Day 20: Prague

Today was going to be a relatively leisurely day for us. So, in the morning we joined a "hop on hop off" bus tour of the city, where you ride around on the open-top bus while they point out various sites, and you can get off whenever you want to check out a particular location (then get back on whenever you want as well). The tour was pretty nice, but the cobblestones on all the streets made it kind of hard to hear the commentary.

We got off at the famous Prague Castle, which is the largest "castle complex" in the world. That means that they're counting all of the various buildings that make up the actual "castle" (which is dozens of buildings), plus the huge church, all the out-buildings, etc. I did a tour of the complex when I was here a couple of years ago through a BVU J-term travel course, but it was Clint's first time. We did a brief tour, just seeing the highlights, but it's certainly a beautiful place.

One reason Prague is so pretty now is that it's one of the only major cities that didn't get bombed in WWII, so it still has really nice older buildings, churches, etc. The "castle" itself is known for having buildings and structures that cover 1000 years of different architectural styles, so we saw Gothic, Renaissance, Victorian, etc. We also got to see the changing of the guard at noon.

After the castle and bus tour, we stopped at the main city square for a light lunch. We chose a little restaurant that was located with a perfect view of the famous clock tower that has a show every hour. Basically, the little dudes on the tower move around, the bells go off, and two windows open up to show the "parade of saints," which are little mechanized paintings of about 10 different saints. There's also a dude at the top of the tower who plays the trumpet. It's a pretty nice little show (and it's free!).

After that, we wanted to chill out for the rest of the day (partially that's literally, as it was super hot and humid today). So we rested in the hotel for about an hour, then found our way to an air-conditioned movie theatre that was showing an English-language version of "The Dark Knight Rises" (Batman). It was a great movie, in my opinion, and it was great just to sit in air-conditioning with a large soda for a few hours.

One weird thing about the theater: they had two different kinds of popcorn. They had the regular kind we get in the states, plus a kind that was "ham and cheese flavored." The woman behind the counter let us try it -- it really did taste like ham and cheese! It was like "chicken cordon bleu popcorn." It freaked me out.

Photos below are of Prague.