4 Corners of Praha

Today I was up and out of the dorm by 9am. The others in the room were not so awake, as I heard the Portuguese guys and the French girls come home at 6am... another big night for them!

Today I wanted to do all the things I hadn't done yet, well... within reason :-)

The first stop was the Czech markets, to the east of the city. This was pretty much the same as any other markets I've been to, but it was pretty big. I couldn't find much I wanted to buy, so I only got some boring stuff: undies, socks, bike light and a new back-pack. It was all quite cheap too which was nice. I did walk around checking it out and ended up spending a couple of hours here.

Next stop the Jewish Museum. Now, the Jewish Museum is actually. The actual museum itself is just an admin office, and all the exhibits are inside the Synagogues spread out all around Josefov (Jewish Quarter). So I got the ticket to see everything except the New-Old Synagogue (the oldest Synagogue in the world). But I took pictures of it anyway, just couldn't go in.


Jewish cemetery: This was pretty morbid. The cemetery was about the size of a small city block, and there were 12,000 grave stones (and more buried than that!) The Jews were denied any more land to bury their dead, so they build a wall around the area, covered it with dirt, then buried more people. They did that several times. The result is:


Klausen Synagogue: This one didn't have much to offer, some silver collections and books and stuff.

Ceremonial Hall: Again, lots of books and stuff. Had some quite impressive massive silver crowns... but you weren't allowed to take pictures.... so I did :-)


Maisel Synagogue: Can't really remember what was in this one, silver pointers and things I think. Didn't leave much of an impression.

Pinkas Synagogue: This one has been turned into a holocaust memorial with a difference. The walls are painted white, then over that is 80,000 names printed on the walls. They are the names of the Jews from Bohemia (area of Czech that Prague is located) that were exterminated during WW2. This is only 80,000 names, and it covers every wall from top to bottom, 3 rooms, 2 stories. Imagine how much 6,000,000 would take up! On the top story there were 4,000 pictures from Jewish children. They were collected by someone who used to entertain the children (well try to take their mind off things) at Terezin extermination camp... out of the 10,000 children there only 242 survived. Pretty morbid huh.


Spanish Synagogue: This one was the most impressive. It's not actually Spanish, but is named so because it is as beautiful as another one located in Spain. The inside was painted in dark colours, with gold trimming everywhere. Very impressive. It also had one of the larger collections of Jewish Silver.


That was the end of my Jewish tour... onward and upward (literally). I was heading for the Petrin Observation Tower, which is a small replica of the Eifel Tower (Paris), only built ontop of a hill. It was West of the city, and along the way I stopped at a set of gardens (don't even know what ones). There were peacocks and peahens wandering around, even had an albino one which I have never seen before. It also had a massive fountain with heaps of goldfish in the water. I then started my ascent and got to the top of the hill (took a while), then started my ascent of the tower (366 steps)... but it was worth it. You could see for miles around every direction of Prague... and further! Got some nice panoramic shots of the place.


Next stop... the big swinging pendulum thingy. Yip that's right :-) It was to the North of the City so a bit of a hike. The story here is once Czech was freed from Soviet occupation, they ripped down the Stalin statue... and had an idea to put a massive metronome in it's place.


From here I headed to the TV Tower to the East of the city... by Metro this time. This building was just weird. They decided to put babies crawling around on the outside of the building. I went to the top of this and chilled out over an expensive beer (for Prague anyway... cheap by any other standard). I watched the sunset from here which was quite cool. I was one of the only people in the cafe, so I ended up talking to the bar-girl for a bit as she was also bored. I stayed until it was quite dark and you could see a really cool view of Prague by night, simply stunning.


I left here around 9pm, and took some photos of Prague by night along the way. I hadn't actually seen Prague by night yet... and it was amasing. Check out the photos in my gallery and you'll see.

I got back to my hostel (south of the city) around 10pm... and after a shower + talking to a couple of people I was on my way to the bus station. I couldn't find it at the Metro stop and I almost missed my bus :-) I got there in the end and that is the end of my grand tour of Prague... all 4 corners in one day.