Day 15 - May 30th - Walking Tour, Dancing House, Sunset

         Today we were out the door by 10 for a three hour walking tour of Prague. We took several trams and subways to the old center of the city around a cathedral, it reminded me a lot of St. Stephen’s. 

        We walked around while the guide told us stories, legends, and facts about the city and its history.  We walked into this old Baroque-style church and were stunned by how beautiful it was. 

This is supposedly the 400-year-old withered arm of a thief who tried to steal jewels from the Madonna on the altar. The Madonna grabbed his arm and wouldn't let go. When people came to church the next day and tried to free him, it wouldn't let go so they had to cut his arm off, then it let the arm go. The monks hung it on the wall as a warning to other would-be thieves.

         We walked around for three hours, from 11-2. By the end, my feet were hurting and I was delirious from lack of food. We crossed the famous Charles Bridge over the Danube, and it was completely packed with tourists, vendors selling everything you can think of, and beggars. 

It's good luck to rub these metal sculpture things, but we opted out, who knew what kind of nasty is on that?! and there was a line...

Another lucky picture to rub

The rubbing things are lucky for such things as returning to Prague, finding love that will last, etc...

There were tons of people like this, which seems like a very uncomfortable position to be in all day.

          We went through the Jewish Quarter and learned about how many Jews were killed from the Czech Republic during Hitler’s reign. We walked through a lot of souvenir places I wanted to stop at, but we just kept walking. Then we hiked up a hill to the castle and cathedral, after getting attacked with a cane by an old crazy lady. She seemed a little senile and kept poking us all with her cane. She even tried to take one guy's empty water bottle, but eventually she shuffled away...

She was nice to our native tour guide though.

Entrance to the hilltop castle

        The castle part was pretty cool and it had an amazing view of Prague. So far Prague is beautiful and feels pretty safe. We met some college-student aged people on our tour who were just traveling for a few months by themselves. Two were British and one was Australian, and we talked to them for awhile before we headed back down the hill to go find lunch. 

Lori is so good at getting random pictures of cute guys. This is the Australian in our group who was traveling around for a year after he graduated college.

         We ate at a nice place that was pretty good. After lunch (which wasn’t until 4:00) we went home for a break. On our way to find the subway, we accidentally wandered into the local library and found this beauty. 

We eventually figured out it's a mirror, it's not actually hundreds of feet deep.... :)

         I took a nap, then we left again at 8:00pm to see the Old Town Square and the Charles Bridge at night. We saw the ‘Dancing House’, a famous building I had never heard of, but it was cool and Lori was excited about it. 

        At that same time, there was a beautiful sunset happening across the river behind the castle on the hill. 

         We walked past the bridge and through some very tourist-heavy streets. We got a small snack at one of the vendors on the square; mine was a greasy scone with nutella on it. It was ok. 

 

        On the way home, we saw an extremely drunk girl and her friend headed home on the subway. Her friend nearly had to completely hold her up. As they walked off the subway, the drunk one couldn’t even keep her head up, it was lolling around on her shoulders as she stumbled and swayed side to side. Apparently Prague is quite the partying place at night.