traveling 11

Our last day in Prague and we were set to just walk to the castle via crossing the Charles Bridge and then on to the John Lennon Wall and basically just enjoy the time we had left just wandering about.

this is the beautiful, old bridge built between 1357 - 1380 and has been a pedestrian bridge since 1965.

Happily for us, being Tuesday and not a public holiday there weren't quite as many people on it as there was the day before. There are a lot of buskers, artists and street venders along both sides of the bridge.

 grotesque gothness, the re are gothic statues all along both sides of the bridge. I don't like them at all, the figures are all,so miserable, so I didn't take any photos except for this one which sits under one of the statues. 

Some of the statues had a part on them which must mean something if a person rubs their hand over it as someone is doing in this photo.

 and this one, too. So many hand have rubbed them that they are shiny where as the rest of the statue is black.

And this one stands inside the castle grounds. We watched for quite a while but no one gave this one a rub so how does he have such a shiny penis. Lots of laughing and sideways glances but no touching, it's a mystery!!!

 at the castle end of the bridge

It turned out to be quite steep uphill  walk to the castle, so we had a beer stop at the top of the hill. In our opinion the castle is rather over-rated. It is free to go into the castle grounds but then costs quite a lot to go into each different part. We weren't that fussed about it but it was great to walk about the streets though. 

the entrance to the castle

inside the castle grounds there was an enormous cathedral, not sure how that works. Basically, there's a very big courtyard with the castle buildings all around the outside and this enormous cathedral in the   middle. There's a paved road, with buildings on either side and little courtyards behind them, from time to time, leading down and then out of the castle grounds.

 the road out of the castle grounds. There are a huge number of eating places inside the castle grounds and it seemed as if all of them were full. 

 

view of part of Prague from outside the castle

   another view

 time for a snack, a potato snack. This was one long curly piece potato deep fried on a long wooden skewer. Lots of salt shaken over it and it was delicious.

 and then on to the John Lennon Wall

Neither the Beatles or John Lennon made it to Prague but when John Lennon was killed Czechs in Prague wrote lyrics from his songs, poems, messages of peace etc on this wall during the 1st night after it happened and the  authorities went and cleaned the wall so the next night people wrote them up again and so on it went. Who ever owned  the wall allowed the graffiti to remain and it continues to still be written on and is no longer just about John Lennon and his music. We spent a bit of time looking at all the stuff, I thought it was ok but Barry was disappointed as he was expecting it to be like it was back in the 1980's, which is what the guidebook made it sound like it would be.

Amongst all the 'stuff' was this - 

 

after we left the wall we wandered our way back to the hotel, packed our bags and then taxied to the station to get the train to Amsterdam so to finish off here's some random photos from our time in Prague

 a little dude hanging about

we found a couple of kiwis and have no idea how they came to be here.

 in all the maps and info in this window there was no mention of New Zealand

taken from the next bridge along from the Charles Bridge, there are 17 bridges over the river in the city

 just a building

there were always beautiful things to see looking up

 and always delicious food to eat, and eat it we certainly have -  my clothes are feeling like they've got smaller.

This was our last dinner in Prague and I had 'pig's knee with dumplings',that's the big lump of meat on the skewer thing on the right of the photo. I'm not sure what Barry had, I think it was goulash and dumplings. 

 

Our coffee stop before going over the bridge

and so it was goodbye to Prague - we had such a good time here. Charlotte was worried that the problem with accommodation at the start of our time here would colour our opinion of Prague but no way would we let it do that. For a start, as I said to her, we got to meet them and that was a wonderful thing to happen and the city is beautiful, felt very peaceful, everyone was friendly and it was easy to get about. We enjoyed just walking and looking as well as the 'things to see'. One thing which continues to amaze me is that everyone speaks English, simply everyone. This makes it so much easier for us but at times I felt like a bit of a language fraud really, language wise, it shouldn't be so easy to communicate in every place we go. We did manage to get the habit of saying about 4 things in Czech which was fun and people seemed to appreciate our attempts at speaking in Czech.

Time to be on the train to Amsterdam- the Prague Railway Station is on the left - that's all we had to know, It's for others to know which tracks go where ...

... and we made it to Amsterdam so they must have.