Today's pictures can be found here on Flickr.
Once I did my usual thing of getting my bearings, finding a map, and finding some wifi to check in, I made my way down to Prague’s Old Town Square where my apartment was. I couldn’t have asked for a better location, it was literally right in a back alley off of Tyn Church, about a minute’s walk from the Square. It wasn’t too long before I realized that Prague was what I was thinking of when I wanted to see “Old Europe”, even though I didn’t know it at the time – churches, cobblestone streets, castles, rivers, photogenic bridges. By the end of the first day I was already thinking that this was my favorite new city of the trip so far.
Coming in from Berlin, we passed a few train stations in Germany, including a stop in Dresden (where I quickly hopped off for a sandwich of chicken and pumpkin shavings with a pesto spread on a cheese/garlic/basil ciabatta roll), before hitting the small towns in the Czech Republic, and then started following the Elbe River, with its own small towns and churches lining the banks and cliffs (the train went on to Brno and Vienna after Prague). I got lucky with the weather, it was low 70s and partly cloudy, so there was nice blue sky everywhere and the clouds made for a great sunset. My plan for the day was just to wander around the Old Town Square area, without having a specific list of places to go or things to see (and my next 2 days would have similar plans for the Little Quarter, the Jewish Quarter, and the Castle Quarter). So I watched the Astronomical Clock at the top of the hour – I saw no less than 4 couples in wedding clothes at the church – though didn’t feel like climbing up to the top of the clock tower. The neighborhood wasn’t as big as I had anticipated and so I found myself wandering out towards the Charles Bridge (it’s only about a 15 minute walk).
My first stop was the bridge north of the Charles, looking upstream (the river here flows south to north). With the Charles bridge tower and the old buildings right at the base of the bridge, it looked too stereotypical to be real. The Charles Bridge has a tower on the east end that dates back to the 15th century and everything looks as old. I timed it so that I got to the bridge about 20 minutes before sunset, so it was a pretty amazing sight looking west down the length of the bridge at the reds and golds of the sky, with vendors all along the bridge and sightseers with their cameras. And always, the Castle loomed off in the northwest, silhouetted against the sky. So even though I hadn’t planned on the Little Quarter until tomorrow, there I was at the eastern end of the bridge at the entrance, so I figured I may as well check out the Little Quarter now. I’d get to see whatever I missed in the daytime when I visit the Castle Quarter.
The Little Quarter has its own bridge tower and its own set of churches, shops, cobblestone streets, vendors, tourists, and restaurants. Before dinner I visited the John Lennon Wall, which was created in 1980 when Lennon was killed (people painted on the walls) and then became a symbol of hope during the later communist years of the 1980s. Now it’s a tourist attraction, but you can still paint on it. I ate at Malostranska Beseda, a restaurant right across the street from the St Joseph Church, got a cheese plate for a starter and a grilled chicken breast with boletus noodles for the main. Plus, of course, a Pilsner Urquell. Took a bunch of night pictures from and of the Bridge and Square on the way back to my apartment.
A guy (from Vancouver) who I talked to on the train from Berlin to Dresden told me something he heard that has stuck with him about the differences in how Europeans and North Americans see travel. “To a North American, 100 years is a long time. To a European, 100 miles is a long journey.”
Today's pictures can be found here on Flickr.
(Originally posted 10/15/11 at 12:01am, Bad Ischl)
No comments:
Post a Comment