Knowing me, knowing you – Praha!

Old Town Square market from astronomical clock tower

Finally got a few
minutes to blog about our trip to Prague a couple of weeks ago, mostly to visit the Christmas
markets.
Didn’t actually do a lot of Christmas shopping– Julie bullied me into
finishing most of that months ago– but we hadn’t been before and it’s
always come highly recommended. We were staying at the Hotel Josef,
which aside from not having a restaurant (although the bar food was an
adequate alternative) pretty much lived up to its 4-star status.

We arrived on the early evening of Mikuláš
Day, so the Old Town Square (left,
a 5 minute stroll from the hotel) was packed with angels, devils, and
coach parties from Yorkshire waiting on the Christmas tree to be
illuminated. Wary of another tree-collapsing
incident, this year’s was by all accounts a shorter affair, but impressive enough nonetheless.

We took the plunge on our first full day by doing a six-hour
tour1 of the city, which included a boat trip on the Vltava River (whose name, apparently, is derived from the Celtic words vlt, meaing “wild”, and va, meaning water– we were everywhere in those days), a tram ride up to the castle
(right), and a leisurely walk back down across the Charles
Bridge
and into the city again. Anyone who lasted the full
six hours also got free tickets to their ghost walk later in the
evening (rounded off with a free beer). Needless to say we partook of
that too, before heading back to the hotel via a very satisfying dinner
at Lary Fary. If
we ever go back there, we might be brave enough to try the kebabs,
served as they are on something that looks like it was borrowed
from the Museum
of Medieval Torture up the road.

1 Not actually this one, but pretty
similar.

St Vitus Catherdral and castle by night
Just hanging out in town...

Our second full day saw us wandering up to the other main Christmas market on Wenceslas
Square, stopping to reminisce in C&A on the way there (they closed down in the UK a few years ago), and to wonder why we don’t get Tesco
stores this big over here on the way back. Having been thwarted in our
attempt the previous day, this time we managed to visit the obscenely
baroque St Nicholas’ Church on Lesser Town Square, en route back to the hotel to scrub up for dinner.

Tonight we plumped for the Hotel Černý Slon
(Black Elephant), where we got huge portions for ridiculously little
money, spoiled only slightly by some loud English git on the table next
to us who was apparently a world expert on everything from wine-making
to internal physiology.
(Unfortunately, that’s not him above).

On our last morning we headed up the astronomical clock tower for a bird’s eye view of the Old Town Square, followed by some
obligatory souvenir shopping, more svařene vino
and a pastry from the market. A couple of hot chocolates in a café on
the way back to the hotel, and that was the end of our trip.

Never did quite make it into Caffrey’s
(right) to sample their Irn Bru though…
Astronomical clock, Old Town Square
Caffrey's - the only pub in Prague selling Irn Bru

Disney matter, so it disnae

Julie’s parents were over at the weekend, one consequence of which was a trip to see Disney On Ice – Toy Story 2 at The Point. Was certainly well staged, although it was just a re-telling of the movie, and given the high standards you’d generally expect from a Disney production, for me there was just a bit too much falling on backsides to make it quite the belief-suspending experience it might have been. (After all, you don’t see the guys doing the stunt shows at Disneyworld crashing into the other cars through lack of practice when they’re doing their now-obligatory extreme parking…)

gcalctool colours

Spent a little time towards the end of last week working with Rich on bug #157962, to get some colour back into gcalctool. We haven’t yet come up with a complete solution, which would involve an option that picked colours from the theme by default (I’m still thinking about that one), but in the meantime you can now copy the cvs-supplied .gcacltoolrc file to your homedir to change this boring old look into something slightly more sexy. (Or, of course, you can invent your own colour scheme to match your GNOME theme du jour.)

A Nova Corsa

Spent the weekend car browsing (and eventually, buying) with Julie. The Astra she brought over with her from the UK has been registered here for a year now, which means it’s now floggable without incurring the wrath of the Revenue Commissioners… so, next week she’ll be taking delivery of a black ’03 Vaux^H^H^H^HOpel Corsa Njoy with a trifling 8000 miles on the clock.

Just Another Day at Sun…

Apparently, a plane was spotted circling a couple of Sun campuses yesterday trailing a “Just Another Day at Red Hat” banner. As one Sun wag put it, the conclusion to be drawn is presumably that a typical day at Red Hat involves going round in circles with your head in the clouds worrying about the launch of Solaris 10 🙂

(Or, as another put it, “So Red Hat has moved from the ‘ignoring Sun’ to ‘laughing at Sun’
stage. On to stage three…”)

The Grudge

We went to see The Grudge at the weekend, an English language re-working of the Japanese Ju-On fright flick (and its sequels). Reviews had been mixed here (as they had in the States), but the majority pointed to the ‘worth seeing and really quite scary’ end of the scale.

It would probably have worked better had the cinema not been half-full of underage kids who couldn’t decide whether to giggle all the way through or just scream occasionally at the wrong bits, and therefore decided just to do both… but while it was nicely made, it had a few loose ends, and I never find that films where the all the scary parts are precluded by scary music ever really end up being all that scary. Julie thought otherwise, however 🙂