Exploring Praha with the Whanau

We wake up the next day and realise the walking tour is not going to happen for us with rain coming down and Zach in a cast.  So we meet up for brunch in the old town square as I really love the church and the clock, it’s where everyone seems to congregate.  

Zach and Gareth leave us to get his arm x-rayed and checked by a Czech doctor, wondering how it's going to go with the medical notes in Austrian / German.  Turns out the Czech doctor is from Germany, is not happy that the Austrian’s didn’t operate and wants us to get another cast in Tokyo before we get back to NZ.  So he notes this all down in Czech and now we have medical notes in two languages. This should be fun.

Meanwhile, Drea, Marty, Kaia and I have been wandering around the city and decide to make our way to the Dancing house for a drink at the cafe and then to look out across the views of the town and river.  As this is a completely walkable city the only time we ever take a tram is when we had to get to the bomb shelter the day before.  The Dancing house is that futuristic architecture I mentioned in the last post, it's so completely different to everything in this city but it just works.  Thinking we are just getting a cold drink I order a lemonade, and see Marty tucking into a “platter of various rums” and Drea’s busted out the aperol spritz.  After Zach and Gareth arrive we take the opportunities to get pictures and selfies across the city and try our luck again at the pizza place that rejected us the day before.  And as luck would have it (and still eating lunch on Spanish time) we ate some very nice Italian at 2pm in the afternoon.  Zach is adamant however that he will only eat carbonara.  Pizza is now a dirty word to him.  

As the afternoon was a right off, we waited until the next day to go to the national museum.  Marty and Drea’s last day, they dropped their luggage at ours and we made our way to the museum which is in two parts, the recent history of Czech pre and post WWII and the natural museum.  I”m absolutely fascinated by their recent history, mostly because I had no idea, and it's very hard to conceptualise how the western world experience was very different to what the eastern european / slavic countries experienced during communism.  I'm really hung up on how the younger people of these countries talk generationally about what is taught to them by their parents and grandparents.  

We move from the war years to the natural museum.  I don’t know why but seeing Uranium glass was more exciting than the impressive dinosaur and mammoth bones on display.  And like all European museums, castles, palaces etc they are always so grand with their intricate details on the high ceilings and grand staircases.  But back to the Uranium.  It's freakin cool to see in real life. Like a highlighter green, it glows but doesn’t.  The magnificence of colour is an illusion.

Time is now ticking and we know that Marty and Drea have to leave for Paris, so we fast track to the massive displays of extinct animals and then have to call it a day.  We get in our last photos together as we know we won’t see them for at least another 18 months.  As usual, Kaia gets emotional when they leave, and Zach does his usual shut down and eye avoidance.  Funny how polar opposites the kids are.

The following day we are on the move again.  The train ride from Prague to Munich is 6 hours long, and with our first class tickets we have a different set up in these trains.  We get a whole cabin to ourselves, so the kids are playing games, I’m pretty sure Gareth is reading the tech news and I'm sleeping.  

Roll on Munich.  Our holiday now feels done and we are ready to go.