March 1, 2009: The Lotsa Castle and Lotsa Rock

I got up at 10:00 and set out on my day after a brief breakfast and checking out of the hostel. I had decided not to join the Australians today because they were heading out to see a church made of bones and I wanted to see the National Technology Museum.

Prague is a beautiful city with a charm unique from all the western countries that I have visited. The architecture is very different; I almost liked it more. My first stop was the Charles Bridge, a famous bridge made in the 1200’s lined with statues. It was fantastic. Then I was off to the largest castle in the world, yes that is right here is another quote from Wikipedia:

“Prague Castle is one of the biggest castles in the world (according to Guinness Book of Records the biggest ancient castle) at about 570 meters in length and an average of about 130 meters wide.”

Inside the castle was another massive church and lots of neat “artisan cottages” as various guidebook describe them. I check out all this, saw some Czech dudes in fur hats marching in formation and continued onwards to the museum.

I made it there and much to my dismay it was closed. Damn. Oh well, I thought, I will just go to the National Agriculture Museum next door. This was the single oddest museum that I have ever been to. The actual exhibits were housed several floors apart from one another in a building fillied with offices. Half of the rooms were barred off with velvet ropes and there were printed sheet of paper flapping in the wind with Czech written on them along with arrows pointing places. The exhibits were odd too, Tractors, paper models and famous Czech garden architecture. I left after an hour.

The next stop was another museum, the National museum of the Czech Republic. I was not to be disappointed. This place was amazing. There was natural history, paleontology, mineralogy, zoology and Czech history exhibits housed in a massive and extremely well laid out medieval looking building will gold leafed pillars and an old airplane hanging from the roof of the lobby. The minerals were my favorite part, my buddy Graham would have lost his mind. I think that there must have been two of every mineral there. 3 massive room with shelf after shelf of mineral each neatly labeled. Each shelf had 2000 specimens, I did the math, and there was a ton of shelves. I left when the museum closed and headed to the train station for my overnight train home. I did not sleep that well.