Na zdraví!

Prague. Finally! For some reason, Prague has always been a place that I wanted to see, though I never thought I’d have a chance. All that changed today when Abi and I signed up for a two hour walking tour of this beautiful city. I had a chance to see MUCH more of Prague in a day than any reasonable person should.

Our tour guide, a very efficient, very angular and very stern looking German woman (so efficient she never even gave us her name, nor asked ours…) took us on what was supposed to be a gentle two hour stroll of the major sites of Prague. That gentle stroll turned from an easy two hours to a three hour tour, then to a nearly four hour death march as we efficiently marched from site to site to site, logging nearly six miles!

During the forced march, I snapped 380 photos. Prague really is that incredible, that historic and that beautiful. Hardly any of my pictures really captured that beauty, it’s just a place that needs to be seen, needs to be experienced in person. What follows is a smattering of places that really stood out to me.

The Astronomical Clock

Beautiful? Maybe, maybe not. Either way, this clock is a five hundred year old marvel of ancient technology. As we waited for the clock to do it’s thing, our nameless tour guide gave us a little background.

Basically, by ‘sitting and thinking about the universe’, ancient Bohemians somehow figured out a mechanical way to indicate sunrise, sunset, Zodiac sign, months, years and more, and manage to say ‘Hey! Life is short!’ at the same time. Every hour on the hour since the 1500’s this clock has put on a show.

First, Death, represented by a skeleton, rings a bell. This is supposed to remind people that life is short. (Death is surrounded by chicken wire to keep the pigeons from crapping on Him.)

Then, two blue doors at the top of the clock open, and the Twelve Apostles parade by and acknowledge the crowd.

After that, at the very top of the Astronomical Clock, the rooster – which for some reason I don’t understand is supposed to represent Judas – crows, and the wildly anticipated show is over.

I started to worry about the tour at that point, because the whole show was so cheesy and ridiculous. Our guide agreed, then confided, “This Astronomical Clock does everything but actually tell what time is it. Very silly.” She concluded with. “We go to Charles Bridge now.”

Charles Bridge

Tired of floods washing away bridges, Emperor Charles IV commissioned a new structure to be built that could withstand ice and flooding of the Vltava River, way back in 1342.

Seven centuries later, the Charles Bridge is still standing, and is currently home to musicians, artists, and of course, junky souvenir stands. A beautifully historic, seven hundred year old tourist trap.

Statues from the early 1700’s line both sides of the bridge. I’m sure each one has a story, but telling each story would mean we’d have to stop walking, something our guide wasn’t willing to do.

One statue was famous enough to actually pause for. Legend has it that in the 14th century, the queen confessed all her sins to Father John of Nepomuk. When Father John refused to reveal the queen’s darkest secrets to the nosy king, he was thrown from the Charles Bridge into the river below, supposedly at the spot that his statue now sits.

The legend continues that if you touch the engraving below St. John’s statue, one wish will come true.

Hey, you never know…

Crossing the bridge, our forced march continued….

Author: frenchy