Praha - Day 3

On Sunday, we woke up slowly and headed down to Vyšehrad. Its an fort/castle in the southeast portion of the central part of Praha. It hasn't been used as a royal seat in a very long time so it is much more ruin-esque than Hradčany. We had breakfast at a small cafe called the Fine Cafe. It was basically a buffet type cafe but you could order eggs too-- we got fried eggs with ham. The yolks here are SO orange! Delicious, like everything we ate.

Part of the old city wall.

The Leopold Gate

St. Martin's Rotunda

Plague Pillar

Church of the Decollation of St. John the Baptist.

So the walls of this castle complex are MASSIVE and thick so you can walk around the top and there were some great views of the city like this one of the old city wall.

Looking back towards the Vyšehrad walls, with a random tennis court.

Entrance to the Gorlice - a hall within the castle walls. (Remember this!)

So many parks we've seen all over Europe have playground-style workout equipment. Pretty Sweet! L on the leg press and me on the lat pulldown.

The inside then outside of the Brick/Plague Gate

On the door to the Brick Gate! Aw. (No, we didn't do that)

Inside the Brick Gate, you can access the Kasymaty (tunnels inside the walls) and the Gorlice (subterranean chamber)!

The Gorlice is now used to hold the originals of the statues on the Charles Bridge that are starting to get too warn to leave to the elements.

The New Provost's House

The Church of Saints Peter and Paul and Vyšehrad Cemetery.

The Devil's Pillar...

The New Deanery

A random HUGE crow in a cage...

View of Hradčany

View of the Baths of Libuše.

After thoroughly exploring Vyšehrad, we headed to the old town for lunch. The salads were refreshing on such a hot day!

The we headed into a church (not sure which! oops!) but they were about to start Mass.

So apparently it was an especially hot weekend in Praha because they kept driving through the touristy areas with water trucks spraying water in the air. People flocked to them and just stood in the water to cool off. It wasn't THAT hot, but L definitely enjoyed cooling off. I'm glad I got the Cordura fabric bag otherwise our stuff would have gotten soaked like L.

This is the best view of the Charles Bridge and Hradčany.

We walked across the Charles Bridge... again. Here is the replica of one of the statues held in the Gorlice at Vyšehrad. Its not looking too hot either...

I have no idea what this is, but we stumbled on it on our way to the metro.

After dropping our stuff off at the hotel, we headed to a different beer garden in Riegrovy Sady on the east side of town. We got a few cool views of Hradčany. We didn't like this beer garden as much because it was fenced in so there was no view or breeze but still nicer than sitting inside a bar like we would have to do in Raleigh. They also had three different beers on tap which is unheard of in Europe.

From the beer garden, we headed back to the old town to see Hradčany lit up at night.

At that point, it was about 10:00 which apparently is very late to start dinner. After checking 2-3 places, we finally found one still serving and were not disappointed. It was called Restaurace Českÿ Ráj. I had pork stuffed potato dumplings and L had a roasted duck! After dinner, we headed back to the hotel and once again crashed hard.