Museums - Sunday 10 December

Having found the lovely Moser vase on Friday, we wanted to see what else was available before we committed ourselves, so searched out another flea-market on Sunday morning, only to find that the articles suggesting it were well out of date and it had closed a few years before! We did a bit more looking at Antik shops, then went in to look at the Museum of Decorative Arts. This was a bit of a fizzer. It was lovely building which had been recently renovated. Unfortunately it was so soon after the renovation that they hadn't yet put the collections back out apart from one room of "Director's Choices". This did have some lovely articles, but hardly what we'd hoped to see.

This shows the quality of what the antique shops have to offer - we'd buy about half of it if we could!

Decorative Arts Museum interior

Next on the list was the Technical Museum across the river. The weather was still cold and grey, but we were well wrapped up and enjoying being out it it. We had to climb up from the river towards the museum and watched a small group playing ice hockey on rollerblades. They were pretty good - it was still pretty ferocious even on rollerblades on paving. It was sunny and clear, though cold.

View of Prague from across the river

The technical museum was mostly a very large hall containing cars, motorbikes, cycles and planes of Czech origin. These included a few Tatras, forerunners to Ferdinand Porsche's design of the VW beetle, but also Caracciola's Mercedes-Benz W154 grand prix car from the era when M-B and Auto-Union ruled the world of Grand Prix before WWII, as a show of Germany and Hitler's power. The display of bicycles was very thorough and interesting. There were a few other rooms that we skipped through pretty quickly, as we'd been walking all day and were ready to head home. Also, washing machines and vacuum cleaners just don't cut it with enormous supercharged V16 racing cars.

The Technical Museum

What we didn't expect on exiting the building was darkness, and a swirling snowstorm! It was cold, but not all that wet as the snow was fully frozen. We knew we had a 40 minute walk back to home and were a little concerned about how that might work out - it wasn't an area with taxis or public transport handy. However back through the gardens and down the hill was more fun than anything. What a thrill it was to be out in the dark, with biting cold, and swirling snow settling on our clothes. A magic way to end our Europe trip for 2017, and just what we'd dreamed of when we booked Krakow and Prague.

Is this fun or what?

Dinner was at Konvikt again, ribs for me and beef cheek for Karen. Very good.