North Bohemia and Germany

I have a habit when I travel not to return the same way I came if I can help it.  I flew into Prague but arranged to fly back to the US by way of Frankfurt.  This gave me an opportunity to see one more place.  Being an American, I couldn't afford an extra day in Germany, so I decided to see a city the guide books recommended in the Sudetenland, Decin. 

Decin is not far from Usti nab Labem.  It is where the Labe (that's Elbe to the Germans) drains almost all of Bohemia into Saxony.

It's really like two cities on either side of the river.  The nazdravi is on the west bank but the main square, Masarykovo namesti, is on the east.  Here is where I booked a room in another cheapo hotel with the bathroom down the hall.  Great food though, as usual.


This is the Sudetenland. Though most Germans were expelled as part of the mass re-aligment of ethnic populations following WWII, up here the architecture still retains a German feel.  While English is widely spoken in places like Prague, Plzen, & Kutna Hora, when I had to rely on it here, people would look concerned and ask, "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" so, clearly, there remains an undercurrent of German culture here.  

 
 









After settling in I went for a walk and wandered up the Dlouha jizda ("long ride" or something like that).  This is a street ascending a long walled-in corridor to the top of a hill where the Castle stands guard over the Labe. (Sometimes it is refered to here as a "chateau")




From half way up, I go through a door to a terrace and look down.  That body of water with a park around it is called Zamecky rybnik.

That word, zamecky, is another term for hrad, or Castle. 






A resident of the castle lawns.  I did everything I could to get him to spread his 'eyes' but this bird was not as cooperative or polite as the Vrana I met the other day!















Masarykovo namesti, seen from up here.  Note the hilly terrain here in the North.

 

Entrance to the "Chateau".

It was late afternoon and I walked through a huge and almost deserted courtyard.  Until 1991 Russian troops were stationed here.  During WWII, it was the Germans.

This scene is the western edge and what appeared to be one of the main entrances.  
When I got to the window to the right of the locked door I looked in and saw a small tour just descending the stairs and the door opened.

Hannah had just finished the last tour of the day but I persuaded her to pose with the very large keys.







Walking back.  To the left of the descent of that walled road, a terrace overlooking the town holds a nice rose garden where I enjoyed some quiet time writing.

At the east end of the garden was this prominent viewing platform, complete with grandiose statuary.












 
Left: Looking back at the Rose Garden
and the Chateau.


Right: Looking east toward the church of the Exaltation of the Cross.

Here you get a feel for the walled-in Dlouha jizda street.

Below: Walking back down it.

 

At the end was another little beer garden/restaurant where I drank a Staropramen and listened to various tables talking.  Some of them had come by bicycle and seemed to enjoy dressing the part.

That night I had a good dinner downstairs from Hotel Posta, where I stayed. Afterwards I sat on a table late into the night on Masarykovo namesti.  A gathering of people aged late 20s through 50s were talking and I gradually came into the conversation.  It was all in English.  Nobody aside from me was American or British.  Most were travelers from central and eastern Europe.  One guy was Ukranian.  We talked about travel, beer and bars, and the Don Bas.

Last Morning in Czech Republic:

Waiting for the bus to the nazdravi on Masarykovo namesti.

Hotel Posta is the one with the ad on it.  The more expensive hotel is the pale yellow one.










School kids going somewhere.

Looking North from the square.

Looking South where the bus would take me.

The blue one is called the Shark.  The red one is a local, "regio" drahy (train).   In a few minutes mine came, it was green, sleek, and a Deutsch-bahn train.  The frontier is only 10 km or so from here.

Once the train pulled out I started snapping photos of the Castle , or Chateau.  The thrid picture has a lampost lined up perfectly with the spire.  You can't do that if you try!

Decin borders a national park of sandstone cliffs, ski areas, hiking trails and other things I'd like to see one day.  They call it "The Bohemian Switzerland". On the other side of the border the Germans call it "The Saxon Switzerland".  I think it's also a national park.

 
Pretty soon I was in Germany.  Both are Schengen countries so there isn't so much as an announcement.  The down side is that I didn't get any neat passport stamps!  Gradually, everyone around me was speaking Deutsch.

I changed trains in Dresden.  What a clean and modern-looking city.  (I wonder why...)

I shared a seat with a 40 year old man chaperoning at least 20 teenaged kids on some kind of school trip.  I was the only person looking at a map or out the window.  Everyone else spent the entire time to Leipzig on his/her mobile device.  The 40 year old was the biggest kid, enthusiastically showing something or other on his device to one 13 year old after another.  Didn't have a word for me, even when I asked him simple to understand questions.

The Liepzig Hauftbahnhof is another gigantic shopping mall.  This was in the former GDR. I grew to adulthood thinking I'd never see it.  Now it looks like suburban Illinois.

