August 5 Thursday

We wake up refreshed and although raring to go, with about half the energy we had yesterday. Our legs and feet hurt, and we are happy that we promised ourselves we'd cover only about one third of the ground we did yesterday: our destination is the Old Town. And today we are going to be smart and take the metro!

The metro looks like DC's - tunnels and escalators leading deep into the ground. What's different, though, is the security - or rather, the lack thereof. We bought a seven-day ticket and were told to stamp it once, as we enter the metro. This puts today's date on the ticket, and if asked, we can show that our ticket is good for the next seven days. We need only produce our ticket if someone asks! As far as we can tell, one can pretty much ride for free, because there are no turnstiles or guards anywhere. Of course, the metro is cheap enough that it isn't worth getting caught: seven days cost us 280KC ($9) each. If one is caught, it's only a 200KC fine. Still, we wonder how many people just hop on and off each day.

We ride to Mustek, and exit at the Tesco stairway. Tesco is a large, British 'Wal-mart-like' store. We buy some film and postcards, and then we walk to an area known for shopping - just because it's pretty. We walk all the way to the museum, and note that it might be a place to come if it starts to rain, because today it's kind of dark and cloudy. Of course, we left our umbrella at the hotel! No matter, back onto the metro we go, and we exit this time at Old Town.

Accidentally, we walk into the old Jewish area of town, where I will later take a tour. We shop a bit, noting stores where we want to return, and we see some synagogues we hope to visit later. Our walk leads us to the Old Town Square, where we stop for a couple of coffees and a long rest.

At 2pm, we meet Pavliva again and walk slowly through only the Old Town for an architecture tour. Though thankfully, we don't cover a lot of ground, we do cover many hundreds, if not thousands, of years of architecture!

We begin with the mid 12th century - the Romanesque style. The telltale signs of this era are the smoothly arched ceilings, without any ornamental square or cross at the top of the arch. These ceilings are only found in basements of buildings, because the entire city of Prague used to be about 12 feet lower than it is now. When the Old Town was rebuilt (it used to be called the New Town until they built the now-New Town and the now-Lesser Town, so it became the oldest part of Prague and is thus called the Old Town), it was raised because of fear of flooding by the nearby river. This rebuilt part of the town was done after the Romanesque period, and so one needs to 'dig' to find it!

This picture shows a lot of the different styles of architecture all together.

From there, we see Early, High, and Late Gothic styles - and there is considerable discussion among the people on the tour, and the tour guide, as to which is which. These people wanted black and white answers to questions regarding the architecture that perhaps wasn't so clear, since building style at that time took so long, the different styles could easily merge within one building!

After the gothic styles, we saw baroque, scraffiti - shown left (not to be confused with graffiti), renaissance, neo-everything, and into art nouveau. With us on our tour were: a couple from Israel (they couldn't believe we'd lived in Cyprus three years and never visited their country); a school teacher from New York City who spent every day of her summer and winter vacations travelling (she'd been all over the world, and this was her second time in Prague - the first time was in the dead of winter and she'd loved it); and a fourth guy whom we couldn't figure out. He asked a lot a questions about the architecture styles - we didn't know if he was trying to trip up our guide, or if he was really interested, but it was annoying the way he seemed to second-guess her all the time. It rained a little, about half the tour, but it didn't bother us (it was cool!) and it could have been a lot worse.

The tour ended too quickly, but by 3:30 we were hungry and we stopped into a little garden restaurant for a salad. We wanted to stay there all afternoon - it was so restful. After a few hours, we shopped a bit, picked up a gift for Monique, who'd spent the weekend sewing lavender sachets for me, and we also stopped at Botanicus, a natural store, where I'd bought some pineapple-coconut soap the day before. This was a larger store, and I found some lovely writing paper and sunflower seeds - something I'd looked for in France and never found.

We then took a walk up to the top of the tower that houses the Astrological Clock, and though it was cloudy, it was a nice view of the town square.

We got home at a reasonable hour (again using the metro) and around 8:30 we set out for a real Czech restaurant that was recommended by the hotel staff. It turned out to be OK - Warren had some sort of stew, much like what we had the first day, and I decided to be adventurous and ordered Kung Pao Chicken - something I'd seen on many menus here, strangely enough. It was OK … But the atmosphere was great - a tolerant place with children running all over, gay couples hand in hand, teenagers and old folks - they had it all.

After dinner we strolled across the bridge that is north of the Charles, which was quiet and almost spooky. Then we headed back across the Charles, looking for the violinist who, we'd heard from the schoolteacher, played every night. Except tonight, apparently, because he wasn't there! Oh well, another evening when we got home exhausted!