In Russian, 'справа' means 'on the right' and in Czech, the
homonymous word 'správa' means 'control'. Similarly, in Russian
'слева' means 'on the left' and in Czech 'sleva' means 'discount'.
Another funny thing is that our hotel offers sparkling wine during
breakfast. Usually, we don't drink alcohol so early, but today we
made an exception.
Yesterday night we bought a Town Hall Pass which gave us multiple
admissions to the Town Hall. Using it, we first went to the Old Town
Hall Tower in the evening to watch the surroundings at night. The
tower is equipped with a modern elevator which is very visitor
friendly. The second time we went to the tower today in the morning
after gazing at the horologe which gathers crowds of people. I can
say that Ankeruhr in Vienna was more interesting although there were
much fewer people.
In the midday, we went on a guided tour in the Town Hall, not
extremely interesting but with a very humorous guide. I remembered
him saying: '... is now situated in the Saint Vitus Cathedral, the
main church of our country... where the majority of the population
are atheists." Such self-irony, I think, is a useful personal trait.
We also visited the Saint Vitus Cathedral itself. It is really huge
and richly decorated. What I remember most vividly was a wooden door
with old-Slavonic texts (still understandable for us) in Cyrillic
letters carved in it. It was dedicated to Saints Methodius and
Cyril, legendary inventors of Cyrillic alphabet. Interestingly, they
are widely venerated here by local Catholics, although Czechs never
used Cyrillic letters for their language.
There are many museums in the Castle District of Prague, but
probably the Cathedral is the most interesting one. At least, we
went to a museum of the district's history and to Saint George
Temple, and the Rosenberg Palace - and all that was boring and
tedious most of the time. At the so-called palace, there was even a
pizzeria - it blew my mind completely:) Zlatá ulička is a nauseous
tourist infested collection of candy-houses, many times worse than
any proper open-air museum of authentic houses. Only the old king's
palace was worth visiting, in my opinion. But surely it's difficult
to judge without actually seeing all the attractions.
In the evening we decided to find the fourth point that the Town
Hall Pass gave us admission to. It was called something like 'New
Town Hall Tower'. Well, we found the New Town Hall of the City of
Prague. The administrator near the entrance never heard of any kind
of admission or tickets, of course. Then, using the help of an
administrator of the Old Town Hall, the paper map, GPS,
OpenStreetMap and Apple Maps, we finally found the destination. It
was... the Old Town Hall of the so-called New Town, Nové Město,
built under the King Karl V rule. Yes, for several centuries there
were four different towns here in Prague each having its own town
hall, own mayor and so on. Only in the XVIII century, it was united
in a single city. The tower of the town hall of Nové Město is
similar to the that of the Staré Město, but without an elevator and
thus with much fewer visitors. All in all, we were proud of
ourselves to find it finally:)
It was dark already when we went to the quay of the Vltava river to
look at so-called Dancing House. Which impressed me even more, were
the view of the Castle District, Hradčany, on the other side of the
river. We were nearly exhausted after such an eventful day (we also
spent much time in different queues thanks to large guided groups
everywhere). There were also some smaller findings, e.g. we tasted a
trdelník (special Czech food for stupid tourists wanting something
strikingly local), payed a short visit to the Church of Mother of
God before Týn, succeeded to see the Karlův most nearly abandoned by
people early in the morning, and so forth.
We dined at a cellar restaurant in a few steps to the hotel which
had a Russian signboard. Surprisingly, it was not bad at all and
served as a good finishing for the day. Our last korunas were paid
for two more trdelníks sold in the street which are quite tasty
after all:)
