Day two of our visit and Jayne,s leg is too stiff to go walking...something that you pretty much have to do here, so Jayne is confined to barracks, well more like solitary in the sweatbox. Grant and myself receive orders to go see the castle, so off we go, first stop though is a traditional Czech Breakfast, this involves spicy sausage things with cabbage, horesradish and mustard and of course two litres of the local Pilsner, We then head up the hill to the castle, which turns out to be a good two mile hike, this because we dont bother going inside the castle and instead head to the Monastery which is about a mile further up the hill. Turns out the Monastery is also a brewery, which is very handy. We visit the vaults and they are pretty impressive but someone has decided to stick a posh restaurant at the far end which sorts of spoils things. Back in daylight, we find there,s a very nice shaded beer garden that flogs the Monks, brews....and very nice they were too. We the wander back down and note that the castle isnt really a castle but more of a walled city, witha cathedral in the middle. We also note that most of these grand buildings are empty, there,s also a lot of posh Embassies on the left had side of the walled city. Again, most of these dont appear to have much going on inside, clearly they were built for a different age. The thing that makes us laugh is the faux grandeur.....massive flags flying outside massive buildings which could easily house hundreds of employees but you just know there,s probably not even three people in there, funnily enough the UK embassy doesnt get one of these palaces, we hear the British Embassy is a room behind a pub down in rundowntown. Lord GIbbs of the Foreign Office will be dismayed to hear how low our stock has fallen here in the Slavics.

We take another stoll across Karlov Most or KIng Charles Bridge to you lot, we note that the statues are indeed very grubby, a few have been cleaned up and they look okay, I wonder why they just dont take a Karscher Pressure Sprayer to them. No doubt if I was put in charge of the restoration project there,s be a few missing heads and some limbs hanging on with duct tape. I know this because later on I saw some blokes doing a proper job and here,s how they do it, they have buckets of sand and they use paint brushes to wipe small amounts of sand over and over again until the cleg comes off......it takes ages and ages just to see a few milimetres of original colour.

Also along the Bridge, there,s pleny of beggars and they take pride in their work, they lie prostate with their rears in the air and foreheads kowtowing the brickwork, it must really hurt their knees on these cobbled stones but they keep at it for hours. Why they dont use the British Model of laying back with a can of Special Brew, rattling a bowl when the punters walk past, I,ll never know. The local cops dont seem to move them on either.

So we return to the sweat box and Jayne is feeling a bit better so we head out for some scran and drinks. It,s a fairly civilised evening, then again it has to be as everywhere once more closes quite early.