Riding the rails - Part 1

As I mentioned yesterday, Brian and I just returned from our first trip outside of Austria. First stop: Prague, Czech Republic. We arrived in Prague on Wednesday night around 11 and left Friday morning, so we really only had one day in the city. And it was a rainy day. But that didn't keep us from going out and enjoying the sites. There were only a few things I wanted to see -- the Church of St. James in Old Town, Charles Bridge and Lennon Wall.

Brian ran across something about the Church of St. James several years ago and we've been curious about it ever since. When you enter the church, hanging from the ceiling immediately to your right is a mummified arm. That's right, an arm. Legend has it that a thief tried to steal the jewels from a statue of the Virgin Mary and the Virgin Mary reached out and grabbed the man. She held on so tight, they had to cut off the man's arm to free him and they hung the arm in the church as a warning for other would-be thieves. Unfortunately, photos are not allowed in the church, so we weren't able to capture an image of the gangly forearm. If you want to see a mummified arm hanging from the ceiling of an old church, you'll just have to make the trip to Prague yourself.

The next stop was Charles Bridge. This bridge is best known for it's role in the opening sequence of Mission Impossible. Okay, so maybe that's not what it's best known for, but that's how I know of it. Here's Sharkdog with the Charles Bridge in the background and me and Sharkdog on Charles Bridge. As you can see, the weather wasn't great. It started raining soon after these photos were taken.

Our last stop was the Lennon Wall. When John Lennon was killed in 1980, some young people began a memorial by writing lyrics and drawing pictures on this wall. Lennon was a role model for peaceful resistance to the young people in this communist nation. For some time, the police tried to paint over the graffiti and arrest people who wrote on the wall, but eventually they gave up. By the end of the 1980s or the early 1990s, it became legal to write on the wall. The wall has been painted several times and new graffiti is always appearing, so it's look is always changing. It's a shame that the original messages and drawings are long gone.

By the time we left the wall, it was raining quite a bit. We headed back to our hotel for a nice afternoon nap. Later in the evening we headed back to Old Town for a traditional Czech goulash dinner.

Doesn't Sharkdog look so well-behaved at dinner? Don't let this picture fool you. The picture below is a more accurate portrayal of the evening.

And here's just a few more photos of our day in Prague.

Prague's most famous citizen is Franz Kafka and you'll see references to him around the city. But "Hotel Metamorphis"? Is this really a good name for a hotel? I'd be afraid of there might be cockroaches.

Sharkdog loved the bed at our hotel. I found him curled up on my pillow soon after I got out of bed.

And later in the day, he settled in for a nap. This dog knows how to sleep!