Prague Day #4

10/9/07

Today we went sightseeing in New Town (called Nové Mĕsto), which is south of Old Town. On the walk to New Town, we started off seeing a few sights in Old Town that we had missed the other day. This is a building that is attached to the Powder Gate (which marks the beginning of the Royal Way). We have no idea what this building is for, but it just amazes me how huge and beautiful it is. It kind of reminds me of Vegas and how all the hotels are so massive and pretty, except that the entire city of Prague is like this, not just the hotels, like on the Vegas strip. And it seems as though they are constantly restoring the buildings because most of them are centuries old but they look great. I can’t imagine how much money they spend on the upkeep.



We also saw this statue on top of another building, which we also don’t know what its purpose is. They have statues on so many buildings. If there is a person that had any kind of significance to this country, there is probably a statue in the city for him (I doubt they have any statues of women, but I could be wrong).



This is the National Theater where they have operas and concerts. You can buy a ticket to a show, but we’re not really into that kind of stuff. We just like looking at the pretty buildings. :)





Here is the Church of St Gall. Unfortunately it was locked, but we peered inside and it looked beautiful, but not as gorgeous as the Church of St James we saw yesterday.



By now, we were pretty hungry (shocker), so we looked for pizzerias in the New Town. They are all over Old Town, but of course once we started looking for one, we couldn’t find one. We finally saw one and I was so excited, I screamed “Pizzeria!” I’m such a dork, and I like food WAY too much :) So we ate pizza and felt revived to go see Wenceslas Square in New Town.

Paul’s little Homey loves Budweiser:


Wenceslas Square is just a long street with a bunch of restaurants and other shops for tourists, but it used to be a medieval horse market. Apparently a lot of historical acts have occurred here, like the celebration of the new Czechoslovak republic and the proclamation of the end of communism by Alexander Dubček and Václav Havel.



Here is Homey checking out the square (where’s Homey?):


At the southern end is the National Museum and the statue of St Wenceslas, who was a 10th century pacifist duke of Bohemia and was called ‘Good King Wenceslas’ (in a Christmas Carol I never heard of but Paul had) even though he wasn’t a king.

National Museum:


Statue of St Wenceslas:


That was as far as we got in New Town. There are some other sights, but we may not get to them because we still want to go to Prague Castle and the Jewish Quarter, and the New Town isn’t as exciting as the Old Town and other places. It’s more business and city like.