After getting up a little late, and finding women's undergarments in my bed (turns out I snore loudly when drunk, and drunk English girls have stupid ideas on how to stop it), I went out to check out Prague Castle. This is located across the Vltava River from the old town, and up a hill that belongs in San Francisco instead of Central Europe. The commanding views of the surrounding territory are probably why there has been a castle on the site since the 800s or so. Even today, the complex is still used to house the President of the Czech Republic. While that part is off limits, the older parts of the castle area are open for tours. Interestingly enough, there is very little security for being a presidential palace, and you can drive cars up to pretty much the gates. Europe is much less paranoid about all of that than we are, but if I'm honest, they're too lax about it. Unless there's a whole lot of reinforcement on the part that's the presidential area that isn't evident from the outside, you could level a lot of it with a suicide truck bomb, and those don't take a mastermind to make.
The tour started with the St. Vitus' Cathedral. It's another old gothic church, but unlike Notre Dame, it has very pointy towers, and nobody let it fall to pieces before fixing it up (Paris is clueless like that sometimes). Additionally, when you go into Sacre Coeur or Notre Dame, they're having pretty much round the clock church services for pilgrims. You can't say a word, you can't take pictures of the beautiful interior, you have to just walk around the outside, and there's all these votive candle stands in front of every statue trying to hit you up for a few Euros. At St. Vitus, none of this is true. Unless you go on a Sunday, you can actually get good looks at stuff, and take pictures of things like the beautiful stained glass, which isn't located 100 feet above you in the main axis. St. Vitus church gives Notre Dame a run for its money in looks, without any of the stuff that can make Notre Dame annoying.
Next on the tour was the old palace. Here, the Premsylids, Luxembourgs, Habsburgs, and other Bohemian rulers lived and ruled. It is an impressive building, with a spectacularly vaulted Great Hall, but is very bare inside due to the interior paintings getting rather damaged and removed. It's older than Versailles, so comparison to the French palace is unfair, but if you make the comparison, Versailles is Germany, and this place is Portugal (except instead of a headbutt, there was a defenestration).
After this, the complex has a place called the Golden Lane. This is not because all the buildings are covered in gold leaf, but because some goldsmiths used to live here. Golden Lane is a narrow street with rather small and simple cottages built underneath arches in the walls. It's very quaint. Golden Lane also has a corridor that would have been used in the defense of the castle, and would have been filled with crossbowmen. To that effect, they had a crossbow range set up. It was 50 Kć for 3 shots (less than a dollar a shot), so I tried my hand. As an American, I was keen to prove skilled at something that is like firing a gun with no recoil, and I did. One shot hit the bullseye, one hit the 80/100 ring, and the other was a 40/100.
After that, I walked back to old town, crossing the Charles Bridge once again. The bridge dates from the time of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, and is still standing despite the Vltava being very flood prone even with modern flood controls (to say nothing of the hundreds of years it survived without mankind controlling rivers). Unfortunately, it's covered with tourists and schlock peddlers today (and supposedly pickpockets if you aren't careful), but is still a great place to snap some very pretty pictures. I didn't do anything of any significance after that.
Tomorrow I'm heading for Munich. I won't be doing anything useful there other than finding a laundromat, and visiting the Hofbrauhaus.
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