Lennon Wall
Lennon wall is a free-to-graffiti wall situated on the other side of the river, near the entrance of Petřín hill. I was nearby the day before yesterday but it was too dark by the time I was done with Petřín hill. I went there before moving towards the Museum.
Everyone wants to take a photograph in front of the wall.
There is also a section where someone has written “non-Lennon wall”. Few Korean ladies were taking photographs in front of the text.
A school kid drawing a heart. The wall is free for anyone to draw.
The only proper stencil of Lennon I saw on the wall. (Besides these, there was one South Park style portrait.)
Prague Castle
By the time I had climbed up to the Prague Castle, the entire area was swarming with tourists. The circuit tour lines were already pretty long and so I stuck to whatever was open and less crowded.
There was a huge line to the castle.
…and more people.
An external mural on St. Vitus Cathedral.
The Christmas dolls in the courtyard were not yet setup.
Surprisingly, the entrance to the tower had no lines. I could be because it was not part of the circuit tour ticket or that it required considerable amount of physical work to get to the top. Either ways, I bought a 120 CSK ticket and climbed all the way up.
The mechanism of the clock in St. Vitus Cathedral.
View of Vitava river from the tower.
National Museum
The National Museum was getting renovated. There were only two sets of exhibition going on—2×100, a two-hundred-item exhibition commemorating two-hundred years of the museum and showcasing the breadth of artefacts, and cz/sz, a history of Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1993.
The museum had made its entry free till the end of the year. Coupled with the fact that it was a weekend, and that too, a Christmas one, there was a huge line for the entrance. It took me over two hours of standing in the freezing cold until I was able to get in. It’s not that the temperature was low but that I wasn’t moving around. I was only thinking to myself, “This better be worth the wait in the cold.”
The exhibitions were pretty good. Especially, after reading all the infoboxes for the cz/sk exhibition, I realised how little I knew about European history.
The interior of the museum itself could have been an exhibit.
One of the frescos in the Pantheon.
There was a Stradivarius on display. I was unable to link it to an entry in the Wikipedia catalogue.
…and a hand written bible, “Melantrich’s Bibles”
Karel Čapek coined the term “robot”. This was the layout of the stage for the premier.
Getting Tintin in Czech
One of the largest bookshops was right across the street. Luxor, a chain of bookstores has their flagship shop near the museum. It is a four-floor shop that had a small non-Czech section, too. I straightaway showed the image of Tintin to a worker and even though she couldn’t speak a word of English, she pointed me to the right section. I picked up “King Ottokar’s Sceptre” in Czech. It’s the only Tintin adventure to take place in this country.
On my way back to the hostel, I had a traditional sweet dish called Trdelník. Even though I don’t have a sweet tooth, I enjoyed the warm sweet bread after a cold day.
A Czeck girl making Trdelníks in the Christmas market.