Arrived last night, luckily caught up with a friendly couple who were locals here in Prague (unfortunately their flight was delayed in London due to the fog since the 20th). Got some great help from them in getting away from the airport. Managed to check into the hostel just past midnight (yeah! :) Christmas), not snowing as planned though, just cold and wet...should have stayed in London and saved the cost and hassle of the flight. The hostel is superb, the whole place has just been refurbished and it's very modern. Checked into a 6 bunk room, but I guess due to the winter season, there's only one other person in the room.
Headed off to Kutna Hora on Christmas day which was about an hour on the train out of Prague. Carly was really the inspiration for me to come out to this place, I didn't even know it was here the first time I was in Prague. I had heard from her that there was a chapel that was covered in human bones. Apparently some 30,000 plague victims were buried in this place, and at one point in the 17th century, someone had recovered those bones and created what is there now. It's actually quite amazing when you see it, all the same seems not quite real, almost like a Hollywood set, but then you remind yourself that these were real people passed away.Kutna Hora was apparently the sister city to Prague up until the 16th century. The city was founded on a silver mine, which they're still milking trinkets to this day. The streets and some buildings are quite similar style to what you'd expect to find in Prague...cobbled alley ways, decorated buildings, but all in a smaller scale. What had happed was that the silver mines ran out and Prague got involved in the European 30 year war, the result of which meant that Prague advanced while Kutna Hora became preserved by UNESCO.
The second day, was spent visiting another castle, this one at Karlstejn. This castle sits on the top of a hill, with a cobbled street township at the foot of it. The castle was built in the 14th century to house the crown jewels and religious treasures. It's located in a beautiful part of the Bohemian country side and well worth the day trip. The other half of the day was spent at Vysehrad, the mythical birth place of Prague. It's now a walled park with a cathedral and cemetery.
For some reason on the coldest day, (-6C according to a street sign) we decided to go up to the Prague Castle. It was pretty cool, not with too many surprises as I had already seen it all before about 18 months ago on my first trip of Europe. We did surprise some Czech guards outside the US embassy as we had taken a slight detour off the normal walking track. We walked around Hradcany (castle district) around the various souvenir stores and returning back to the new town square over the Charles Bridge.The last day we walked back through the parkland that this Mala Strana over to the Strahov Monastery where we had lunch at Hells Kitchen. The restaurant was under the ground and looked like it was part of the cellars of the monastery. Once again I went up to the library and took some photos of the painted roof. In the afternoon it started to snow, around 3ish, this lasted all afternoon while we were running around the new town looking for a pub. Once we got back to the hostel, Cam and I decided to build a snowman with what snow we could gather from the ground and surrounding cars. I thought that for a couple of Queenslanders, our first effort wasn't too bad. We topped the evening off with a snow ball fight with a number of other people in the hostel.
It was a great holiday, and all the better to catch up with Cameron and Carla.
