Prague, Part 2

This was during a Cyklojizda bike ride, just as the group were waiting on Italska, next to Hlavni Nadrazi, for the police to clear the street ahead, which was Seifertova.

The Cyklojizda ride ended with an afterparty in, of all places, Nakladove Nadrazi Zizkov, one of the largest rail freight stations in Prague (Uhrineves is another big one). This was my first inside look at it, as it's normally closed to the public.

Like most modern freight stations, Zizkov handle most of their merchandise traffic in containers.

Here's another shot of the freight station.

Oddly, it looks to be a stub-end station.

This was the beginning of my next train trip, to Wien, or Vienna, in Austria. I had been to Austria three times already, but had never visited Vienna or any other major city, so this would be my first look at urban Austria. As is often the case on Eurocity Trains, our locomotive was a Class 371 electric.

As I said previously, OBB #1216 239-4 took us all the way to Prague.

Carodejnice, or "Witch Burning Night," or in German "Walpurgisnacht," for St. Walpurga (c. 710-777), is maybe the most politically incorrect holiday in Europe. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carodejnice No one is actually burned in the modern version, but a witch is burned in effigy. It is held every year on the 30th of April, which is supposed to be six months before Halloween/All Hallows/All Saints/Ween. It doesn't happen in just one place, but is a national (actually international) holiday. I have a photo of another one in 2009 elsewhere on iPernity. The other photo was taken in Landskroun, but this one was in Centralni Park Pankrac. In spite of the theme, it's considered a family friendly holiday with food and music.

This art van, a VW Transporter of maybe 1980's or 1990's vintage, was being used by one of the concessions at the Carodejnice event.

"Silicon Hill," is really Strahov, a neighborhood on a hill overlooking the rest of Prague. It's adjacent to Petrin, and the Petrin tower (the Eiffel Tower copy) can be seen from here. It's called Silicon Hill because some of CVUT's buildings are located here, and you can see some of the dorms in the background of this photo. CVUT is a technical university, obviously, but I've attended free lectures there in other subjects like history.

This band is called Gattaca. I thought that I had photos of them on iPernity already, but I guess not. They're a hardcore band from Prague, and I would argue they're one of the best. This show was at Klub 007, maybe the most famous punk club in Prague, which actually has been in operation since 1969, on and off, and continuously since 1989.

Here's an alternate shot of Gattaca.

This is an original Prague Metro train, with only four cars on it. These are considered the Ecs Class, and were built by Metrovagonmash in the Soviet Union in 1974. They remained in service on the C Line until 1997, but ultimately were pulled from service prematurely because they were overweight and caused too much damage to Nuselsky Most. Amazingly, Nuselsky Most had been stress-tested by filling its street level entirely with Soviet tanks (I don't know the class, but in the films I've seen they look like T-55's or T-62's).

This was a concert by the hardcore band Linterno at Cafe na pul cesty in Prague.

The Linterno show yielded this dramatic photo that I decided to keep in spite of it being a grainy cameraphone shot.

This was another hardcore band called Daydream.

Again, I got a luckily dramatic, if technically bad, cameraphone shot.

Daydream were playing a double bill with this band, called Just for Being.