{"id":11355,"date":"2019-05-12T21:20:16","date_gmt":"2019-05-12T20:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/?p=11355"},"modified":"2019-05-29T21:44:49","modified_gmt":"2019-05-29T20:44:49","slug":"daily_1597_-_prague","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2019\/05\/12\/daily_1597_-_prague\/","title":{"rendered":"Daily: 1597 – Prague"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nToday was a sightseeing day in Prague. First we all went on a boat cruise together, up and down the Vltava. The afternoon was free time, which I spent together with some other 1337 ninjas walking around the city centre, visiting the castle and cathedral and other such obvious sights.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The boat trip was not particularly exciting. There was no guide to tell us anything about what we saw. And the Vltava is so wide that you don’t really get a very good view of the city this way. The clear highlight of the cruise was a yachting event that we passed. Half a dozen little yachts were going up and down the river between colourful buoys. The wind was brisk to say the least, and they were going at great speed, very close to each other. There were several near crashes and we saw one sailor go overboard. Compared to this, the rest of the trip was bland.<\/p>\n


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The city was chock full of tourists, especially Chinese ones. Literally busload after busload of them, everywhere. I was going to go see the old town square and the old astronomical clock but the square and even the streets leading to it were so full that I gave up before getting there, and turned away and walked in another direction. The Charles bridge likewise could barely be seen between all the selfie-takers and souvenir vendors.<\/p>\n

The city has adapted to the tourists and their preferences more than I would wish. Every single place charges an entrance fee – even churches! I like churches and when I am in a strange city I like to look into them, both the splendid cathedrals and the small, simple back street churches. Here, I couldn’t do that, because paying for every single one would get expensive fast. In the St. Vitus cathedral, where I peeked in but decided against paying, visitors couldn’t even walk around freely – there was a narrow path that you had to follow, at the same pace as everyone before and after you, which rather takes away the whole point of visiting a church.<\/p>\n

Instead I admired it from the outside. And as an added bonus, a choir was visiting the cathedral square at the same time and sang beautifully – mostly for themselves, I guess, but since they were outside and not behind an entrance fee, the rest of us could also enjoy it.
\n <\/p>\n

All of the city centre is full of dozens of soulless shops hoping to sell luxury brands to the Chinese. And every caf\u00e9 and street vendor sells identical trdeln\u00edk<\/i> cakes, which have no flavour and no obvious redeeming qualities. They’ve obviously been cooked up for tourists only, because they definitely aren’t traditional to Czechia – I never saw anything like them during my previous two trips to Prague.<\/p>\n

Once you get away from the most famous parts of the city, it is nice. But on the whole, it wasn’t what I had hoped for or what it used to be.
\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today was a sightseeing day in Prague. First we all went on a boat cruise together, up and down the Vltava. The afternoon was free time, which I spent together with some other 1337 ninjas walking around the city centre, visiting the castle and cathedral and other such obvious sights. The boat trip was not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,768,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dailies","category-photography-2","category-travels"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11355"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11359,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11355\/revisions\/11359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}