Today, a few of us decided to get up early and go sight seeing through Prague all the way up to the castle. Jess, Bob, Drea, Mindy, Steph, Jamie, Kristi and I headed towards the city center on the tram. We arrived at the city center and then walked all the way through Old Town Prague. The streets here are made of the old cobblestone but the streets put so much character into the city’s history. It was about a half an hour walk until we hit the Charles Bridge and that’s when it hit all of us that we were in Prague. The view from the bridge was breathtaking. We took lots of pictures and there was a live band playing on the bridge that put a nice theme to the experience. We hung out at the bridge for about a half an hour then made our way up to the castle. It was probably about 20 minutes before we got to the bottom and walked up the stairs. At first look, the stairs are huge but once you get on top to see the view and castle, you realize it was completely worth it. Right outside of the castle there are guardsmen standing and they don’t make any expression at all. So we took pictures with them and drew attention to ourselves because then more and more tourists started taking pictures with them. From the front gate, the walk into the castle was about 2 minutes. Luckily, there was no wait to get right into the cathedral that’s inside the castle. Once you walk into the cathedral the first thing you see is the stained glass and you feel the coldness of the stone. The cathedral was amazing and huge, it had to be about the size of half a football field I was so amazed by all of the statues and the painting that I almost forgot to look up (don’t forget to look up when you come!) because that’s the best part of the cathedral. It takes about 30 minutes to walk through the cathedral and look through everything. But this time most of us were saying we needed to head back because we had a game later on that night. So we headed down and stopped to get a quick bit to eat and tried to figure out if there was a tram that could get us close to the hotel. Little did we know at our trip was going to get a little more interesting. We got onto the train and about 3 minutes into the ride a man came on board and pulled out a badge and asked all of us for identification. He ended up making all of us get off the tram along with a few other tourists. He held onto our identification until we paid 750 crowns because we didn’t stamp our tram ticket. We ended up paying because we had to get back for our game and didn’t want to try to negotiate anymore than we already had. It was pretty obvious that he wasn’t willing to budge on the 750 crowns. It was a frustrating experience but an experience nonetheless.
Editor’s Note: That night we had the team split into three groups once again. One team headed off to Strenovice on the tram to play the 1st Division Team there (we lost 0-4). Ron took his group on another tram up to Olymp Zizkov for their match (they lost 1-2) and Cory’s team returned to the Olymp Praha Gym to play against the Olymp Juniors and go 2-2. Of course we ended the evening (and our stay in Prague) with an awesome dinner at Jirka’s “Czech Pub” which ended late in the evening for some…
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