My dad and I are on a Rick Steves Tour in Prague and Budapest. This was our fourth day in Prague and our second day of the tour.
You can find all my previous posts about this trip here.
This morning we met in the lobby of the hotel and Peter, our guide, handed out tram tickets to everyone. He led us to the tram stop and we got on the 22 up to Prague Castle.
We met Martin, who is our guide for Prague, since Peter is a Hungarian native and can tell us more about Budapest when we get there.
We went into the castle through the security checkpoint, where you have to put your bag and any metal in your pockets on a table and walk through and the guards say you’re fine and to go on.
We went to St Vitus Cathedral first.
Most of the Cathedral, including the front part, was built in the 1800s.
The inside had pretty stained glass and a lot of tombs.
The side of the cathedral is where you can see the original parts built in the 1300s on the right and the newer parts on the left.
The back is the original construction and has flying buttresses fortifying the towers against wind damage.
We then went to the Old Royal Palace and St George’s Basilica. I don’t remember anything about St George’s Basilica.
There was a lot about Maria Theresa, the Hapsberg queen who was a great leader and barely lost any of her kingdom to wars and had 16 children, including Marie Antoinette.
Then we went to the Golden Lane, which is tiny houses that had been cheap housing for artists and writers in the 1800s. Kafka lived in one of the houses. You can tell which one because it is selling his books. The ones at the beginning are shops and the ones at the end are set up to show what they were like at various historical periods.
I didn’t buy anything at the shops because they were crowded, but I did like the part set up like a film studio, with a cutting room and a showing room.
We then went to see the window where people were defenestrated and the changing of the guard in front of the castle.
After that, we went to the Strahov Monastery for lunch. It is a brewery, so I was hoping for a tour of that, but we just had lunch. We got soup and everyone at our table got goulash because it was loud and we couldn’t hear the other options and the waitress was annoyed we asked five times.
Because it’s a brewery, it’s known for its beer, so I’m disappointed Bryce isn’t here to try all the beer. I’ll have to bring him sometime.
After lunch, my tour buddy and her mom got on the tram with me and my dad and we helped each other find our way back to the hotel. We keep being told the tram is easy to use. The hard part is figuring out when to get off. We decided if we got super lost, we would get off and find a Starbucks and use their internet to find our way back to the hotel, but we made it without having to resort to that.
