Luelle’s First Impressions Of Prague

Until I started selling River Cruises, I had no notion of wanting to visit Prague.  Would have been hard pressed to tell you exactly where it was. But more and more people have been wanting to add it on to their River Cruise, that my interest grew.  As we planned our current trip, which is also including a Passiv Haus Energy Conference for my husband in Dresden Germany, I found that Prague and Dresden were quite close to each other.  So Prague became our first stop on this journey.

What struck me first is how clean it is — especially the older buildings.  I am sure it is rennovations that they have had to make, but it is beautiful. Building after Building, hundreds of years old without the years of grime or grafitti on them.

The first thing when we come to a new country is to try to figure out how their money works.

When we got to the airport, I got $200 US Dollars worth of CZ and $200 US Dollars worth of money to use in Hungary.  For CZ I was able to get 1930 CZ per $100 so it is 20 for $1.

I have to keep converting it in my mind.  The taxi ride from the airport was posted as 492 CZ, and when I gave the taxi driver 1000 CZ I only got back 400.  So somehow it went from 492 to 600, but he spoke no English so I couldn’t ask him.  600 = $30.  Not bad for a taxi drive that took at least 30 minutes.

We are actually staying in the Jewish Quarter, not far from the River.  We just returned from dinner at midnight, and the streets are well-lighted and feel very safe.

There are so many twists and turns though, we did get lost coming back to the hotel.  We were able to find where we had been last night in Wenceslas Square and were able to retrace our steps from there.

For lunch today we went to a typical Czech cafe.  Dave had Goulash with dumplings.  They brought it as  big round bread (dumplings) on a plate, and then a dark gravy with hunks of meat (Dave thinks it was venison) in a metal container with a fondue candle underneath it to keep it warm.

Czech Dumplings. When I asked one Czech person what is famous Czech cousine, he said, "Oh dumplings, of course." I would have to say, they are pretty good.

They had many Greek dishes and I had chicken gyro with a good Greek Yogurt.  I am seeing more and more on TV at home about Greek Yogurt, and how good it is for you.  This is the first time I have had it, along with on the plane on the way over when they served it for breakfast with fruit — much healthier than our processed yogurt.

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Dave has been working on his webinar which he has to do at 3am this morning.  He does it every Tuesday night at 6pm PST — so that means 3am in Prague.  I have just been walking around the hotel area and Wenceslas Square, but tomorrow we plan to take an organized tour so we will have a guide to tell us what we are looking at.
As we have tried to engage the waiters in conversation, they do not really understand what we are asking.  So they know how to communicate with the customers regarding the meals they are ordering, but don’t fluently communicate in English.  The same with the staff at the front desk.  Dave asked them for a restaurant, since we were going at 10:30pm.  After listening to him, as we started out the door, I asked Dave what he said — “I don’t know” was his answer.  So I guess it goes both ways.
There is a group here from AMA Waterways, spending a few Pre-days of their Pre-cruise for their river cruise.

I (Luelle) found this on my walking tour today. Tomorrow, we'll go check it out. I would say Prague definitely has plenty to keep a tourist busy for 3 or 4 days at the beginning or end of a River Cruise.

One of the main reasons I wanted to visit Prague was to find out if I would recommend it to my clients, and if so — should they only do it as a pre-event of their cruise — or is it easily done on their own — and how do they get to the ship from here?  Flying in is a piece of cake, but our next adventure is the railroad to Dresden, and then for Dave to take the RR to Passau, while I am doing the ordinary and flying to Munich to have Uniworld pick me up and take me to the ship in Passau.

BTW:  Most of these photos are taken with Dave’s camera and  the resolution is huge.    That means that there’s a lot more picture than it looks like and if you want to see more detail … just click on the photo.   If it hasn’t been compressed it will expand for you.