Last weekend, one of the guys in the office had an Open House, so we loaded up the family truckster with a couple from the office who live in our town and headed over there. We spent a couple of hours at their place and then went to one of the Christmas markets in their town, a few towns over from us (but still in the Frankfurt area).
Parking at the Christmas market was horrible, so we parked on the street leading up to the little castle. Halfway up the hill, we encountered a few cops, blocking off traffic so that tow trucks could come in and use cranes to lift parked cars onto flatbeds. This concerned us a little bit, since we were parked on the same street, about 6 cars down the hill.
We sent the ladies inside, with the plan to move the car to a (more) legal spot... but before moving it, we confirmed with one of the cops what was going on. Evidently, you're not allowed to park with your wheels on the curb on that specific street. If all four wheels are on the street, your car is fine. Well, I moved the car, and made sure that all four wheels were on the street. After the Christmas market, our car was in the same place we'd left it. There were quite a few Germans who weren't able to say that.
Tuesday, we decided to head downtown and hit the Frankfurt Christmas markets. I drove down to the wife's office, and met her there after work. She put on some warm clothes, and we caught the bus downtown.
We walked through the main part of the Christmas market, then made our way down to Romer (the tourist area). We had some decent glühwein (isn't all gluhwein decent, by its very definition?!?!?), then caught the bus back up to the car, then drove home.
Because of my wife's tenure with her employer, she gets a bunch of leave each year - more than she's able to use, sometimes. Toward the end of the year, she has to get rid of her excess leave somehow, or she loses it - this is referred to (oddly enough) as "use or lose." She put in for every Thursday and Friday through the end of the year, to try and get rid of it.
On Tuesday evening, we were talking, trying to come up with places we could go over the weekend, and came up with a handful of towns in our area to do day trips to. I'm not sure what her thought process was, but after checking hotel prices she threw out the idea of taking a trip to a place we'd never been before.
We decided to take a long weekend in Prague. We looked at train tickets, and it'd be a bit more expensive than we were hoping, plus, it would take close to 8 hours to get there. Driving would take a little more than 6 hours.
Thursday morning, we left the house in route to Prague. We made a quick detour through Nürnberg for lunch - remember that barbecue restaurant? Had that for lunch, then got back on the road.
We eventually ended up in Prague, and checked into our hotel. We were a ways out of the middle of the city, but less than a 5 minute walk to the nearest subway station. The wife asked the receptionist about an authentic Czech restaurant, and she recommended one a few minutes away, right on the other side of the metro station.
We got all settled in and walked over. The food was pretty good. I just had some sides; the wife had garlic soup. Looked a little like French onion soup, but the cheese was inside the bowl instead of on top. The wife had a half liter of beer (a little more than 16 ounces) for $2.06. Cheapest thing on the menu, I think.
Friday morning, we metro'd and walked to Prague Castle. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, it's the largest ancient castle in the world. I'm not certain what its competitors are from the "ancient" standpoint, but the complex dates back to 870, and clocks in at around 70,000 square meters (750,000 square freedom units). The complex contains multiple palaces, cathedrals, and meeting halls of all types and sizes. There's also a little shopping street called "Golden Lane," where gold merchants worked and hawked their wares in the old days. In one of the shops on Golden Lane, Franz Kafka wrote one of his stories, "The Castle" while he lived there.
Interestingly enough, this tour gave us a bit of the opposite perspective of the story of the Habsburgs of Vienna; it's always said that "History is written by the victors," and the Habsburgs were winners by just about any definition - what with being monarchs in the Holy Roman Empire, and all. You know who wasn't really happy about the Habsburgs being rulers? The Czechs. While in Vienna, we got the story of the Habsburg reign as a picture of roses and sunshine, in Prague they were interlopers and outsiders.
My readers who are history buffs (Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? Just as I thought! Nobody.) might remember something about the Thirty Years War. I remembered something about it... the name. That's all I remembered about it. Turns out, it was a big deal over here, when the Bohemians (Czechs) revolted against the Holy Roman Empire (led by the Habsburgs). One of the major events in the revolt was something called The Defenestration of Prague, where the protestant Bohemians threw three Catholic regents (two regents and one of their secretaries) out a seventh story window.
I misspoke a bit ago. It wasn't called "The Defenestration of Prague." It was actually called "The Third Defenestration of Prague." You'd think, after it happening twice before, people would start to notice a pattern when negotiating with the Bohemians, and stay away from the windows.
The weather was crappy all day long - mid twenties with snow flurries. The castle was situated on top of a hill, as many good castles are. On the way out of the castle, we had to walk down a long set of stairs... and despite holding onto the handrail on my way down, I ended up falling on my butt. Not fun. Didn't bruise anything, but I ached all day from my spill, and walked pretty slowly for the rest of our time in Prague.
We followed the stairs down and caught a tram towards the Old Town area, where our dinner tour would be taking place later. We went out onto Charles Bridge, the main connection between the palace and the main town of Prague back in the old days. Until 1841, this was the only means of crossing the river between east and west Europe, which made Prague quite important in medieval times.
We took a handful of pics, then kept wandering.
