6 weeks Holiday: Prague

Prague is the new Paris - at least in my opinion. It's beautiful, old, well maintained (the bits I've seen so far), has fantastic food, loads of culture (they're very big on the arts and there are sculptures everywhere), and there's a river that runs through it that has amazing bridges.

Today we visited the Prague castle, the largest castle in Europe,and started in 870 AD. Apparently it has every style of building for the last millenium, and is dominated by a huge gothic church in the middle. The Basilica of St Vitus.

I saw beautiful gardens, and exotic birds. There's towers, and museums, and it's all on a hill overlooking the city. We saw part of a toy museum, and shops that sell toys that are clever and made in Czech out of wood not plastic. That is one of the things I have noticed here - they have big photography shops, china shops selling fine china, fantastic shoe shops with high quality leather boots, hand blown and etched glass - not a $2 shop to be seen, and I haven't seen any shops selling plastic either. It's really really fabulous to see that they haven't succumbed (yet) to total globalisation. Yes there's maccas, but there's loads of cultural stuff, and obvious pride in local manufacturing. And antique shops to go crazy in... It's hard to imagine that this was once a communist country under Stalin - it would be interesting to talk to some of the older generation.

Lovely old buildings that you could never afford to build now - loads of detail, cornices, gargoyles, the lot.

Lunch was in the old town square. I said I wanted a hot dog - not like you'd imagine, but an extremely tasty bratwurst sausage served on delicious rye bread with lashings of mustard. And then we came across a stall selling those, but also hot roast ham. Well, what can I say. There were these 2 huge hunks of pork roasting on a spit over flaming coals! So I ordered 1 sausage and 1 ham. The guy cut off this huge piece of ham and I thought 'ok, he'll divide it up and just give me a slice'. But no, he slapped it on a plate, weighed it, and charged me 638 Czech crowns! ($44 plus a couple of beers of course). Well, it was over 1/2 kg of hot tasty ham - OMG it was amazing! And there was enough for dinner as well lol. Yum, yum, yum.