Today we met Misha who will be our tour guide for the next three days in the Prague area. She is a wonderful and knowledgeable woman who grew up during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. She spent much of her early adulthood working as a shore excursion coordinator for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and she is very knowledgeable.

We visited Prague castle and she shared much of Prague's history with us including how it went from being liberated from the Nazi regime straight to becoming a communist country because its main liberators were the Russians. Also, although the Czech Republic has  had a president since the early 1900s, this year was the first time the people finally got to choose and vote for the president. It was a very close race.

The views from the castle quarter were gorgeous and my favorite part of the area was the St. Vitus Cathedral which was started in 1344, put on hold for over 400 years because of plagues, and finally finished in the early 1900s.

 

 

The most interesting thing I learned from Misha today was that this city was taken over by the Hapsburgs in the 1600s and thus all people were forced, to become Roman Catholic or be put to death. Then when the communist rule came after WWII all religion was banned completely, although Prague's places of worship were saved for some reason. Therefore, in this beautiful country although 65% of the population are Catholic only 10% practice. 2% of Czechs are Protestant and thus Czech Republic has one of the highest atheist populations in the world.

Here are some views of Prague.

We went for our beer tasting and discovered that statistically Czechs are the largest beer consumers per person in the world. Stevie and I tried to keep up at the beer tasting, but as I am a serious lightweight AND I am the navigator on this trip and had to eventually get us back to our room I am afraid much of our seven samples were not finished. After all, they started with a sample bigger than a regular US bottle and moved us on to six other samples the size of 1/2 of that. I guess you take a clue when the "beer master" only takes a few sips of each of his. We learned lots including that Czechs made the first Pilsner.

We ended our day with a Ghost and Legends tour with a great guide who is from NJ and is over here teaching English. It was a great informational tour about the medieval history of Prague and some of its more colorful stories.

We arrived back to our room to this nice fruit gift from our hotel. What a nice snack to end the night.