Our first full and somewhat normal day,
Here's what our breakfast looked like. It was somewhat underwhelming.
Behind Mike was another table with cold cuts. It was still underwhelming.
Our activity for the day was a city bike tour that Mike had arranged. We took an Uber to the start, an unassuming arch off an alleyway. The Uber was much cheaper and faster than the car service the front desk ordered for me for the concert the previous night.
Most the bikes were heavy city bikes.
We found some black commuters that were lighter.
Here we are, ready to go.
Here's the bike route with data: https://www.strava.com/activities/15068408418
Altogether, a little over 4 miles. But it was much better than walking.
We covered many of the same places that we walked to the day before.
Our first stop was a central square and a church.
Like many old churches, it was full of gold. I wasn't supposed to take pictures.
Turns out the concert I went to last night was part of a traveling ensemble. I guess they play at this church at 6:00 and maybe play at the other one at 7:30 as well, maybe the same night, maybe alternate nights and possibly multiple days of the week. Probably an easier side gig than teaching kids.
Off this square was the clock that we saw yesterday. Our tour guide cynically suggested that it was one of the three most overrated tourist attractions in Europe. The Little Mermaid was one of them, and we saw that last year. We concur.
It wasn't at the top of the hour, so we didn't get to see any action. She said there are a series of puppets that come out, but we didn't see anything happening yesterday either even though it was noon.
We stopped at the Jewish Quarter that at one time was the most desirable places in Prague to live. The cemetery is above the shops. I'm not sure how that works.
One the next stop, we saw the world's largest metronome. The story goes that the metronome stopped when Russia invaded Ukraine but for some reason, it has started moving again.
The next stop was a building with statues of composers along the top. (I don't remember where we were.) Here is Anton Dvorak (the building is behind me).
The next stop was a building with a record of the floods. The water was highest in 2002 where they placed a brick in the yellow part of the wall.
The next stop was the Lennon Wall (John, not Vladimir).
We made our contributions within the blue swirl.
We finished with a few more art installations and I don't remember the story behind them but they had some political significance.
This next one was composed of 40+ slices that moved and once an hour it made an identifiable head. It had something to do with Kafka.
Finally, a famous square, so famous I don't remember the name.
For lunch, we got a recommendation for an authentic Czech restaurant not far away. We were advised to be prepared for good food rather than good service.
Since it was a place that locals would likely eat rather than adventurous tourists, the menus had pictures, a little like a chinese restaurant, and only scant descriptions. It worked a little like a cafeteria, so it was fast, but first you had to get by an impatient woman who made it clear we were doing it all wrong (which we probably were).
I decided it was too risky not knowing if there was dairy in the sauces, so I decided to bail. It was so loud that I couldn't yell to Mike and Marty I was leaving, and Walter also decided it was a little too chaotic, so he left with me.
We found a nice mediterranean place we ended up doing different things the rest of the afternoon from Mike and Marty.
I wanted to get some local currency and a few stamps. Walter came along for the walk. We got directions to a post office in a mall but between google maps and asking a member of the local constabulary, we ended up a block or two away at another one.
To get service, we had to sign in.
You select the service and the machine spits out a small slip of paper with a number. It's just like the DMV.
When my number came up on a screen, I went down to the cubicle at the end of the hall that displayed my number.
I was greeted by a surley civil servant. Our tour guides warned us that old generation Czechs were pretty grumpy, and I suppose that working in a post office may not spark joy. Just like the DMV!
For dinner, we asked the staff at reception for a recommendation for dinner. We were interested in one of the boats that were docked at the river edge, not a dinner cruise, since we would be doing that the next week.
Here's what we decided on. It was pretty much a beer and burger/pizza place.
On the way home, we walked along the river rather than above at the roadside and finally got to find out what was in these holes in the wall.
Pretty innovative use of space as long as the river doesn't rise.
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