So when last we spoke, Palmer and I had just finished up a trip to Salzburg. Once the boss got back to town, we decided to take him on a last road trip to Prague.
We packed up the car and drove there on Thursday arriving in late afternoon. Our hotel was (surprise, surprise) right next to a mall.
It was too late to start touring the town that evening, so we went over to the mall and ate in the food court, and stocked up with snacks at the grocery store.
Next day, we toured around town a bit (reorienting ourselves to the layout of the city), and made our way to the other side of the river for our scooter tour, which started in the Lesser Quarter.
Lemme take a break really quick and talk about the geography of Prague. There are 4 main areas of the city (that tourists are concerned about): Old Town, New Town, Lesser Quarter, and the Castle District. The Castle District lies on the west side of the river, the northernmost of the (touristy) districts on that side. The Lesser Quarter is down the hill from the castle, still on the west side of the river. Old Town is where the majority of the tourist sites are located, on the east side of the river. New Town (which, despite its name, dates back over 800 years) is immediately south of Old Town, still on the Vltava River. Our hotel was on the east side of the river, a couple of metro stops east of Old Town.
We were in a small group, 5 of us plus the guide. Me, the boss, and the boy were on electric scooters, the other 2 tourists were on motorized electric tricycles, and the guide was on an electric assisted bicycle. Our route stretched from the Lesser Quarter down to the river, down the river to the castle, and followed the crest of the hill south from the castle past our starting point, then back down the hill. We got lots of pics. These will be out of order, but I'll throw them in anyway.
While we were waiting for our tour, we had beers next door to the place:
We saw the Lennon Wall, which John Lennon never saw or visited (named because of the graffiti that espouses freedom, western culture, and political struggle):
A weird little pond with two guys peeing in it... the guys buttocks can be moved left and right, and the... nozzles (for lack of a more appropriate term) can be moved up and down. Makes some sort of political statement, including that the left-most gentleman is peeing on the approximate location of Prague, somehow telling the people to be mindful of who they put in office... as the story was relayed to us, anyway:
An overlook of the city, from the northern end of the Castle District. On the far side of the river, you can see some of the buildings of the Old City... I believe the closest twin spires in the middle right of the pic are the Church of Our Lady before Týn, which dates to the 1300's. This church is on the main square in the Old City, across from the Astronomical Clock:
An overview of the city from the south end of the Lesser Quarter... if you look in the center of the pic, you can see a small portion of the river; the preceding pic was taken from among the trees you can see on the left of the river. Basically, another angle of the city center:
Afterward, we wandered around the city for a while, and found ourselves in the Prague Ice Bar... essentially a walk in freezer turned into a tourist site. Basically, you pay about $10 to go into a freezer that's -8 degrees Celsius (about 17 degrees Fahrenheit). You get one drink with your admission, and can buy additional drinks for between $4.00 and $6.50. You could get a bottle of Heineken or a vodka based drink. They had blocks of ice with cylinders cut out of the middle of them with a shot of vodka in each, and you'd tell them what kind of juice you wanted in it: cranberry, orange, or cactus. We each had a different flavor. Don't let me kid you - my description of it sounds dorky, but it was actually pretty cool (cool, get it? Because it was a... you know what? If I have to explain it, it loses something. Try to keep up!). Here are a few choice pics from inside - I had to keep putting my phone back into my pocket. Over about a minute out in the cold, and it would quit working until I'd warmed it back up in my pocket.
During our wandering around town, we encountered the same antique store where the wife had found her steins during the last trip - thankfully, she didn't encounter anything this time around that she couldn't live without.
The next day, it seemed like every time we turned around, plans didn't work out for us. Whether it was a museum where there were only tours at specific times (the Cold War Museum), or being unable to find a museum (supposedly a free museum somewhere in town), or yours truly doing math wrong and insulting the waiter at Hard Rock Cafe with a messed up tip... more wandering that day than anything else, and nothing much to report. We did end up doing the museum of the Charles Bridge, but we had hoped to pair that together with a boat tour, and that boat vendor seemed to have a really hard sell, and just didn't feel right.
Just FYI, I'm probably going to get the order wrong on some of the things from our last day, so I'll just give you a list and you can put these into whatever order you'd prefer.
We finally did the big museum in Old Town. There seemed to be a lot of animals - an entire floor devoted to different kinds of animals, with stuffed versions of all of them. Big aquarium section, with lots of fish (and a whale skeleton hanging overhead), and a section on dinosaurs as well. Other floors had normal museum stuff, mostly about the history of Prague and the Czech Republic.
We finally got our boat ride on the Vltava River. We boarded a boat a little downriver from the Charles Bridge and rode it for about an hour upriver, then further down, and back upriver to the dock. There was a constant narration playing in the background in multiple languages, but we could barely hear it, and were never sure when we were supposed to be listening until it was too late. I'm sure that the recording shared some vital information, but I have no idea what it could have been. Unfortunately, the windows were smeared, so I didn't get any good pics while we were on the boat. Maybe we should have taken the boat ride with the hard sell instead.
A family I bumped into at the hotel had told us about "The Anonymous Bar," themed around Guy Fawkes masks (and evidently the movie "V For Vendetta" rather than the Gunpowder Plot), so we had to get a drink there. All of the bartenders wear Guy Fawkes masks - but only when they're actively serving drinks (which I think defeats the purpose of the whole concept of anonymity... but what do I know?). I had some sort of whiskey sour (with a themed name), and Palmer had a "V's Blood" (I'll share this pic, even though it's a little blurry - was an interesting concept):
One of the delicacies that Prague is known for is something called a Chimney Cake; it's a dough that's spiraled around a cone and cooked inside and out, then covered with your choice of toppings, crushed nuts, cinnamon/sugar, etc, and optionally filled with whipped cream or ice cream. The wife and son had to have one, so we stopped at a vendor and they got one each. I tried a bit or two of the wife's cake - she thought it was a little too crisp, but I didn't think it was too bad.
Many of y'all know that I enjoy pedicures... I finally had the opportunity to get a pedicure given by fish. Yeah, go back and reread that sentence again. They have these all over the world, but I've never been able to get one before. There's a tank in the massage/nail place where they have hundreds of these little fish called "doctor fish" or "nibble fish". The lady sprays your feet down with some sort of antiseptic/cleaner, then scrubs them down with a soft brush and rinses them clean. You put your feet into a set of Crocs, and walk over to the tank, then slowly ease your feet into the tank. The fish spend the next half hour or so eating the dead skin off of your feet.
I'm horribly ticklish, y'all. These fish tickled me so much that it just didn't tickle any more.
Additionally, the tank that they put me in was in the front window of the shop... I felt like I was in the Red Light District of Amsterdam.
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People walking by on the street stopped and took pictures... one pair of guys asked me (using sign language) how much it was, so I told them with hand signals. I gave so many thumbs up, I lost count. While I was getting my feet serviced, the wife and boy were eating at a place a little ways down the street, watching people stop to gawk at me.
10/10, will do again. I actually found some places in Frankfurt that offer fish pedicures - I'll go get one with you when you come visit!
That was the end of that evening, and the next day we drove back to Frankfurt. Palmer flew home the next day, and is settling back into his normal schedule.
That's all for now - see you here next time!
