9th May

and we're heading off to the prague castle. or what the locals call it, prazsky vhrad. we crossed this bridge, mistakenly thinking that it is the famous charles bridge, but when we looked down the river and saw another bridge crawling with people, as well as how empty our bridge was, we realized our mistake.

bridge is still quite pretty though.

the grounds of some parliament/european union thingy. no idea what it was, but lots of people inside so we went in too. pretty cool though, lots of hedges around.

to get to prague castle, which is situated on top of a hill/slope/mountain/idk, we have to climb up a really long slope. which again is cobbled. seriously by the end of the day my ankles were hurting from the imbalanced weight placed on my feet. stumbled a few times due to the grooves as well.

the downwards view halfway on the slope

and the upwards view.

reached the top of the slope, just before the entrance of the prague castle. it's so damn high up that apparently you're supposed to feel a sense of accomplishment reaching there on foot. uhh okay. anyway, view out there was pretty good, better on a clear day.

petrin hill in the distance.

and prague's new town/old town, where we were staying.

entrance to the prague castle. they have this changing of the guards thing too, and a quartet playing on the streets outside. the music of the quartet was pretty good, with them singing as well. i have no idea if they played for the changing of the guards,  but they were playing some music when the guards were changing.

and here's one of the guards! 

looking at all these photos, you'll notice that we've actually captured quite a few other people (tourists) as well. i wonder if we ourselves are immortalized in their photos as well?

gaining entry into the castle. walking around the castle grounds is free, but you gotta pay if you want to enter some of the buildings.

look at the flagpole. it's a spike with a sharp pointy end at the top. hell for a paratrooper (idk what the hell you call people parachuting so i'll call it the army term) to land on. :)

you can see the st. vitus cathedral in the background. (lots of churches to see in europe. kind of wasted on me.)

the square of the castle (no idea of it's exact name).

and here's the st. vitus cathedral. it's a neo-gothic structure dating back from idk when. hi mummy can we have a neo-gothic house? i think i like it.

queuing up to get into the cathedral.

the cathedral is so damn freaking huge that the photo can't do justice to it. seriously. it took us quite long to walk around the cathedral, and we weren't exacting like admiring anything since we don't know what they were about. all we knew was, ooh pretty let's take photos yay!

i don't know if this is common of a catholic church or something, but there were a lot of stained glass windows in this one. and the colours were bloody amazing, and extremely complex. it was kinda disappointing that the sun wasn't exactly shining through the windows, if not it'll be even more breathtaking.

hello lion with a broken sword! anyone knows what the broken sword means? or is it an accident?

and here the guards come from standing stationary at one spot for one hour.

and we viewed a bunch of other attractions in prague castle, but they either did not allow cameras or there wasn't anything much to take, so no photos. the st. vitus cathedral was truly the one most outstanding attraction in prague castle. perhaps that's the reason why it was the only attraction with a queue.

by the way, in prague castle, you can rent this audioguide which tells you about the various attractions inside (which we were too cheap to spend on). seeing people going around with the audioguide was pretty funny, as it was this huge phone-lookalike thingy, so people were going around with them stuck to their ears.

just outside prague castle, we saw a camera crew on the streets. turns out that a toyota advertisement was being shot when we were there. but it's not a model that singapore has. (that or it's a brand new model) but a pretty ugly one.

saw a bunch of kids in idkw costumes. quite adorable. a girl even posed for the photo. :)

we had a late lunch around the area. trying to look for cheap and authentic czech food (we heard about the goulash and potato dumplings) we walked past quite a few restaurants. again, being greedy bastards, we forgot about photos until everything was (half)-eaten.

the dark bread was pretty fucking weird. and hard. apparently germans like bread like that. i'm pretty sure the french like white bread though. the sauce that came with the bread was good though. some mix of garlic, butter and cheese if i'm not wrong.

and ta-dah! our half-eaten/finished meal. we ordered something called the peasant's omelette, which was really good (but choy thought there was too much veggie things), the goulash and the potato dumplings. if you're a person who doesn't like starchy stuff, i wouldn't recommend the dumplings to you. but again. i have no idea if the dumplings were authentic.

and off we go to the petrin hill.