Czech out time

Tonight is our last night in Prague before catching a train to Germany to meet this blog's namesake, Dagobert. Allie and Noelle have been patient with us as we drag them around the town, droning on about architecture, the Velvet Revolution, gothic this and that. This city reads like an architecture textbook, where you can sit in one spot and point out perfectly preserved examples dating from medieval times to modern. Yesterday we rode the street car up to the castle to finish our look around that was interrupted by rain the day before. We jammed into the street car with a bunch of Czech college kids on their way to class. They were excitedly chatting with one another in Czech, which as I mentioned before, we can't understand a word of. Apparently they are interested in the same things that young Americans are because their conversation sounded just like this, "Blah, blah, blah, Facebook. Blah, blah, blah, Angry Birds. Blah, blah, blah, "you da man!""




We love bizarre sculpture and yesterday we ran across some more pieces of outdoor art. We googled "creepy Prague giant baby statues with dented in faces" to find out the meaning and it turns out a famous and controversial Czech sculptor, David Cerny, is responsible. In fact, he did the peeing men we ran across in the last post. It turns out the peeing men are not just randomly peeing, their urine would spell out phrases from famous works of literature, like mischievous boys writing their names in the snow. We sought out another one of his works, good old Wenceslas riding an upside-down dead horse.



We did manage to make it to the castle, and it is huge. In fact, its size is so overwhelming that it's difficult to even get a picture of it. Unfortunately, we arrived at the same time as all the buses with their guided tours. Guidebooks always warn you not to be an "ugly American", well we saw and heard plenty of ugly Japanese, Germans, Russians....you name it.



As large as the castle is we felt the need to escape down a back trail and have a picnic away from the tour groups.Tonight we'll forego our usual Daddy-cheapskate meal of dry bread, cheese, and water and head out to a cafe in the square. We may even find ourselves a hospoda and grab some hovezi gulas s knedlikem and a privo.