We'd signed up for a food tour for that night, meeting at the entrance to the Natural History Museum. We got there a bit early, so the wife walked over to explore Wenceslas Square, named after King Wenceslas, the patron saint of the Czech Republic and the subject of the Christmas song. He ruled Bohemia (the Czech Republic) from 921 until his death in 935, or maybe his reign ended in 929. History is a bit murky on that - but we all know I'm not a historian, so... we'll just say his reign ended sometime around 1100 years ago. There was a little Christmas market there - the wife walked through it while I waited in an abandoned doorway, staying out of the flurries and momentarily resting my sore bones. For some reason, the Czech markets we went to didn't have porcelain cups for their wine. All of their hot drinks were sold in paper cups - where's the holiday spirit in that?!?!? We collected a paper cup from one of the markets anyway - just to make sure our collection was truly representative of our experiences here.
Our food tour group met on time, and we were introduced to our tour guide, Martin, and the rest of our group. It was Martin, the wife and me, a group of four (a couple celebrating their engagement, and each of their mothers), and a single lady traveling home from working in Poland.
We touched briefly on the history of Prague while we stood in front of the museum, then walked over to our first stop. Our guide was a very well traveled gentleman his late 40's, and during the day, he was a butcher. One of his friends had opened the first restaurant we visited, and this was my favorite stop on the tour, a place that specialized in meat. There, we encountered a horseradish cream sauce that I'm going to figure out how to make.
I won't belabor to individually describe all of the places we went... I'll just tell you that we made 4 stops: the meat place, a pub (with local pub dishes), a wine bar, and a dessert place and bakery. I will relate one story that Martin told us.
One of the Czech Christmas traditions is to have carp on Christmas. There are tanks all over the city where they sell live carp on street corners. Families purchase the live fish, and transport them home in the days leading up to Christmas. They bring them home and keep them in a their bathtubs, so they can swim freely until Christmas. Carp are bottom feeders, feeding on whatever they can find as they grow. Keeping them alive in fresh water in the tub is supposed to help clean them out before they make their way to the holiday table. Opinions vary on whether a few short days in a tub with (chlorinated) bathtub water is enough to clean out the fish's system. Evidently, activists have gotten involved too, and protest the tradition from both a cruelty perspective, and from an environmental perspective.
Me? I don't currently have a carp in the bathtub, nor do I have any plans to put one there in the foreseeable future. I'm not getting involved in any of this 'bathtub carp' business any more than that. Your may, of course, run your own house however you wish though.
After a long day on Friday, we took our time getting moving on Saturday. We walked over to the shopping mall (because we seem to always stay next door to shopping malls, right?).
We metro'd over to Old Town, and hit a little Christmas market on the way. Still no porcelain cups. Walking over to Old Town, we walked through a little antique store where the wife found two steins (maybe closer to little jugs) of the same style as the ringkrug from the Garmisch-Partenkirchen entry. She took pics of them, and I predicted in my head that we'd soon be the "proud" owners of another piece of salt glazed pottery.
I should have taken the over. We ended up with both of them, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.
So... we made our way to the Old Town, and I managed to keep my wife from visiting any more antique stores on the way. We missed the hourly chiming of the clock, so when we got to the old town, we looked around for some way to spend some time inside, and found an art museum, displaying the works of Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, and Alfonse Mucha. I've only heard of two of these guys, but evidently Mucha was a famous illustrator and graphic artist. I might or might not have seen some of his stuff before, but I did recognize at least the style of some of his work. Warhol's work was (of course) quite recognizable, and Dali was just an odd fellow.
We went back out afterward and wandered around the town square for a while, taking in the biggest Christmas market (that we saw, at least) in Prague. Same general goods that are usually on sale in Christmas markets. Still no porcelain cups though.
We walked over to the end of the square with the astronomical clock in it. I had seen pictures and videos of it, but I personally found it a bit underwhelming. Other attractions such as this are huge, and seem larger than life, dominating the area where they're installed. This was just a couple of dials mounted on the side of a building. For as large as the dials were, I would expect that they would be mounted quite a bit higher.
The Glockenspiel in Munich is massive, and high up on the building. When it chimes, the entire square fills with people to watch the story that it shows.
The astronomical clock in Prague isn't much smaller (dimension-wise) than the Glockenspiel, but there's no real performance or show that goes along with it (that we saw, at least). Two windows open above it, a few bells ring, and some figurines pass in front of the windows. Then, the windows close. Disappointed? Don't be. I just gave you the full experience, and you didn't have to stand in the cold.
We got something to eat at a local restaurant, and while we were eating, the wife was researching the mugs, because of course she was. We left the restaurant and headed back over to the metro station, stopping (of course) to buy those two damned mug things. Should have taken the over. We hit the little Christmas market again before taking the metro back to the hotel.
Sunday morning, we took our time getting all packed up and hit the road. We stopped in Nürnberg to check out the Christmas markets. There were a couple of markets there, we walked through most of the old town, sampling glühwein at a few booths, and buying a couple of Christmassy things we couldn't possibly do without.
We drove back home afterwards, ending our most recent trip.
Here is the latest pic of the Christmas mug collection (including the paper Czech cup):
In retrospect, it's quite interesting to find ourselves in the position where we could talk on Tuesday about our weekend plans, and find ourselves in Prague for four days, out of nowhere. We'll remember this trip, as well as keeping in mind the flexibility that we're enjoying now. Just so all of you know... there's nothing that we did this weekend where we couldn't have added a couple more people to our trip - if you come visit us, we very well could find ourselves taking a trip like this, so make your plans now!
