Red Tile Roofs

A large part of Prague's charm is it's red tiled roofs.

There were other ways of getting around than our feet, which were hurting.  We took the tram up the hill to the Strahovsky Monastery and walked down to the castle and into the old town where our hotel was. 

 

Other people tried these novel ways of seeing Prague.

The Monastery Library was one of my favorite spots of the trip.  Again, no interior pictures allowed and I was sorely tempted to cheat on that one.  They just had hall monitors everywhere so there wasn't much opportunity.  The amazing interior room was in the process of renovation (another theme of the trip), but they let you step into the construction doorway so you could see the extraordinary painted ceiling and the stunning rich redbrown woodwork of the walls and moldings.  The inside of the bookcases was painted a sky blue color that coordinated with the ceiling.  There was a wide hallway filled with display items collected by the monks over time. that connected another beautiful room full of books.  The second room also was not accessible except with your eyes.  NER thought a study station created to allow many books to be out and accessible via rotating shelves was just what he needed.  It did look pretty useful.

The hallway was more amazing than one would think at first glance.  One of the hall monitors provided a guide to the hallway written in English for us to read.  Elephant trunks, a Dodo bird, many kinds of apples were among the goodies preserved by the monks. One wall was books, beautiful books, all bound in white or variations of white.  Perhaps shaded by the amount of use they got.  They were medical and chemistry and law books of their day.  The "best" books were at the end.  They had a collection of books about trees.  Each book was a box made to look like a book and made out of the wood of the tree (with the bark still on it) and containing sample leafs and nuts or fruits of the tree.  I suppose thirty or more trees were represented. For those of us that love trees and books.... These were delightful!