Day: September 18, 2014

Day 82: Wednesday 17th September
Today Miss Hannaford and I went to visit a puppet maker here in Prague. The Czech Republic has a long history of making wooden marionette (string) puppets and Miss Hannaford wanted to add a real Czech Marionette puppet to her collection.

The shop we visited is called Rici Marionettes. There are lots of different marionettes ranging from really small to really big.

The really big puppets have mechanisms inside them that allow the eyes to move or for the mouth to open and close or a tongue poke out.

Miss Hannaford ended up purchasing a large warlock puppet with the eye and mouth mechanisms and a small Harry Potter Marionette!

You can see here how steep the roads are in Prague. Miss Hannaford and I had to climb this hill to get to this puppet shop and when we got to the top we could see some of the old defensive wall that surrounds the town as well as great views across the city to the other hills!

After our puppet shopping, we caught the tram back to the main square of Prague called Wenceslas Square named after Saint Wenceslas who is depicted in a huge statue at the top of the square.

I am really looking forward to binging my new friends home although I think the Warlock is quite scary!

– Lucy

Day 81: Tuesday 16th September
Miss Hannaford was feeling better today so we decided to go on a series of bus tours around Prague. The first tour started at a really interesting building near our hotel. It is called Ziźkov TV tower. The building looks like it is a space age building- something you would find on an alien planet.

Part of the bus tour included a river cruise on Vltava River, the main river through Prague. From the river we could see the big Hradčany Castle as well as all the decorated bridges across the river.

During the cruise, we spotted a row of yellow penguins marking the edge of a canal beside the river as you can see above but further down the river was a really big group of white swans at the edge of the river. They were really pretty!

Here are some photos of the Hradčany Castle as seen from the river.

It was a very interesting tour around Prague!
– Lucy

Day 79: Sunday 14th September
Today was another long travel day. We left our hotel in Brussels at 5:30am and took the local subway trains to the big Mid Brussels train station for our 2 hour train to Cologne in Germany. We then changed trains for a 4 and half hour train trip across Germany to Berlin, the capital city of Germany.

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We did see some really interesting buildings along the way,

In Berlin, we changed to our final train for this 3 month adventure for the 3 hour trip to Prague, the capital city of the Czech Republic and the last city we are visiting on this adventure!

Here are pictures of the German and Czech countryside we travelled through.

Day 80: Monday 15th September
Miss Hannaford was very unwell today so we stayed in the hotel so she could rest.

Hopefully tomorrow we can go an explore Prague.

– Lucy