Prague Castle

An absolute must-do on any trip to Prague is a visit to the Prague Castle. It's a beacon and a landmark as it sits high on a hill that you can see from most vantage points in the city. You really get a sense of how life must have been before skyscrapers and cars. Everything would start at the castle and flow down the hillside to the river and then over to the other side.

Prague Castle is a complex of many buildings and we spent 2 half days there in order to get a look at everything. You can rent an audio guide for up to 3 hours that provides more information than your head can take it. We did that the first afternoon and felt a bit rushed trying to fit everything in. The second afternoon, we took our time without the guide to really enjoy the place.

This is the first inner courtyard of the castle just inside the gates. We took these during our Segway tour around 10:30am on Sunday morning so it wasn't very crowded.

Fountain in that same courtyard. Still enough tourists that I couldn't get a shot of just the fountain. You can see in the background some of the restoration going on.

This is outside the gates and looking back to the castle compound. You can see the crowd starting to form for the hourly changing of the guard.

Here's a better view of the front gates shortly before noon for the changing of the guard ceremony. Now you really get a sense of the crowds!

This is the end of the ceremony and the guards heading away from the castle. I captured some nice video of the event, but can't get it to upload into the blog.

This is inside the castle complex near an area called Golden Alley where the merchants for the royal family lived and set up shop. It started to rain about this time, which, of course, we loved, but did put a damper on our photo ops.

Sun back out and one of the chapels in the castle complex. The largest structure is the St. Vitus Cathedral, and that's so cool, it deserves it's own blog post. You can see the poster for the evening concert. Again, music everywhere in Prague!