More Prague!

We're in Prague for a whole week so expect many blog titles about it. Yesterday was a fun filled day of finding out how the Czech like to screw tourists out of their money. First we walked to the Prague Castle, which is the big toursit attraction here. It was quite a long wal from our hostel, almost an hour, but it's a nice walk through town and along the water. The castle is really a castle complex and has tons of things inside, like St. Vitus Cathedral, other churches, Golden Lane (a reconstruction of what a typical road in the days of the castle would look like, kind of like a mini RenFest without people dressed up). We bought out tickets to get into the castle which were 125 Czech crowns (14.5 crowns to 1 US dollar), but then they told us that there was no information signs inside the castle and so highly recommended the audioguide...which was 200 crowns for 2 hours! Yeah, so no audioguides for us. Then we got into the Royal Castle and found out that the majority of it was closed for renovations and much of the open rooms were in a bit if disarray from the renovations. Ah well, we could still get into St. Georges Church, St. Vitus Cathdreal and Golden Lane on our ticket. St.Georges was nice, although rather small. Oh, by the way, it cost an extra 50 crowns for the priveledge to take pictures, so we all snuck pictures behind tour groups. We then went to Golden Lane, which was my favorite part, mainly because you could pay 50 crowns for 5 shots using a real crossbow at a target. That was awesome. I got alright at aiming, but all of my arrows kept bouncing off the target instead of sinking in. But it was still really fun. Lastly we saw St. Vitus Cathedral (after a not so bad wait of 30 minutes to get in), which was very impressive with really awesome stained glass and the creepiest pieta I've ever seen (all the heads and hands were missing).

Since we were already so far out of the center of Prague we decided to go to the Loreta church, which is even further out. Loreta church has the Prague Sun and Santa Casa (which is supposed to be the Virgin Mary's house). When we got there we found it was closed on Mondays, so we get to walk all the way out there another day (we are considering paying to use the public transportation instead). As we were walking out we went back to St. Nick's, which was open this time, but it actually cost money to get into (about 35 crowns). Angela and Adam went in, but Steve and I had seen enough churches for free.

By this point we were all really tired from walking so much and went to an early dinner at the same restaurant we went to the first night. We had a bad start there...we tried to say we had 4 people for dinner and somehow this got interpreted as we wanted 4 coffees. Imagine our surprise when 4 coffees showed up on the table, and our waitress was not pleased when she figured out that we weren't going to drink them or pay for them. Then magically we got a new waitress. The rest of the dinner went smoothly.

We were planning on going to the bone church in Kutna Hora today, but it's raining, so we haven't decided if we want to go yet. Really other than the Loreta church this is the only thing we have planned to do and we have 3 more days, so we may not go anywhere really today. Prague is a nice city to be in, but if you are trying to fit in as many places as possible into a vacation I would say 3 days in Prague is all you need to hit up almost everything.