Long day walking

As you can imagine for a tourist spot like Prague there are tours of every sort imaginable. Well, after reading loads of stuff from deifferant companies I was still undecided which tour to do today.
In the end I decided to take a tour of the Jewish Quarter, so spoke to the lady who was standing below the Town Hall in order to sign up. She gave me a free DVD with photos of Prague and then directed me to a gent who would actually conduct the tour, telling me to pay him at the end of the tour. Having spoken to him he told me that there was still time to grab a coffee and directed me in the direction of Starbucks. Whilst in Starbucks I picked up a free map of the city, they always come in handy, and on the back of the map was an advert showing free tours, also starting at the Town Hall. Free tours, how does that work then? Well it appears that the tour is free and if you enjoy it you give the guide a tip of whatever amount that you think fair. Well, that was good enough for me, so off I went to join the free tour...that will teach the other bloke to get the money up front.
The "free tour" guide was a young woman named Chrystal, who it turned out comes from Vancouver in Canada, and has only been living in Prague for 8 months, and doing tours for the past 3 months, and boy! was she good at what she does. She was a natural, and her head was packed with facts and figures, but she could put it over very well. Her tour, which lasted 2 1/2 hours was one of the best that I have ever done, and it covered most areas of the old town, including the Jewish quarter. Although it did not include going into any buildings etc, it also gave me an insight of what I needed to look at further.
During the tour she also mentioned that she was doing a further tour in the afternoon of the Castle, however, this tour had a set fee. Well she was so good that about 8 of us signed straight up for that tour as well. The castle tour would last 3 hrs, so that was 5 1/2 hrs walking and the weather was great, a nice sunny 24 degrees. Whilst on the first tour I looked up at one of the buildings on the main square and saw this statue on the top corner. It clearly shows a fireman, with hose in hand, rescuing a woman from the flames and smoke. The building was an office block, and I have no idea of the relevance of the fire fighter. There was also a golden Fire fighters helmet on the pinnacle of the front of the building.

Whilst on the afternoon castle tour we were taken into these very quiet gardens below the castle, this pond was so peacefull and full of loads of fish, and to cap it all, there was hardley anyone about. A lovely place to spend a nice warm afternoon.

There were also peacocks in the grounds of the gardens, this one is an albino, he proves quite an attraction with the few tourists that go into the gardens. There was also an aviary with about 6 Bengal Eagle Owls in it, however, due to the height of the aviery they were not easy to photograph.

This is a view over the city from up in the castle grounds, pretty neat eh.

We were also luck enough to catch the changing of the guard at the castle at 4pm which was also pretty good to watch (and a lot more proffesional than the ones at Stockholm). Note that all the guards are wearing sun glasses! They do one hour stints and have to remain at attention for that hour.

The guards at the back of the castle were in the shade and did not therefore wear sun glasses, Chrystal told us to watch there eyes. It was so funny to see the guards eyes following every female in sight, you can see why they wear sunglasses given the opportunity.

At the end of the 5 1/2 hrs I was tired out, my feet were sore from walking on the cobbles and I was hot and sweaty, so after a quick tea in the old square, I walked the couple of miles back to the hotel to grab a shower and wash my sweaty clothes for another day.