This is the ICE high-speed train I took to Frankfurt.  Speeds often hit 180km/hr.

I told a German friend in Oregon I'd like to stop in Weimar, a city of various historical connections for Germans.  Goethe, Schiller, the interwar republic, ... Birkenau.  The train slowed to about 60 miles per hour as we swept through the station en route to Erfurt.

Twenty-eight years ago I stood at the edge of the Grenze, near Bad Hersfeld.  I hiked to a sign deep in the wood that said "achtung!" and looked out across the 100 meter no-man's land cleared with bulldozers through the woods. I thumbed my nose at a guard tower across a high barbed wire fence were somebody was looking at me through binoculars.  

It's no longer a grenze and you have to study a map hard to find it.  The train passed very near, at 160km/hr.

Arriving in Frankfurt there were virtually no hotel rooms available and I had to pay $125 for one night in a Hostel!  

But I had a private room with a balcony and this was the view.

Looking west is the Hauptbahnhof itself, very close by.  

Looking east down Keizerstrasse is one of the many Frankfurt bank high rises.  I spent the evening walking around a very busy street scene and wound up eating pizza from a Turkish place and talking to a Brit and a Swede who told me I was a strange type of American.

The street was busy and loud until well past four in the morning.  This is a selfie on the balcony as I prepared to check out.  Downstairs was a communal breakfast.  I met some young travelers here and made friends with a couple from Seattle, and another from New Zealand. 


Then I headed for a quick look around downtown Frankurt on the tram before heading out to the airport. 

Right:  Paulskirche. 
Below: Roemerplatz.

Back at the Hauptbahnhof I found the U-bahn to take me to the airport.  An African American guy from Virginia traveling around Europe took my pic in front of the impressive transit map.  We hung out all the way to the Lufthansa terminal together and it was good to talk to a friendly American before trying to reenter my own country.  Once on the ground in the USA, we had to run a gauntlet of rude and angry TSA workers at Dulles who made us pass through security yet again where we even had to take off some of our clothes. 

 
At Dulles I switched to a plane to Portland, and so 13 hours on two planes and I was home again.

It takes time to digest a good trip.  It's hard to let it go.

Back to Prague.

Prague would be the home base of this trip.  One, because it is central and everything goes to or comes from there.  Two, because I sort of know the city by now.  Three, because I just haven't run out of interesting things to do and see there.

Trip back north.  A pleasant compartment companion.  Lara was going to Prague to visit her "man" who is in a hospital with some sort of cardiac condition.  Despite this she was jovial and always on her cell phone or computer.  She gave off that special glow some people have who are almost always content and happy.



Oddly, Lara lived in Tabor, this town, which we passed along the way.  She spoke no English so it is possible she said it in past tense and I just didn't catch it. 

Tabor plays an important part in the Czech history of the turbulent 15th century.  It was founded as a fortified camp of the Hussite armies under general Zizka in the 1420s.  I hear there is a big statue of him in the main square.  No time to stop on this trip, but it's on my list to see some time if I get to come back.  

Cool cable-stayed suspension bridge.  I almost missed it.

I didn't see many windmills generating electricity in the part of Bohemia I visited but these photovoltaic farms were not uncommon.

Back in Prague and the deep deep subways.

Got a room back at the penzione "David's Apart-hotel" in Florenc where I'd stayed last week. Florenc is a neighborhood in the north part of the center of the city, south of where you'd cross the river as it flows temporarily eastward.

Before it got dark I changed and went out to Namesti Republiky - the Prague one. This is a busy tourist place and a shopping place.  I stood in one place for these three pictures and s swiveled with that couple wearing green and white shirts.  The place that says 200 shops is a giant shopping mall made to 'fit in' architecturally.

Just around the corner from the third picture is the Obecni Dum, a building for which I haven't figured out the function but what a facade!

It, in turn, is next to the old Powder Tower.  This is one of the old gates to the city.  Beyond here is refered to as Steromesto "old town". Just on this side is Novemesto "new town", ~ 1300s.

 

I wandered around window shopping and had dinner (Chinese actually) and enjoyed a night time stroll.  This is Saint Havel church. No, they haven't cannonized Valclav ... yet.








Tyn Church 
from the Steromesto Namesti at night.  Even now there were lots of tourists and musicians etc.

Before taking a metro home to Florenc I wound up on Vaclavske Namesti, the center of night life in the city.  There a woman very sweetly asked to spend a few hours in my hotel room tonight.  "Sorry honey", I had to say to her, "My feet hurt too much!

Next Morning:

The stairs up from the Mustek station on Vaclavske Namesti.  In the background is the Hotel Europa again.  The trams are a mix of new, modern and some from the 70s and 80s, as seen here.  All are Skoda. 













