Our Big Adventure

CZECH REPUBLIC

PRAGUE

I’ve always wondered where Bohemian’s came from…….now I know.

Prague is the centre of Bohemia, and it’s an outstandingly beautiful city. It’s architecture spans a 1000 years, a mixture of Baroque, Renaissance and Gothic. It even has Cubist building, which is now a museum.

It has and ‘old town’ that dates back to the 10th century, and in it’s massive square, a tower with an astronomical clock that has a figure of a skeleton ringing a bell to announce the turn of the hour. Then figures of vanity, greed and lust turn in place, and then 11 apostles accompanied by St Paul proceed across the face. Quite a show.

In front of this clock is where we met our guide for another ‘free’ walk. Alistair is from Scotland, doing pilot training here in Prague and earning a bit of extra money doing these walks. Today it was raining and we started with four in our group, but soon moved to two, just Brian and myself as the two young girls from the U.S. couldn’t take the cold, and asked to be left at the mall.

The three of us soldiered on and Alistair did a great job for us on our ‘private free tour’ taking us to the Jewish Quarter, Wenceslas Square, the beautiful Charles Bridge with it’s 30 statues along it’s sides. Alistair had great stories, maybe fact, maybe fiction about the various places we saw. He told us he also does the ‘Ghost Tour’ in the evenings, I think some of the stories he told us he tells then as well. Prague Castle was next and it sits atop a hill and overlooks the city, and it’s large, they say the largest castle in all of Europe. From the entrance gates the castle is guarded by two dramatically poised giants fighting dragons or some other mythical creatures. Also the human guards are plainly in sight, with their swishy uniforms, complete with daggers and rifles with bayonets.

I think Alistair would have gone on for longer, we were already in our 4th hour. But we had seen enough and it was getting close to ‘wine time’, so we paid him, a little more than we should have, but he kept talking about holes in his shoes, and the cold wet weather, and the poor boy looked like he hadn’t had a good feed for months.

Using our day transit ticket we ventured out of the city centre on the various trams and got a real feel for the place. Graffiti scared buildings and the remnants of Prague’s recent communist past, the ugly concrete box like buildings abound, so different from the city. Prague also has a ‘new town’, built in the 15th century, and the town has many beautiful and ornate buildings. Some you just have to stand and stare at, giving yourself time to see all that is going on, statues, painting and of course their architecture

We spend 4 days in Prague, the capital of Bohemia in the Czech Republic and now it’s time to move on to Poland and the next stop in ‘Our Big Adventure’,

The dictionary defines a ‘Bohemian’ as…somebody who does not live according to the conventions of society. Thomas Wolfe said “A free spirit, someone who will cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way others cannot see, to be high, to live low, to stay young forever—in short, to be a Bohemian.”

I think we can say that Brian and I are living the life of ‘Bohemians’… and we love it!

posted by Brian and Julie @ 6:25:00 AM