Monday : Rain

Love the complimentary breakfast! After polishing off 3-4 plates we went for a walk. There are lots of walkthrough arcades in Prague. All filled with shops, restaurants or offices. One had this big stone statue hanging from the ceiling of a knight riding a dead upside horse. I could tell the horse was dead because its tongue was hanging out. Most of the arcades lead us to the adjacent street or alley, others took us through secret gardens, with churches, veggie gardens, and cafes.

All the streets and footpaths are cobblestone too, I don't think I have seen so many stones. It definitely suits the buildings here in Prague. They are very nice and very well kept.

We were heading to Old Town, and man it's confusing walking these streets. Its a real pain in the butt if your using a map. There are so many little alleys and streets, lots of lefts and rights. It's better to just wing it! I wonder if they deliberately made the streets confusing, so if there was ever an attack on the city, the invaders would get lost? That's how some towns were built on the Greek islands.

We made it to the main square and there was a crowd gathering around the glockenspiel. I thought that we would wait the 5mins to see what it did. We never waited for the one in Munich. I don't know if the 12:00 show was different, but the 1pm show isn't worth waiting for. It's just a skeleton ringing a bell. Unless that's your thing?

We walked around the square for awhile looking at the grand buildings and through the markets that were setup around a huge fountain. We saw that it is possible to do a free walking tour in Prague too, which would be good. The guides could tell you about all the buildings and statues. We didn't book one because the weather today is suppose to turn, and tomorrow we have other plans.

Once we had finished walking around the square, we went to an absinthe bar just behind it. Nice place, they sold nothing but absinthe products. Shots, cocktails, absinthe beer, slushies even soft serve. We gave the top shelf absinthe and the beer a go. Pretty strong stuff! The absinthe that we tried is supposed to be hallucinogenic and only legal in Czech. Unfortunately we would need to drink a lot more than the glass that we had to get the full effect. It tasted like licorice, and I'm not the biggest fan of that stuff either. The beer was alright though, not as strong a licorice flavor.

When we were about to leave the bar it started to rain. We walked towards the river, but the rain got too heavy and we took shelter inside a library. The library had this big column like structure made out of old books. It was floor to ceiling high, but when we looked inside, through a hole, it looked like it went on forever. There were mirrors setup on the floor and ceiling to give the cool effect.

We braved the rain for a little bit more and then jumped into another bar to have lunch. We eventually chose something from the delicious never ending menu and had a nice lunch with a couple beers.

Thankfully the rain had died down afterwards and we were able to continue our walk. We followed the river up past the Manesuv Most bridge and towers to the Jewish quarter. We were a little shocked to see what the quarter has been turned into. We heard that Hitler wanted to turn it into a museum after the war, on our berlin walking tour last week. To walk there and see that it is a museum! Pretty ironic! Can't believe that they for-filled hitlers vision!

We headed back through the old town and went to a pub that delivers drinks by little model trains. The whole pub/restaurant is linked up by train tracks, we stayed for a couple drinks. It was fun.

It was time to get home after that so we stopped back off to a shop and picked up some more cheap beers for the hotel.