Prague

I’m glad we set off early on the tram for our city tour, we arrived by Prague’s No.1 attraction, Charles Bridge early enough to get across before hoards of those pesky tourists brought the place to a near standstill.

Interesting fact: The numerical palindrome 135797531 carved onto the Old Town Bridge Tower at the east end of the bridge is far from random. This sequence, refers to the exact time and date of the placement of the bridge’s foundation stone, determined by royal astrologers as an auspicious time. Work began on the 9th of July 1357 at 5.31 AM. Medieval beliefs attributed a magical power to odd numbers and arranged them in a particular way to create a pyramidal pattern symbolic of power.

Apologies for the rather uninspiring photographs, it really is much better than these make out!

Another advantage of seeing the city during the morning, is that it is now regarded as one of Europe’s leading destinations for stag and hen weekends. What this means is that by lunchtime this species has recovered enough (in most cases) from the previous night’s excesses, to venture out during daylight hours. By mid afternoon the more discerning tourist is joined by bleary eyed, bottle carrying groups of all nationalities, wearing their respective ‘uniforms’, of matching t shirts advertising why they had travelled a 1,000 miles to get hammered. As the afternoon wears on, the city becomes more theirs as they hone in on their favourite bar and get into good voice, that can be heard several streets away. This is like a light to a moth as the Germans, Dutch and any other nationality cannot resist the attraction of 20 Geordies singing footy songs at the top of their voices.

That became the signal for us to ‘tram it’ back to our campsite, but not before we had managed to walk 11 miles, just like the other amazing cities we’ve seen on this trip Prague gave us the buzz we like, yet another highlight of this tour.

Oh, and one last thing, during the late morning we wandered through one of the many parks and saw some guys erecting a sign proudly advertising ‘The 2017 Prague Naked Cycle Ride’, we didn’t think it was worth hanging out for.

This place made the penny drop for us about a building back in Hungary.
Notice how the sun shines through the plinths sticking out of the wall, thereby spelling a name.

When we were in Budapest it was cloudy so this is how the building looked. Having seen the place in Prague today we Googled a photo of The House of Terror and when it's sunny....