Dear Prague Castle

4/11-12
4/8


Dear Prague Castle,

You loom high over a very pretty city. Really you do. It’s a city where every snapshot is a post card and every beer is the best one we’ve ever tasted. Seriously, the city you loom over is so pretty it eventually makes one want to crap.

All of this beauty despite the rain. We’ve toured Prague over two meteorologically miserable days of cold winds and colder rain. We’ve climbed the steep steps to your strategically imposing position, and paid a good deal of money for access to your rooms and sights, in my case mainly to see a specific fenestra. You know, a window from which a particularly (one of three, actually) famous defenestration took place.

And the building which housed that window? Closed! In fact several of your important buildings were closed for repair or renovation or whatever it is that you thousand year old castle complexes do! Oh, I get it, you can’t keep up your girlish castle looks from oppressing the peasants any more, but when we buy tickets your people should have told us that there would be no defenestrative clowning today! For indeed I would have clowned up some defenistratociouty!

All and all it was a good day, despite the closed buildings, despite the rain and wind, despite the complete lack of signage and information about the historical aspects we’ve paid to see. I further recommend that when your people are selling us our expensive access tickets, and we decline to pay for a guided tour or an additional book, that they be trained to say:
“Are you SURE you don’t want to pay for a guided tour?”
or
“Do you REALLY think that the Prague guidebook that you brought with you from home will be enough to get you through this castle?”
and especially:
“Do you REALLY expect to see a room from which a defenestration took place?”

All the best to Good King (actually a Duke) Wenceslas and that St. John who his great grandson threw off of a bridge.

Rob