204. Prague Spring

10th May 2013. We're back home in the Pays Basque after a week in Prague and southern Bohemia. As it was a French holiday, the final leg of our journey - the drive from Paris to Bayonne - took us 10½hrs with long queues on the roads leaving the capital.
Prague was a revelation to me - it was Old Europe set in aspic. A Europe that had developed in isolation from us in the west and, as it had been largely untouched during WWII, there were innumerable examples of  ornate baroque architecture - overlaid with some monstrous examples of Mother Russia's brutal buildings erected during its 40 year tenure of Czechoslovakia.
The city center was awash with groups of craggy-faced tourists mainly from middle and eastern Europe roving to and fro, all trying to follow their own guide through the masses. Each guide was holding up easily seen symbols such as umbrellas, inflatable lips and other imaginative markers. Throughout all this, smaller groups were gliding through silently on Segways..

 Here are some photos we took.. (I found the images for the first 01:22 from the internet as the weather was gray and shadowless for the most part - but we're to blame for the rest!). That's Smetana's "Ma Vlast" in the background.  

While the cobbled streets of Prague were admittedly hard on the feet, I'm not sure I could have submitted my feet to this Thai foot treatment I saw in several shop windows there:

Some sections of the Czech population appeared to be doing well since independence: the streets were alive with the sound of large 4x4s pattering over the cobbles - Range Rovers, Mercs, BMWs, Audis and there were more than several Porsche Panameras and Aston Martins (Nature's way of telling you that you have too much money!). I spotted one sole surviving Trabant (right) - that stuttering 4 wheeled anachronism that, in case you needed reminding, tells you all you need to know about socialism in practice.  
On one memorable evening, we had a cruise on the fabled Vltava..  
The programme noted that there was a "John Lennon" wall - and I was curious to see what that was all about. Apparently, during the Communist régime, a student had painted a stylised image of John's head  on a wall opposite the French Embassy - much to the annoyance of Gustav Husak - and it became a focus for expressing youth opposition as can be seen here:  John would have been delighted!