Christmas Day, Prague Castle and a super train experience

While Czech people do gift exchanges on Christmas Eve, we three Americans kept up our tradition of exchanging gifts on Christmas Day. 

We each bought gifts from the Christmas markets for one person in our group. For stockings, we bought ourselves wool socks from the Christmas market. 

We found a greenery stand that had mini trees, so we even had a Christmas tree. 

We had bought food the day before for a Christmas dinner – Old Prague Ham, potato and sauerkraut salad, grilled vegetables, bread, cheese and fruit. It was nice.

We all missed our families back home and made several calls to share Christmas greetings.

We took the tram to Old Town again. Even the trams are decorated for Christmas in Prague.

The next day, Nezzie and I visited the Church of Our Lady Victorious, home of the shrine to the Infant Jesus of Prague. My grandmother had an Infant Jesus of Prague statue in her house since my earliest memory. So I definitely wanted to make this visit.

As so many things with Prague, the Soviets threatened centuries of history as you can see from this timeline.

Here is the shrine and a closeup. 

Here is the prayer provided at the church.

After that, Nezzie and I toured the Prague Castle grounds, including St. Vitus Cathedral and St. Wenceslas’s tomb.

I preferred St. George’s Basilica, also on the castle grounds, which has St. Ludmila’s tomb. I like the simpler worship spaces. 

While our weather in Prague had been mostly cloudy, that last day cleared up and we enjoyed a beautiful sunset. 

Our last Prague meal was at the Café Savoy. It has the ambiance of an old Viennese café. It opened in 1893, but closed with WWI. The space was used for various businesses until WWII. Then after WWII, the communists took it over for police offices. It was restored in the early 2000s to its glamorous café beginnings. Our meal was delicious and the Cake Savoy dessert with cherries, chocolate and marzipan was scrumptious.

One unexpected feature — the chandeliers were recreated from plastic bottles. We definitely did double and triple takes before finally asking a waiter. He confirmed they are plastic bottles but didn’t say anything more about it, but it’s quite the art installation.

That night we took a sleeper train to Budapest. Loved it! We had a two-bed cabin, a little sink, breakfast in bed and our own steward.

When the steward showed us our goody bags, slippers and toiletries included, we were so giddy. He was so friendly but I’m sure he was amused by our American reaction to train travel. 

Forget flying. That’s the way to get from one place to another.

Next post – the thermal baths of Budapest!