The (...not so...) Grand Tour: Prague Pt.1

The country roads of the Czech Republic were quite different from the autobahns of Germany and the speed limits were SIGNIFICANTLY slower. I mean, on a road that you would travel along at 110Km/h in Australia you now had to go 50Km/h.

Driving through the centre of Prague itself was a nightmare. Lots of people changing lanes without warning, cars coming into our lane from the wrong side of the road and MAJOR road works everywhere made things difficult. And to top it all off, our GPS decided to crap out before we were able to find our hotel! But as usual we managed to work it out and after a few trips back and forth across the bridge we managed to get to our hotel … or should I say, Botel?!

Our car park (and the bridge we kept driving across)

After we settled in to our hotel room (our first since arriving in Paris) we decided to go for a stroll into Old Town. We saw some really cool buildings but had no idea what they were because we hadn't bothered to research this part of the trip. To be fair though, we knew we would be doing a walking tour the next day which would more than likely cover the important historical buildings so we were happy to just keep wondering.

This is awesome. It's called the "Dancing Building".

After travelling for a while you really start to miss the little things from home. In our case it was good Asian food. I know, I know. Prague probably isn't the best place to fill this void but we were desperate. To our surprise we managed to find a really good Thai restaurant pretty close to our hotel. The food was good (not great, but good), the Maitre-de was nice and very helpful when it came to my nut allergy, and the Czech beer went perfectly with the meal. It was also really cheap too!

The following morning we had our complementary buffet breakfast at the hotel's restaurant which, conveniently for us, was the boat next to ours.

Hotel on the right, Restaurant on the left.

On this particular day we decided to do two walking tours back-to-back. The first one was the usual introduction tour which gives you the general history of the city, shows you some important buildings and takes you for a wonder through various historically significant areas.

What we saw on this tour included: Old Square, the Town Hall, the Church (including the famous astrological clock), New Town, Concert House, the Jewish Quarter, the Cemetery, the Synagogue, the Museum, the Ghost Statue commemorating W.A. Mozart's "Don Giovanni", the Kafka Statue, Big Square among other things.

Our tour guide telling us the story of the 400 year old mummified forearm that hangs in the Church of St. James. According to legend "it belonged to a thief who tried to steel some jewels from the Madonna on the high altar one night. But the Madonna grabbed his hand and didn’t want to let it go. The thief had to wait there until the next morning. The next day, when the Minorites came to the Church, they tried to separate the thief from the Madonna, but in vain. They had to cut his arm. Then the Madonna let the hand go. The monks hung the arm to remember this event and as a warning for other thieves".

The second walking tour was the Prague Castle tour. This was actually a little misleading because we actually only arrived at the castle about half an hour before the 3.5 hour tour ended! Still, we did learn a lot more about the city which was great. We heard about the country's communist past, NAZI occupation and the subsequent assassination of "The Butcher of Prague", the influence scientists Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler had on Praha (and the rest of the world), not to mention Prague Castle which according to the Guinness Book of Records is the largest ancient castle in the world (about 570 metre long with an average width of 130 metres).

Probably the most important thing we learnt was that Defenestration was a big thing in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). Admittedly I had no idea what Defenestration was until this tour, but it is simply the act of throwing someone out of a window, usually to their death. It sounds pretty funny but they actually did this a lot back in the day.

Sometimes things didn't always go to plan. For example, way back in 1618 the "Second Defenestration of Prague" failed when three men were thrown out of a window 30 metres high. Instead of meeting their demise, they landed in a big pile of manure and survived. I can't quite remember the story but apparently this one failed attempt sparked the start of the Thirty Years War which was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history. Guess they should have used another window.