We woke up to a sunny day. Strange to see what that feels
like. The weather remained near perfect through the day. It was warm and sunny,
but not hot – probably in the high 70s.
Last night at Old Town Square, we were approached by one of
the many folks on Segways and offered a discounted rate for a 2-hour Segway
tour of Prague. There are so many of these companies crawling all over the
square that it appears to be the entrepreneurial venture of choice here. I
checked TripAdvisor and there was one clear top choice for Segway tours. I
thought I’d call them and see if they will negotiate on their price to match
(or come close) to the 1299czk offer from the guy at the square. But, the guys
I called said they were booked and reiterated that they’re almost always booked
and so offer no discounts. Since we were really looking at getting an overview
of the place, we decided to give the cheap guys a shot.
We met “Michael,” a friendly Russian boy outside the Powder
Tower about 10:15 in the morning. He had a great sense of humor and we had a
blast riding the Segway all around town for a couple of hours, but we got
little to no useful historic information about the place during our travels.
When we drove through Old Town Square, he said, for example, “You’ve seen the
clock, right? Well, this is the square where do protests and stuff. It used to
be a horse market at one time, now it’s a Segway market.” Then he moved on.
That’s it. That’s all the background we got on Old Town Square. Prague Castle
wasn’t much better. Still, for about $50 per person, I thought it was a
worthwhile fun time.
We were left at the bottom of the hill leading to Prague
Castle at about 12:30 PM and had to walk fast all uphill to get to the
Lobkiewicz Palace for our Midday Concert in the Palace. We huffed and puffed
our way up to the castle and made it to the palace with minutes to spare. The
concert consisted of several short pieces in a beautiful music room of the
palace. I particularly enjoyed the incredible pianist who blew everyone away
with her exceptional performance of Mozart’s Turkish March. After the concert,
we walked through the Lobkiewicz Palace museum and then headed back down, going
over the Charles Bridge and back towards the hotel. I found a record shop and
picked up a few interesting records. They were a lot cheaper when I was here in
1998.
We got back to the room a little after 6 and I headed for a
quick shower before we changed into fancier outfits (I wore a suit and tie and
Sheila wore a dazzling red dress), grabbed a minor bit to eat in the Executive
Lounge, and walked over to the Estates Theater for our evening show. We were
particularly excited about this. The Estates Theater was built in the early
1780s and, according to Wikipedia, “remains one of the few European theatres to
be preserved in its almost original state to the present day.” It was here that
Mozart premiered Don Giovanni in 1787 where it was extremely well received. We
had booked a luxury box and were fortunate enough to get a great box right in
the center (one of the larger Royal Boxes) of the second balcony.
Fortunately, I bought a program and read a summary of the
opera before it started. There were no supertitles and it was performed in its
original language of Italian. But, I was able to broadly follow the plot
because I had read the summary. The singers playing Donna Anna and Leporello
were particularly impressive. Overall, it was an extraordinary experience.
We got back to the hotel room and watched some CNN coverage
of the Republican convention as I finished this blog, past 1 AM again.
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