Prague's Golden Gate

Today we had two separate walking tours through beautiful Prague, with a quick lunch break in between. In the morning, we started out in the huge hilltop complex that includes the Prague Castle and St Vitus Cathedral. It was at the castle that our local guide asked if anyone in our group was from San Francicso, because he was going to show us Prague's Golden Gate. No, it's not a bridge. It's an entrance to the castle, shown in the lower right hand corner of the photo below.

Here's a close-up:

 

The cathedral was massive and ornate; it was built to compete with Notre Dame. The details are just amazing. Bill spotted the clever rain spout in the photo below.

Inside there's recognition of Wenceslas, known to us from the Christmas carol "Good King Wenceslas went down, on the feast of Stephen . . ." Well, we learned today that he wasn't a king, he was only a prince!

Besides the castle and the cathedral, the complex includes the government building where the flag was flying to show that the Czech president was in attendance.

Leaving the castle grounds, we walked through an alley lined with quirky buildings -- most of which have been turned into shops.

From there, it was a short walk down to Prague's "beach" along the river, where swans and ducks are plentiful!

Our next destination, the pedestrian-only, statue-lined Charles Bridge, can be seen in the background of the next photo.

After crossing the bridge we came upon an unusual piece of artwork depicting the split of the former nation of Czechoslovakia into 2 separate countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The break-up is shown as a pissing contest -- literally! 

We made a stop in Wenceslas Square where we saw the good king (I mean, prince) and then finished the morning tour at 1:00, just in time to see the 12 apostles appear on the astronomical clock. (Six hundred years ago, when the clock was built, there was no Daylight Savings Time, so it looks like the clock is showing 12:00.)

After lunch, we spent a couple of hours walking through the old Jewish Quarter. The highlight was the cemetery, where the graves are layered up to 10 deep and there are about 12,000 tombstones crammed into a very small space. Unfortunately we couldn't take photos there. We saw 3 synagogues, the most interesting to us being the Spanish Synagogue with its moorish architecture.

The most sobering one was the Pinkas Synagogue, whose interior walls are covered with the names of 80,000 local Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Now, to end on a light note -- somewhere on our walk through Prague, we could have sworn we saw a statue of Darth Vader.