This is St. Vitus Cathedral.
Well it’s a tiny part of a huge cathedral.  I mean you know how
big these things are.  By the time you get far enough back to get
a picture of the whole thing it looks tiny and you’ve lost all the
detail. 
     This is in the Hradcany district.  It is
where the king built his castle way back when and said this is Prague
and it’s going to be my capitol and the capitol of the country. 
Now mind you this was like a thousand years before Columbus got a gleam
in his eye and a hankering to travel.   The castle he built
has a hall in it that is so big they held jousting tournaments in
it.    It has a special entrance and stairs built to
accommodate horses.  All of my pictures inside came out so dark you
can’t see anything.  And if I had lived back then I would have
killed myself for lack of light.    But in later years
other kings had palaces built and this is from one of
those.   The
funny thing is we never would have seen this if I hadn’t wanted to buy
some postcards.  It’s not on any tour.  It’s the room leading
to the gift shop from the ticket area.  You go into this cramped
room to buy your ticket and there was a dingy sign pointing down an
equally dingy corridor.

 We went through the door and wow!  The ceilings were at
least 20
feet high, everything that could be gilded was  and of course it
was filled with religious art.  A favorite theme of kings and
conquerors.  This room was immense, can you see how small the
woman looks in comparison to the furniture.  We never did find
out what it was used for, both of us meant to ask but with everything
there is to see it completely slipped from my mind.   I guess
that is going to be one of the things for the next trip.  If you wanted to you could spend a whole day just in the Hradcany
district.  I mean it was its own self-contained little town, so
there is plenty to see.  And  I know we missed tons of
stuff. 

I’ve never seen stained glass like this before.  It had so much
blue and purple and red that the whole cathedral had a purplish red
glow.  It was worth it just to see that.  Most of the
cathedrals I’ve seen didn’t have all the blue and purple because it was
so expensive to make back then.  But this cathedral was built
expressly for the king and his family so no expense was spared. 
All the kings for the last 1000 years were crowned here.  When
they died they buried them here too.  Even before it was completed
they were burying kings inside, because like most cathedrals it took
about 500 years to get it finished.  Give or take a couple of
years, lol.  When
we left Golden Lane, which inexplicably I didn’t take one picture of,
we were in a small courtyard with this bronze statue.  I could not
figure out why everyone coming from the back of the statue was
grinning, snikering or just outright laughing.  I mean everyone,
from little kids to old ladies.  I don’t know if you can clearly
see the looks on their faces but all of the people in this picture are
smiling.  Kind of like I’ve got a secret. 

What I should have done was cup those suckers because that would have
been the biggest handful of my life.  What’s really funny is see
how shiny his butt and balls are?  Well I don’t think some guy
comes out and polishes them at night, that’s from the volume of people that can’t
keep their hands off.    That’s what I like
interactive art.

One more and that’s it from the Hradcany district.   I just
can’t show them all.  This is to give you an idea of how big
Prague really is.  I took this from the castle wall.

Czech has a population of over 10 million.  Prague itself has a
population of over 1.1 million.  Tourism is the number one
industry of Prague.  What that means nowadays for a traveler is
everyone you meet speaks English and all the hotels have normal size
towels. yay!  I have no idea which one of the districts I’ll do
next, i guess it will be a surprise for all of us. 

The one thing I know for sure is that unless the xanga team gets on the
stick and fixes my picture uploads you are probably going to wait
another two weeks.  Half the time my word wrap doesn’t work and
the other half everything is underlined and I can’t get the edit to
work to fix it.  I lost everything in this post twice and finally
resorted to a crude cut and paste method.  I’m so glad I pay for
this stellar service.  Is everyone having these problems or is it
just lucky me?