 
At right I am inside the famous Lucerna Pasaze, a series of shops on first and second floors of adjacent buildings linked together as a shopping mall.  This one dates from the 1920s and is built in art deco style. Its architect was Vaclav Havel, the ex President's grandfather. Adjacent to the rotunda is a theater the presidents' father ran.  

The statue 'Horse', by David Cherny, is a parody of the statue of Wensaslav on a horse at the upper end of Vaclavske Namesti of course.  This artist is installed in many places in and around Prague and has a typical Bohemian sense of humor I think.

Hradcany isn't the only fortified castle in the city.  In fact, there was a fort and Castle on a hill in the southern part of Prague centuries before Hradcany became the seat of the kings.

That place is called Vysehrad, where archeological evidence suggests was already a fortified place for the new Slavic tribes in the 6th Century.  It's a rocky promontory close to the right bank of the Vltava.  Even the road next to the river takes a little tunnel to go around it. I took a tram down that street and wandered around until I found a way to get up from behind.  This is a view of Prague and, in the distance, Hradcany, from up on Vysehrad.

Wandering around up there I came upon a younger couple from Vancouver BC and we hung out speaking English together.  It can be enjoyable to find someone to speak your native language with ...natively.  We then met an American on leave from the Army - Ft Drum NY - and the four of us toured the sites together.

Looking down a walk toward the river.  I went over that railroad bridge just the other day when Maria and I were on the train going toward Plzen. Hradcany is a peek-a-boo view in the center at top.

These castles all have their big cathedrals.  This is Saint Peter and Saint Paul's.
  
Near here is a park where we hung around for awhile.  I saw these statues but rather than religious themes, these are mythic-heroic.  That kind of imagery is more characteristic of the 19th Century Nationalism that was building in Bohemia before WWI.  In fact, the style of the sculpture is definitely romantic/nationalist.  Sort Czech Wagnerian?.  It also reminds me of a Janecek opera. 

 

After a beer at a small restaurant I started heading back to town and found this place with a cage and a Vrana in it.  As if there were any doubt, there was a decal on the glass.  From the other side it was chicken wire. I went around and shared an apple I was munching on with my more distant cousin.  He was very gracious and thanked me.


On my last full day in Prague I wandered around revisiting many of the places I'd already been and enjoyed.  This picture is of a place called Frantiskanska Zahrada, a courtyard-garden hemmed in by buildings in the busiest part of NoveMesto.  Just on the other side of the backs of these buildings in fact, is Vaclavske Namesti. It is a nice garden to have a bite to eat and drink a bottled water while resting my feet.

Taking a tram across the Vltava to a section of the city called Smichov.  Is it just me, or are we going so fast the pillars on this railing are leaning!



 












Smichov is a non-tourist part of the city and dominated by apartments, business streets and a large shopping mall in the middle of it.  I walked around a cool cemetery for a while and took another tram north back to Mala Strana, where it is very interesting but smothered with tourists again.

Looking back toward the Charles Bridge from Mala Strana.  The same car is here as last week.  

I walk the bridge again, this time in the opposite direction, back toward Staromesto.  The guy on the upper right is guarding the bridge.

The guy to the left is hoping for money in his cap.  This is right on the bridge, the heart of the tourist section.  In other parts of Prague I didn't see much pan-handling.

There are a lot of boats though, this one moors downstream and comes under the bridge and turns around.  On the other side of the bridge there are many more.

Looking back toward Mala Strana.

The characteristic statues.

Looking back at Hradcany.

  Boys in the band.  There was a dixieland jazz band on the Charles bridge here.

I look back at the Castle a lot, don't I?

So where does the number 17 tram end?  I decided to find out. It goes north around Josefov, the old Jewish quarter then crosses the river to the northern part of town called Holovice.  I hadn't been to this section before but I found it interesting.  At the very end of the tram is what looked like a late19th century exhibition space.  The centerpiece is the Kzizikova Fontana, a series of water jets illuminated by arc lamps.  The inventor of arc-lamp technology was "The Czech Edison" ,F. Kzizik. The street where I stayed was named after him.  I'd been curious about that name for a week.

Last morning in Prague:

Took the metro one stop past the train station to The Muzeum at the top of Vaclavske Namesti to say goodbye to this fantastic city.

The Muzeum Narodni dominates the view of the top of the "square" but I've never visited it.  It's mostly a natural history museum and there are many more intresting museums to see that I also haven't visited.  

Looking north from the Muzeum toward the hlavni nadrazi (main train station).

Walking toward the nadrazi.  This is the modern entrance to the grand old station.  You enter and walk under a large boulevard and you are in a grand shopping mall/terminal that rivals the commercial areas in large airports.

After getting my ticket northbound I explored some of the older parts of the station. 

Then took a look at the tracks northbound and south.  

 

I went back down below and walked underground to pop up at the appropriate platform, boarded my train and left the city of a thousand spires.