Catch Up - Saturday 30th August

Saturday we dedicated to visiting Prague Castle. I use "castle" in the very loosest sense of the term - forget any image of turrets and ramparts, this is a hotchpotch of miscellaneous buildings with no defensive purpose at all. 

Situated atop a hill, the castle was quite far from the hostel, so we took another tram and walked up the steep incline, stopping partway up for Lucy, Mitch and Dan to eat lunch in a café. 

The views from the crest of the hill were fantastic, and we were greeted at the doors to the castle by the straight-faced Czech equivalents of the Queen's grenadiers, the blue-uniformed Castle Guards. 

We bought tickets just as the heavens opened, hailed by thunder and lightning. Hurrying across the square, we entered the cathedral, a huge, ornate, grandiose structure. We wandered around, admiring the statues and paintings, until the rain subsided. The building was just as impressive from the outside, and we walked to the Great Hall which faced it. On the outside, this looked like an 18th century house, but the internal walls were clearly hundreds of years older, and the family tree painted on the ceiling traced the Royal family back for centuries. We wandered the towers and halls before moving to another courtyard, where we sat on the wall of a fountain in the increasingly warmer sun. 

We also visited the basilica, a small Catholic building with an adjoining hall sporting a beautiful painted ceiling. If you stood in the centre, you could look up through a window straight above you, surrounded by painted cherubs and flowers. Round the corner from here was the former home of the royal alchemists, Golden Lane, and the Rosenburg Palace which used to house the Institute of Gentlewomen. After perusing these, and the dungeon prisons, we decided to walk back to the centre to eat. On our way back down the hill, we found a nice Italian restaurant for tea. 

We had booked ourselves in (excitedly by Dan and Lucy, and begrudgingly by Mitch and Siân) for a pub crawl, so at quarter to eight we made our way to the meeting point for that. The first hour was unlimited beer, absinthe, wine and vodka shooters in a small, underground bar called Chapeau Rouge. It was roughly the temperature of Satan's sauna, and with 90% of the eighty pub-crawlers being male, there was enough testosterone in the room to start a third world war. We quickly decided to drop out after the Power Hour, and to attempt to skip a few bars for the ice bar in "Europe's Biggest Nightclub" Karlovy Lazne. The bouncers said we couldn't get in until midnight, so we bought pastries, took a walk, and turned in early.