prague. The view was really gorgeous! Then we had to make haste back to our flat where we changed into our Rotary uniform so we could do the Rotary presentation at a local GSE club. We met a really fun young Czech doctor who interned at UAB for a few months. He took us back to our flat, and we finally got to go to sleep around 11 pm.