Ruth in Spain!: traveling 9

We'd been told by many people that Prague is a beautiful city, and I certainly concur. We spent our time there just walking about looking and enjoying the city and the food. We didn't use any public transport at all but we did use taxis on 3 different occasions - from the hotel where we'd used the internet to the hotel we booked into; from the hotel to the railway station when we left; and to get to where we were to meet Charlotte and Mauris because we would have been very late otherwise. Fortunately, taxis are cheap and also we didn't go very far in them. It's a very easy city to walk around in and every night when we got back to the hotel we felt like we walked several marathon. Sometimes, the cobblestones made it hard going and the certainly made wheeling suitcases extremely difficult.

Many times we found ourselves in some part of the enormous Wenceslas Square which isn't a square but is a 750 meter long boulevard. When we were on Prague there were lots of stalls and buskers, food stalls, and thousands of people because it was Easter and the Easter Markets were on everyday. It was always very interesting, but, after getting through all the people a few times we would map a route to avoid the square. It seemed that everywhere that we were walking to took us through it because it is in the middle of everything.

Looking down most of Wenceslas Square

another part of the square

Barry having a little lean between a couple of interesting posters

there are hundreds of these trams, and at times it seemed like there was an endless stream of them coming along the street.

Another fascinating place is The Old Town Square. When we first came into this square my jaw dropped and I just stood there with my mouth open looking up, not at the people or all the stalls but up at the buildings - simply fantastically amazing!

in The Old Town Square

the astronomical clock - dates from the 15th century and every hour, on the hour the 12 apostles appear, 2x 2 in the little windows above the 'clock'.

The architecture is amazing. Not that it's particularly grand but all the buildings are beautiful right up to the very uppermost part of the building.

The food was very delicious, too. Some of what we ate

kind of pastry coated with cinnamon sugar

These guys were cooking huge lumps of pork over a wood fire

and for dinner - I had fatty duck with pickled cabbage and dumplings because that's the thing to eat at Easter and Barry had spicy sausage, beef, and pork with dumplings and pickled cabbage. The dumplings are made by boiling dough in water.

There are traditional Czech food restaurants everywhere , not a lot of pizzerias, fast food places etc. The Czechs are very proud of there own traditional food and keen for people to try it however there's always steak and hamburgers and chips on the menu for those people who stick to what they know. The people in this little restaurant, where we ate on the first night, were very happy that we choose Czech food. We always ate Czech and always enjoyed it. Eating in restaurants is cheap, at least in the little out of the way places that we ate in. I guess there are big fancy restaurants where we could have paid more but we like the little out of the way places - the food was always very good and the people were always friendly and efficient

Here are pictures of some of the buskers that were entertaining the hordes.

this guy was singing Leonard Cohen songs