So I got up at 6:30am, luckily I slept well so I was not overly tired; took a lovely shower, made a scrambled egg (which I overcooked a bit), and was ready to leave the dorms by 8. We took the tram all the way to Prague Castle. Now I was expecting a giant Cinderella-type thing like Newshvanstein or something, but Prague Castle is actually like a small city of many different buildings. We walked around and went to the Cathedral, which was the most impressive building there, I thought. It was a Gothic-style cathedral, even though it was not actually complete until the early 20th century. (It reminded me a lot of the cathedral in Vienna). So, as we are presenting our tickets to get into the cathedral, I see several signs with pictures and big red "X"s through them. A picture of a soda and sandwich, a picture of a camera; things that I assume, based on context clues, mean you cannot have/do them inside the cathedral. So, of course as soon as I walk in half my group is taking pictures. I say rather loudly that the sign says we cannot take pictures. My teacher asks our tour guide and she says "well, everyone else is doing it as you can see, so go ahead and take pictures, just don't use a flash". Ok. That's fine because I wanted to take pictures anyway. What do people keep doing? Use flash. Every single time I saw a flash go off I wanted to say "they are being kind enough to let us take pictures at all, please turn your flash off", but I am sure it would come off a little rude. The cathedral was really nice when I was able to ignore the flash of cameras, and then we made our way to other parts of the "castle". We saw a giant banquet hall that was partly under construction, but again, no photography. And yet, people were still taking pictures. With flash. We also saw a dining room with 2 pieces of crown jewels and a beautiful book from the 15th century. By the end of the tour we made our way from old "upper" Prague to "lower" Prague (Prague used to be 4 different parts, with upper and lower on the West side of the river, and Old Town and New Town on the East side of the river) and stopped at a tiny street, the "doll" street, so named because the buildings look diminutive. It's a tourist attraction now, but in the early 20th century people still lived there, include Franz Kafka at building #22. Behind the buildings there was a small armory exhibit, and at the end of the street was an example of the old prison/dungeon.
The sun was a little bright today, so most of my pictures with sky are whited-out, which is annoying because the clouds were really pretty. I also got some video of musicians.
Just woke up from a nap, I'll probably make some pasta, but I swear I'll get to my jazz club tonight!
No comments:
Post a Comment