First trip to Praha aka Prague

Two weeks ago I headed to Prague for the weekend. This was the first trip that I’ve been on after arriving three weeks ago, so it was a very exciting trip for me. The three days, two nights trip wasn’t enough to explore the whole of Prague. There was so many things that I wanted to do, and places that I wanted to visit, unfortunately, the limited time frame prohibited me from doing so, thus, a second trip to Prague is most definite in the future.

Prague is not just a beautiful city consisting of old historic buildings, churches and castles, but behind the facade of it all lies history, stories to be told of isolation, communism and wars.

Our first day there, we visited the town centre, also known as tourist central. We had a tour guide that guided us through the city, explaining the stories behind each of the historic buildings around Prague. The one thing that stood out for me was the Jewish quarter in which during WW2 the Jewish were enclosed behind these walls in which they were to be born, live, die and be bury. One of the small cemeteries contained more than 15,000 bodies. They were buried on top of each other, the graves were 3 metres deep into the ground. They had no names or evidence of their existence on record when they died, only certain children who illustrated their life behind those walls in a painting with their names signed on the bottom are evidence of their existence.

We began our second day by heading to Prague Castle, the largest ancient castle in the world. This place was amazingly beautiful from architecture, courtyard and the view below from the castle. The architecture was very detailed especially the cathedrals. It was very overwhelming as we endlessly walked through the castle, never ending paths, one courtyard to the other, being amazed at one building after the other. Words can’t even describe how beautiful this place was.

From Prague castle we strolled down to the infamous Charles Bridge built by Charles IV and withstanding foot and wheeled traffic for the last 400 years. This bridge was bustling with tourist trying to squeeze in between each other to take pictures and make it to the other side. It doesn’t seem as beautiful or romantic as seen in pictures and postcards. However, when I returned later on at night, my perception did change as there were way fewer people, we took our time to stroll across the bridge and stopped to watch every street performer we passed compared to the afternoon where we were pushed to reach the other side and didn’t stop for a moment to embrace the beautiful surroundings.

Charles Bridge

After walking over the Bridge for one last time, we ended our night and our stay in Prague with an Italian dinner.