Prague
Prague
We hit Prague for the weekend – to see Mr and Mrs P, our friends from Sheen who have recently moved out there to start new lives.
It’s pretty easy to get to - ~2 hours flying time – and although we’d both been there before, me 13 years ago and S, 5 years – it had changed a lot.
These days it’s a thoroughly modern city – with an Austrian baroque feel to it – and thoroughly stylish too. It’s relatively expensive – or seems so – but still cheaper than some Western European cities, especially at today’s Euro rates.
Anyway, as a destination city to work in, it seems like Mr and Mrs P have landed on their feet. The city is open to foreigners, english is widely spoken well, and the Czechs seem friendly and progressive. The tax rate is pretty low and the economy seems to be on the up. Another great thing is that accessing Europe is easy from here – Vienna two hours away by train, Dresden three, Leipzig, Berlin, Germany, Poland, Austria all fairly easy to get to by train or car for weekends or holidays.
I guess the inaccessbility of the language (it’s based on Russian) and the generally cold winters are the main drawbacks, but it seems like one can enjoy a pretty decent and interesting lifestyle exploring this city.
Here’s a few photos from the weekend
Posted via email
And here are the photos:
We followed the experience (after a nap) with a trip to Woodchester Mansion - the most incredible building I think I’ve ever seen… built (or rather not quite finished) in the mid 1800s by one William Leigh, it was designed to be a family home (on a grand scale) mixed with a Catholic commune. It is elaborately gothic (see the pictures below), still a building site and quite eerily spooky. The fact that the builders departed swiftly (when William ran out of cash) means that unlike most gothic buildings, you can see how they built it - with the most incredible stone engineering and what the Victoria/Georgian’s thought was most important in such a building - “clean air” was a priority, for example. But there was a shower room with overhead gargoyle spout as well as a deep bath, carved out of limestone (and intended to be lined with lead) with gargoyle taps. The place is really a very elaborate folly - it is estimated it will cost £6-7million just to “restore to it’s original condition” the chapel (just one part of the building). And donations and grants are relied upon just to keep the water out. It will never be finished and thus is destined to be an expensive and eccentric oddity as long as it still stands. It was a wonderful diversion for an afternoon though and if I had the money, I’d want to buy it and turn it into the most fantastic (if crazy) house. Few photos: 
