Travelling Hopefully

In keeping with my impromptu "monuments in the rain" series I picked the greyest, wettest day of my stay in Prague to visit Prague Castle.  The castle is actually a massive palace complex perched on top of a hill overlooking the city.  Since time immemorial (about 870AD actually) there has been a fortification of some sort on the site.  Successive rulers (over the years dukes, kings, emperors, presidents and, briefly, a reichsprotekor) have lived and worked there.  It is still the official residence of the Czech president.

Anybody visiting the castle hoping to see examples of late ninth century architecture are going to be disappointed.  Like most building complexes that have been lived and worked in for over a thousand years there has been a fair few changes.  Various rulers have torn down, built up, renovated, subtracted from and added to the castle.  That's before we get into the fact that different parts of the castle have burnt down, been blown up and on at least one occasion hit by lightning (there is a five story tower which used to be a seven story tower before the lightning strike).

The weather did fine up long enough for me to watch the changing of the guard at midday it was very impressive although it didn't quite have the machine like precision of the guards at Buckingham Palace.  I wandered around the breathtaking cathedral of St Vitus with an equally breathtaking interior, carefully placed ropes made getting good pictures of the inside difficult.  I visited the old royal palace and checked out the window made famous by the defenestration of Prague (technically the second defenestration of Prague.  Apparently tossing people out of windows is the standard Czech method of registering a protest against government policy).  All three victims on this occasion survived the seventy foot drop with only minor injuries.

There are some nice paintings in the picture gallery with a couple of works by Titian and Tintoretto to name just the artists I've heard of but sadly most of the magnificent collection built up by Emperor Rudolf II is scattered to the winds as a result of looting by Swedish soldiers at the end of the Thirty Years War (which was precipitated by the previously mentioned defenestration, what goes around, apparently, comes around).

The view of the city from the castle walls is amazing which is the reason the castle is where it is although the original builders were probably thinking in terms of "fields of fire" rather than "photo opportunities".

With the wet gloomy day turning into a wet gloomy night naturally I decided to hit the town.  I went to the Black Light Theatre to see "Aspects of Alice" a piece that takes Lewis Carroll's character as an adult and puts her into a series of scenes showing her the most important emotional moments of her life against a backdrop of Old Prague.  It was very well done although I didn't realise Alice was a lesbian until that point.  Strangely the theatre announcements were made in English and Italian but not Czech, still I guess they know their audience.

No restaurant that even pretends to serve Czech food will be without goulash with potato dumplings.  I've eaten it about three times so far.  If you see a restaurant offering "Czech and Mediterranean" food that means goulash and pizzas which I'm less certain about.  The waitress at my first restaurant kindly offered me the choice of sparkling or stale water.  I went with the stale water, it wasn't very tough.  On my way back to my accommodation I saw a man walking his tortoise.  Berlin, your sparrows have just been trumped.  It was moving at a pretty decent clip for a tortoise too.