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Monday July 4th
Well, for my first night, I only got around 4hrs sleep. The bed is a bit too hard, but then it’s not always easy to get a good sleep when you’re in a strange bed. It also didn’t help that whoever was in the next room would get up much earlier than me and so would be banging and clattering about before me. So did the cleaners. Ughh…. why can’t they wait?
I got to the restaurant around 9.40am and found the food available to be a bit decimated. Bread rolls, some ham and salami, and slices of cheese. I tried the cereal but it was a bit tasteless (I was going to try another one during the week but just made do with what else was on offer) and the tea was lukewarm: later in the week it got better but I think it was down to the urns having been out for a while so not being as hot as they should be. Orange juice was okay-ish. I found after I got back on Tripadvisor that they’re meant to serve bacon and sausage (and eggs for those who want them) but none of that was present while I was there. Surely they’re meant to serve all that throughout the full 3hrs too? Oh well.
I set out from the hotel around 11am after I’d got all my stuff together and despite the weather being predicted as raining most of the week, things changed such that it was mostly sunny, often humid and only gave a few drops of rain over 3 days of the week including Friday, where it went the most for 30 mins as I walked from the hotel to the Old Town Square.
Most days I would walk to and from everything via the Legil Bridge, but for my first day I went to the next one up, the famous Charles Bridge. As it was quite overcast on the Monday, the pictures of everything on the bridge didn’t turn out brilliantly. My first day was just going to be a recce round Prague so I wasn’t going at speed anywhere. Before getting onto the bridge, I saw the first of a large number of Segways which you could rent, but a 3hr trip including 30 mins training cost around £60 so I wasn’t that desperate to try one. Technically, you can buy them in the UK but you’re not allowed to legally use them on the roads so there’s not a lot of point.
Along Charles Bridge, I saw an organ grinder and skiffle band. I’d like to have put a bit of money in their respective hats as they were a bit of fun, but at that point I only had notes of 200kr (£8) and up, so they had to go without.
At the other end, I saw there’s a museum and roof area in the Charles Bridge Tower so went up there. Afterwards, I was drawn to the Boat Trips along the River Vitava, the latest one of which was about to start. It cost 290kr (almost £12) but as well as including a ticket to the Charles Museum (normally 150kr), it also included a free beer and ice cream :-p
In the pictures, the balloon by the Kafka Museum is a hot air balloon in which you can go up and hover above the river. Later, on Weds, when I went on the Prague Castle tour, we saw someone doing this. While the weather was all calm and serene, our guide, Jeff, said he’d seen it on other days where it was swinging about all over the place. I commented that if you were to fall, then it’d only be into the river.
After that it was into the Charles Museum and then a few shots in the Church of St Francis de Assisi before looking for somewhere to eat, by which time it was 2pm. That place turned out to be the outside area of the Hotel U Zlatého stromu. Not feeling too adventurous, I went for the burger and chips.
After lunch, I took in the Astronomical Clock where it chimed at 4pm and then the trumpeter does his bit. That is something introduced only 3 years ago to pep up the fact that the clock’s usual hourly ‘performance’ doesn’t seem to quite cut the mustard these days. As one of the tour guides later put it, they needed something for the audience to clap at. I went up to the top of the clock for the 5pm top-of-the-hour to see the trumpeter first hand.
Afterwards, I went to Wenceslas Square and up towards the National Museum, but by the time I arrived it was after 6pm, the time they closed. In addition, they were also shut on the first Tuesday of the month so Wednesday would be my first chance to go in. After another walk, I went for dinner around 8pm at the 7 Angels restaurant on Jilská, 110 00 Praha, which I’d been recommended. I had the Venison with rosehip sauce, with potato croquettes (below) and it was delicious but I learned the hard way that you need to know in advance whether the bread and water they offer you before a meal is free or not. Like in the hotel, always assume it isn’t. I found that out too late, but when I did try to ask if it was free or not, the guy was all “Oh, my English probably isn’t so good.” Hmm…
In addition to a 50kr (£2) cover charge, they charge the same for the bread and once you take into account the service at the end of the meal, the 0.75litre water bottle cost somewhere between £7-8! As such, while the food was nice, I doubt I’d go back to this restaurant when the bill for one came to just over £25. There’s much better value to be had elsewhere, and closer to the Square.
Due to having had hardly any sleep last night, I made my way back to the hotel along the Legil Bridge and got back around 10.30pm. Early for me, but like most nights, despite there being the occasional wi-fi spot around, as I found out, the hotel’s wi-fi allowed me to have my internet fix 🙂
There are a lot of free wi-fi hotspots about, but they don’t seem to function too well and just tended to connect long enough – when I didn’t even realise it was – to get me up to date on my Gmail account (all my regular emails are copied to my Gmail so I could see everything I’d been sent) even if I then couldn’t get onto a proper signal so I could connect to Tweetdeck and reply back to things on Twitter and Facebook.
Note that Vodafone have a European Data Traveller option which gives you 25Mb internet for £2/day and that’s pretty good value, but I only ended up using that on one day because I eventually found, from Tuesday, that if I went for something to tide me over at KFC for lunch (where they had free wi-fi so I could catch up on everything) then inbetween getting up to date in the morning and back in the evening at my hotel, apart from checking occasional emails, if I spent a lot of the rest of the time on the internet then I’d be missing out on everything I’d actually gone to Prague to see.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.