I now know what it feels like to fit a whole week’s worth of experiences into just one day! …and who are Fred and Ginger? You’ll just have to read and find out…
My trip to Prague was AMAZING! … and there was no way I could fit it all into one post, or two, or three… It ended up being SEVEN posts! But just wait until you see some of the things I saw – sooooooo cool!
Leading up to it, during the night construction workers have been busy laying new tracks for the light rail and, while I complete understand this needs to be done, let’s just say sleep has not been easy to come by recently… Oh, well – who needs sleep? 🙂
I set Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” song to wake me up at 06:20am – and found myself bopping along to two repeats of it before I finally found the will to actually get out of bed… The pink sky of dawn (that didn’t happen until 06:47) is visible behind the opera house…
Now primed and ready for my day, I head outside and there is barely a creature stirring (apart from the ever-present construction workers)…
Across the road to the lovely Hotel Bristol where my car is already waiting for me… and I met my driver, Alexander – and what a fun trip we had!
…and we are off…
…and it seems everyone received my memo asking them to please stay off the roads to give us a clear path…
As with my drive from Budapest to Vienna, stopping at the border to purchase a sticker for the windscreen…
Travelling along during the three-and-a-half hour drive, Alexander and I talked about just about everything imaginable – and laughed for hours…
This casino reminded me of the ‘pretend’ Las Vegas as one drives from California to Nevada before actually reaching the ‘real’ Las Vegas…
While this may look like I photo-shopped it, this is actually a real image – and it looks just as strange in person!
Not sure what he was up to, but this helicopter pilot had his craft awfully close to those wires…
Although it was still chilly, I was surprised to see snow…
Welcome to Prague!
We were early to meet our guide so, since I already had several items from my bucket list, we went in search of Fred and Ginger!
Mission accomplished! Well, sort of… Let’s go down, around the block and come back in the other direction to get a better view…
Meet Fred and Ginger!
Designed by Frank Gehry and Croatian-Czech architect Vlado Milunić, the building is known as The Dancing House (Czech: Tančící dům). Gerhy named it Fred and Ginger in honour of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers, however he was concerned about bringing American influences to the region, so dropped the name soon after.
I still think ‘Fred and Ginger’ fits perfectly…
OK, having found our dancing buildings, we explored Prague a little before it was time to go off in search of our guide…
By the way, that is the River Danube…
This is the entrance to the famous Charles Bridge that I wanted Alexander to drive over… however given that it is only for pedestrians, he politely declined. Poor Alexander, the number of places I asked him to drive, park, wait… almost all of which were ‘technically’ not exactly precisely perhaps maybe where we should have been… 🙂 He was a total gentleman and such a good sport; and as I mentioned to a friend today, I have officially made him ‘family’.
Somehow the man with the mo-hawk seemed very fitting in front of the torture museum…
This poster would give me nightmares! I cannot image what the film is like…
Later, when we picked up Eliska, our guide, she informed us that these cars are specially built for Prague tourist operators…
I felt sorry for Eliska when we collected her. She was wonderful and ever so professional – and commenced by introducing herself and saying that we would start our tour at such and such a place – only for us to tell her we had already been there…
So, she suggested another place – and we had been there as well…
Then I said that I had some places I really wanted to visit and gave her the list on my phone…
…and so began our glorious off-the-tour tour of Prague!
