Old Town Square

Old Town Square is the tourist center in Prague. It's bordered by several restaurants and bars and speckled with several food and trinket stands where one can find hot wine, nasty sausages, and bracelets of sugared bread.

It's also the site of Prague's beloved Astronomical Clock Tower. As the legend goes, Prague was overcome with joy when the clock was completed. Everyone was proud to have such a beautiful, intricate, one-of-a-kind clock tower. So obsessed were they that the counsel members convened to discuss how to ensure that the clock never be duplicated. Having reached a conclusion, members of the counsel snuck into the home of the clock's architect, and, while he was sleeping, they burned his eyes. The blind architect was angry that this was his repayment for such a masterpiece, and, with his intimate knowledge of the inner-workings of the clock, he snuck into the tower and dismantled it so that the clock stayed silent and motionless for the next 70 years.

Amie and I heard a poorly-constructed, badly-enunciated version of this story on our Ghost tour. (I found a more detailed, coherent version in a book at a gift shop.) We had decided to book the tickets earlier that day, and the man at the kiosk told us 5 or 6 times how to find the group that evening ("look for the yellow umbrella") in Old Town Square. Amie and I arrived in Old Town Square early that evening. You can walk the whole square in about 2 minutes, so we decided to grab some snacks before meeting up with our group thinking they couldn't be far away. Amie said, "How many ghost tours could there be, anyway?" It turns out that there are a lot. We were just waiting around one group when we realized that our ticket was from a different company. We eventually found ourselves wandering from ghost tour group to ghost tour group until I had the good sense to take the directions out of my pocket. Eventually we landed on the right group just as the tour was about to start. The umbrella was tan, at best.

Anyway, after we heard the clock tower story in Old Town Square our small pod headed off into the alleys of Prague to discover the ghosts. The tour guide tried to dramatize the stories by noting how "the wind had picked up", when it had been quite blustery all day. And although I admire a language-learner, I must say that I quickly grew annoyed with her pronunciation. I'm very well aware of how difficult it is to learn a language and how one should penalize a person who makes an effort in another language. However, I'm also aware that when one has a thick accent and poor grammer it's counterproductive to try to be "spooky" by speaking at a whisper, mumbling all words, and trailing off at the end of each sentence. And after only 45 minutes of this uneventful promenade (that was supposed to be an hour, but I was almost relieved that it wasn't) our guide dumped us back into the hustle and bustle of old town square. At least we got a nice evening walk out of it, though.

The clock tower isn't just nice to look at, though. It's also nice to look from the tower. For a few dollars you can climb to the top and circle the tower for a spectacular view of this:



We climbed the tower just at the right time of day--the moon was rising over the city on one side, and the other side was being painted yellow and pink. We spent a while up there just circling around, soaking in each view and then coming back around to see how it had changed in the fading sunlight.