Another country Czech’d off the list! Prague is such a cool place! It’s filled with cool buildings, a big old clock, a river, and every stag/hens do in Europe.
A quick update on the train seat situation though – we decided that €3 each to guarantee a seat on the train was worth it after the last experience. So this time it’s a 5 hour train to Austria with a seat that no one is going to kick us out of. How good. Anyway, back to Prague!
We arrived in Prague on Friday afternoon after a train ride that was already mentioned previously. We had plenty of day left to go and check things out!
After finding our accommodation (which turns out was on a street with about 3 strip clubs and 2 saunas), we headed down the main shopping street and towards old town Prague. We went past some markets on the way and we loved the very cool buildings all around! The buildings are tall and fairly typical of the types of buildings we have been seeing on the trip so far. We just don’t get that kind of thing in NZ.
We got straight into the main food that is sold in Prague: trdelník, or in English they call it ‘sweet chimney cake’. It’s basically a bread/donut type consistency cooked wrapped around a wooden stick a bit larger diameter than a rolling pin, over hot embers then covered in cinnamon sugar. You can then have it served in all kinds of ways. With ice cream, with fruit, with chocolate. Kind of like how other countries serve waffles. I got mine with chocolate sauce in the middle and it was incredible! Highly recommend.
We then went to the old town square and saw the astronomical clock (it is big, but astronomical is not used synonymously to gigantic in this situation). It is the oldest working astronomical clock in the world and is still using original parts from the 1300s. Each hour, people gather around the clock to watch it chime. On the hour, a bell starts ringing and you can see a skeleton next to the clock holding a bell and it’s arm moves to make it look like it’s the skeleton’s bell which is ringing. Two doors open above the clock and the 12 apostles rotate past the windows one by one. Once all 12 apostles have passed the window, the doors close and the bell stops, and then the clock chimes however many times to match the hour. It’s a 24 hour clock so at 5pm when we watched it chimed 17 times. Then at the end everyone clapped which was weird because it was cool, but like no one did anything and the person who made it is dead. But anyway, cool experience to see it!
We continued through the town square and went to check out the church. It was pretty cool. We’re seeing a lot of churches at this point so we only really went in because it was free!
We headed back out of the church and it was pretty outrageously hot for the early evening. We sat down and had a drink in the shade at a cafe to try and cool down a bit.
For dinner, Jordan & Tristin found a butchery that also had a bit of a menu for eat-in food. Miriam and I each ordered a cheeseburger and it was amazing. They cook the mince medium rare and the bun was so soft and so good! Highly recommend. It was called Naše Maso.
That was the end of our first afternoon in Prague! We did a lot and it’s not even a full day yet!
Day One
Saturday started slow and it was nice to be able to have a little bit of a sleep in. While I was in Berlin I bought some coffee beans from a place called The Barn because my beans from Ark in NZ had run out. This was my first morning of trying these new beans and they were incredible! Simon, who is a friend in London, is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to coffee in Europe. Hugely thankful for his recommendations!
After getting up we walked down through old town, and went into the town hall for our hall and clock tour. This was pretty cool. We climbed all the way to the top of the clock tower for an awesome view of the city!
Further down the tower, we were just in time for the clock chimes. There is a window just behind the 12 apostles so you can watch them rotate from behind the clock. You can’t hear the bell so you’re really just seeing these statues turning. It was less impressive than seeing it from the front, but Miriam decided to start the clapping off at the end anyway. I think one other person joined her!
We then headed towards a farmers market for lunch. It was cool to walk around and see a new area of Prague. We walked along the river and the market was right on the side of it.
Everything is very cheap in Prague compared to other places in Europe that we have been. It was nice to be able to just eat cheap but good food! Highlight for me from the farmers market was a cheese toasty. So good.
We kept walking and went towards the famous pedestrian bridge – Charles bridge. It’s got statues all along it and castle-like features as well. We were heading towards the castle which is at the top of a hill north of old town.
The view from the top of the hill was amazing! The buildings in Prague all have orangey/red roofs and they’re all crammed in together.
We walked into the castle area as it was free to walk around the grounds, but you had to pay to visit any of the indoor areas. We decided that it wasn’t really an impressive castle so just did the grounds. We did go into the church as it was free to look at it from the back. It had some pretty impressive stained glass with very bold colours. Some of the detail in the glass was very cool!
We were pretty exhausted by this point after all of our walking so jumped on a tram and headed back to our accommodation for a bit.
We spent a bit of down time planning some of the next bits of our trip which was great to get done! Planning is always the hard bit. Once it’s planned and you just get to enjoy it, it’s so much better!
We went to a place called Wokin for dinner. It’s pretty much a build your own noodle dish kind of thing. Think Noodle Canteen but Subway ordering style. It was really good and pretty cheap!
Day Two
Miriam and I decided that we had seen enough in Prague and wanted to check out a neighbouring town. There is a place called Sedlec Ossuary that looked intriguing so we decided that Kutna Hora was the town we were going to visit.
If you don’t know (I didn’t), an Ossuary is a place that the skeletal remains of humans are kept.
In Kutna Hora in the 1300s, there was a major famine that killed an estimated 30,000 people. 30 years later there was a plague that killed another 30,000. They also believe that another 10,000 people were killed in a war about a century later. At this point, the city cemetery was getting extremely large so the decision was made to build an ossuary below ground level with a chapel on the top. The bones of about 70,000 skeletons are displayed as various artworks in the ossuary.
It seems extremely strange when you walk into a room and there are bones everywhere. There are pyramids built with skulls, there are random bones all over the place. It’s like walking into a nightmare. But they say that it’s not meant to be bizarre, rather it’s meant to show hope and that humans are all equal. It definitely feels bizarre. Sadly they have banned cameras in there due to too many people taking selfies back in 2019. Classic.
Our ticket to the ossuary also got us into a cathedral down the road. It was a pretty cool building. A lot lighter and brighter than other cathedrals we had been in. There wasn’t any stained glass and the walls were painted a shade of yellow.
We decided to grab some food and head back to Prague at this point. Our train ticket was valid for as much travel in 11 zones within 300 minutes. It was about NZ$15 for the two of us to go there and back. Pretty cheap!
The train ride back had no seat so we were standing outside the private cabins with the train windows open. The brakes made a horrific noise when the train stopped, but we got a great view of the Czech countryside as we took our 1 hour train ride back!
Back in Prague, we met up with Jordan & Tristin and had another chimney cake. So good. We then found a place that was selling ham on a spit and a pizza type food where the base was deep fried bread. It was pretty yum!
That pretty much brought us to the end of our time in Prague! We spent a little bit of time looking at some shops before bed to get up early the next morning for our train to Vienna!
Bye for now! 👋🏻
