A Trip to Remember: Part 8

My final day of planned events in Prague started out with a trek to Karlstein Castle, an old Gothic castle built on the top of a mountain.  The day go off to a great start with some, as the tour guide put it, typical Czech traffic jams.  The others in the van, a group of ladies from Ireland and one man from Germany along with myself added that despite cultural boundaries, traffic jams all look identical.  The van could only go so far up the mountain before we all had to pile out and hike the rest of the way, but it did give us a chance to get a great view of the surrounding woods.

Once we made it up, the castle looked like one of those fairy tale castles you see drawn in books.  It was fantastic.

And the views it offered around it were great.

Alas, once again we were not allowed to take photos inside the castle, but it was a great tour and I even managed to snag myself a nice chunk of Lapis Lazuli, something that I've been looking for for a little while now.  After the tour we made our way down and back to town and thats when those lovely Irish ladies turned out to be not so lovely...what with their talk about writing (read riding) cheques and bouncing cheques...if you know what I mean...

So, moving on...tonight I had a folklore dinner with traditional music, songs and food from the area, and I have to say that this dinner was much better then the one I had in Vienna, which was great.  Tonight though, they got everyone participating, singing along and dancing.  It was hard not to join in when the singer was going around the tables and threatening people with a giant wooden spoon if they didn't join in.  We were all served wine from these nifty looking things, I've no idea what they're called.

The music started playing.

As we arrived, we were asked where we came from and they played a local song for each of us. As it turned out, I wasn't the only Aussie in the room as they were playing Waltzing Matilda for another group when we arrived.
After the music started, the singer came out followed by the dancers.

It was a great night, and after this I've made a resolution to myself.  After being seated with a couple of Italian ladies who only had a little bit of English and me struggling through with my badly mangled and broken Italian, I'm resolved to going back and learning it until I can speak it fluently.
Tomorrow is when it all comes to an end.  My long flight home tomorrow night gives me enough time to see a couple of sights I marked down on my first tour before heading home.