Birthday day!
I started the day Skyping Mum and R, and it was great to hear family voices. Birthdays are pretty big in my family, and while I’ve been away from home for my birthday in the past, R is usually with me. Poor D had to make up for everyone all at once!
We had booked a tour for 1pm, and started wandering along one of the shopping roads, heading for the meeting place. Unfortunately we managed to get pretty lost, and I’d forgotten to load the maps on my phone, and D forgot to bring the physical map. We started asking people for directions, but we’d gone so far out of our way that we weren’t in the tourist zones any more and not many people spoke English or knew where we were looking for! I rang the company, and eventually they decided to start without us.
Meanwhile, we were still lost, but managed to find some of the big landmarks accidentally, not knowing what they were – Wenceslas Square and the Astronomical Clock in the Old Town Square, in our search for Charles Bridge, our touchstone landmark! We also detoured via a couple of shops, but didn’t buy much, apart from a beanie with earflaps and pompoms! By 3pm we were starving, and decided we needed to reward to huge walk with an extravagant lunch.
To this end, we stopped at School, a nice restaurant with views across the river, who did a degustation menu for about $50! Yum-o! Fish, pork, sorbet, strawberries, all washed down with a few local wines. The waiter caught us talking about my birthday (“Should I have another glass of wine?”…”Of course, it is your birthday!”) and so when dessert came out, they had stuck a candle into my crème anglais and strawberries, and brought me a glass of sparkling wine to celebrate. Fabulous! I can highly recommend them.
Once we’d done with late lunch, it was almost time to meet I. for dinner! We were meeting under the Astronomical Clock, so we had at least found that today! I.’s friend L joined up for dinner too, so we were pretty raucous. I. had arranged for us to go to a wonderful vegetarian restaurant around the corner from the Old Town Square, which had fabulous food. We drank a couple of glasses of local wine, ate delicious meals (they have things like eggplant curry, Mexican salad, raw chocolate cake, white chocolate mousse, etc etc etc)
Next stop was an atmospheric underground jazz bar, with a local band with great musicality but not a lot of audience participation. After the wine with dinner we stuck to non-alcoholic drinks for this part of the evening, to ensure we could find our way back to the hotel.
Two Weeks Away 