Elsewhere in Prague

Trust me: Tessie enjoyed the streetcar rides a lot more than you'd guess from that picture.

After the castle, lunch. We stumbled upon a pub named for the beloved Czech literary hero The Good Soldier Švejk. As this is one of Tessie's Deda's favorite characters, and one he frequently cites, it seemed to be an appropriate place to stop. Also, we were drawn in by the menu, which featured delicious Czech cuisine, heavy on the pork products.

Fully satiated, we rode a funicular - yet another mode of transport new to Tessie - up to the Petřín hill, where we found a park for Tessie to run in and a swing to ride. No pictures exist of this interlude as we were too busy chasing Tessie all over creation to stop and focus. Sorry. On the morning of our last day in Prague we visited the Museum of Communism. Yes, it's yet another of these "Hey! Look at all the statues we found at the flea market!" museums, this one specific to the history of communism in Czechoslovakia. It presents what it refers to as "the dream, the reality and the nightmare" of communism, and is pretty effective in doing so, from the idealism of the early days, through the corruption and barren store shelves, to the political prisons and executions, and finally the end of Soviet communism . It's a small museum, but densely packed with artifacts and displays, most of which seem to date from the 1950s and early '60s, up until the "Prague Spring" of 1968.

I'll have more to say about 1968 in another post. For now: Irony. I'm lovin' it:
The museum is improbably located above a McDonald's and adjacent to a casino. Times have changed in Prague.

A delicious lunch at the U Posta pub near our hotel was our last delicious, beer and pig-laden meal in the Czech Republic. We returned to our hotel and boarded our previously arranged shuttle for another chaotic drive to the airport.