Saturday in Bohemia

"I pack my suit in a bag

I'm all dressed up for Prague"

Slept in a bit more today, got up around 7, Katy was up having breakfast with some friends, chatted with her for a bit, like most Airbnb super hosts she is insanely nice and friendly, she gave me some tips for today and sweetly said "Oh yes, I love my city so much too" when I told her what I had seen on day one.

First stop is one of the four weekend Farmer's Markets in the city, I don't remember the name because it was in crazy Czech.

Grabbed pastries:

 Czech's are big on hot wine beverages, which are all awful, luckily there was also good local coffee stands in the market, one in particular had really impressive espresso.

Friendliest people I have met so far in Prague turned out to be German, the two guys at this stand were really open to conversation, chatted about half an hour, bought some meats and cheeses.

Also bought bread from a young baker who just moved back to Prague from San Francisco because he couldn't afford to keep living in SF. Food is certainly cheaper in Prague, a impressively tasty loaf of crusty, heavy spelt was about $1.60 Canadian.

Packed up my foods, drank one more espresso and got back on the subway to find a knife. It is impossible to overstate the impact of Google on this sort of travel, should be interesting once I get to the Stans and don't have Google in my pocket all day to refer to.

Found a nice jackknife for about $15 (apparently pretty much any person weapon that isn't a gun is allowed, switchblades, butterfly knives, brass knuckles, etc, all fine). Picked a park at random from Google Maps and took subway there to eat my market lunch. Arrived to find that this park was also hosting a farmers market...

Bread = Crazy good
Meats = for the most part too strong and smokey
Cheese = Best thing I have eaten in Prague so far, no idea what it was, something like manchego or greyere-ish.
Apricot Platz - not as good as my moms

Today was the Prague marathon so lots of people and lots of transit issues, the English version of the transit announcement was cute, telling people that "Because of the tradition of the marathon run please would transit riders stay underground", lots of English on signs and in museums but it is never quite right, always very formal with word usage that is really interesting .

Walked through the old town square, it's a madhouse of tourists at the start of April so it must be unbearable by June. Would have been so cool to visit Prague around 1990, after the USSR (hahahaha, spellcheck autocorrected USSR to USA) fell but before the city made it onto must visit lists. It's really easy to see the differences between the generation who grew up under Soviet rule compared to anyone born in the 80's or later here, like two totally different cultures.

Walked and walked and walked, made my way over to Prague Castle (apparently the largest in the world) the castle and surroundings could easily make for a full day, so big and so historic I really found it hard to process.

 View from partway up the hill heading to the castle.

The Czech National pastry, trdelnik, plus cathedral.

I kinda forgot to get pics of the castle and grounds, here is one Google liked:

What a busy day, I am going to bed now but didn't even get into the art gallery (hundreds of Dali) or seeing Good King Wencislaus's tomb or a bunch of other stuff.