Manchester, England, United Kingdom
Wednesday, September 2, 2015

A busy last day started with packing – obviously I was not involved in this technical procedure, so I was sent out into the, surprisingly, cool Prague morning to find the makings of breakfast. I returned with croissants and yoghurt to find very little packing accomplished !

Anyway, we packed, left the arpartment and dropped off the keys by 10:30 and then joined our Castle and Cathedral tour that was starting at 11:00. This was, as the others have been, superb. We took the tram up the hill and wandered around the huge castle complex being entertained by the guide, Pistis. He had been a stained class maker in Isreal, a yoga instructor in the UK (before he was deported for working without a visa) and was now a tour guide in Czech. He repeated a story we had heard a few times of the Swedes stealing things from the Czechs at the end of the 30 years war, and to this day refusing to give them back – but when we viewed the cathedral he pionted out some empty plinths where statues would have stood “When the cathedral was completed” he said “the builders didn’t put statues at the front, since they said that if they did the Swedes would probably come and steal them !” – there is still quite a lot of ill-feeling.

At midday the noise started. The drone rose over the castle, the cathedral, the city as the air raid sirens wailed over the whole of the Czech Republic. The first Wednesday of every month is the time for the testing of the civil defence warning system, and has been for years. It was eerie and strangely uncomfortable but it didn’t seem to bother anyone else, I guess familiarity breeds contempt. It has only been used in anger once in the last 20 years when it sounded at about 4am just before the river Vltava burst its banks and flooded the low lying bits of the city.

After the tour we went back down the hill and had lunch in a street-side cafe. The fried cheese was excellent as well as Belinda’s sausages and Lucia’s duck. A walk over Charles’ Bridge was followed by a leisurely stroll through the old town watching the entertainers in the main square before we picked up our taxi for the trip out to the airport.

The flight home was uneventful other than some grumpiness by the EasyJet staff, but ho hum… 🙂