The city of Prague is a non-stop delight for the eyes. As some will have noticed from the first of my new “Urban Entrances” series last week, I just spent a long weekend there, my first visit to the city since, well, 1990 to be precise. It was May that time as well, and photographs weren’t yet digital, and blogs didn’t yet exist, so very few people were subjected to my appreciation of the city’s visual delights at that time. You, dear readers, will be seeing Prague and its delights in many posts yet to come. And spoiler alert that I’m about to spend time in another major European capital city, so our City Views and other series will be showing you new vistas in the weeks & months ahead. Enjoy.
Above: Prague Castle (it’s all of those buildings atop the hill, with the cathedral the most distinguishable element to the whole complex) with one of the many sculptures on the Charles Bridge in the foreground. Below: a panorama showing the river, the castle, the bridge, and the city on both banks.
Winkel van Sinkel means “Sinkel’s Corner,” more or less, and this building housed the very first department store (selling multiple types of goods) in the Netherlands. Now it’s a cool restaurant and bar, beautiful both inside and out as you can see :-). Note the advertising campaign that plays on issues of the moment in the EU at large…
This is the Utrecht cathedral, a major portion of which was destroyed in (if I recall well) a storm many hundreds of years ago. There’s some kind of rebuilding thing happening, but I didn’t entirely follow whether they plan to rebuild the whole thing or not. (Image below: much of that is a painted canvas which I assume shows the future cathedral as planned?) Everyone knows Amsterdam’s a gorgeous city, but a lot of folks from outside NL aren’t aware of how many other quite charming and lovely mid-sized or small cities there are here. We’ll have several more posts of the sights of Utrecht ahead – and if you’re on the full version of this, you can also check for “categories” and then select “Netherlands, Utrecht” to see all the posts from here. (Or same logic for other places, because I do try to categorize and tag most posts so any of you considering a trip can consider what you want to see and do 🙂
A new series spurred by things I’ve been seeing this weekend in Prague, a city I’ve not visited since 1990. Once I sort the many photos I’ve been taking here, you’ll be seeing a lot more of this city 🙂
Fun fact, this residence was built for the one and only Dutch pope, who died after a short term in office & without ever living in this lovely building. I’m told he was rather unpopular in Rome because of his ascetic, non-partying ways, and the same source told me that the men who elect popes never again elected a non-Italian one, until they elected the first Polish pope during my own lifetime.
(so much world, so little time....) 