I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky

You have to feel a bit sorry for John Masefield writing poems about the sea and then ending up on a pub sign in New Ferry looking uncommonly like Adolf Hitler.

New Ferry is where you can find the Wirral Farmer’s Market and I was down there this morning to pick up food for the weekend. The onset of autumn is clearly bringing on some subliminal desire for slow cooking as I came away with an ox heart, some ox tail and a piece of beef that I was told would need roasting for a good three hours.

The same man who sold me the beef was also selling giant carrots almost to inches across. I bought a bunch of these and a bag of his homegrown potatoes.

There were also some French style baguettes for lunch to be stuffed with either steak or chicken and a Moroccan Lentil Roll.

Afterwards I walked through New Ferry. A place in decline although there used to be a pub there whose bar was taken from Brunel’s SS Great Eastern which was broken up nearby. Sadly the bar and the pub are long gone.

After our expensive dinner we found a smoky pub to have a last pint before a long walk back up the hill round the back of the castle to our apartment and bed.

There had been vague intentions around the idea of getting up early on Sunday to see Charles Bridge without the crowds but the long walk did for us and by the time we got there a great mixture of people was gathered to walk across it one way or other. But we were there before some of the hawkers and street painters although we could see them gathering behind us pushing their strange wrapped up trollies ready to unload for their days work.

It would have been easy to become irritated by the crush of people, hands in the air waving cameras and phones trying to capture the moment but in fact there was something moving about it. There wasn’t much noise over the murmur of voices and over above us the statues stood in supplication to the sky. At one point one of the hawkers took out a guitar and started to play the theme to The Deerhunter. The music seemed to bring the people on the bridge into sharp relief and all of a sudden I was there amongst them marvelling at what we had done.

After the Bridge we walked up into the Old Town and got there in time to see The Astronomical Clock strike 11.00am. There were thousands of people standing there to watch the half minute of the bells coming out and the skeleton statue shaking its bones  and a man blowing a bugle from the top of the tower. Although the crowd thinned out once it was done I found myself having to take pictures of the buildings from the first floor up to avoid the crush of heads at ground level.

We walked up through the Jewish Quarter and had to content ourselves with a quick glimpse of the cemetery through some iron railings.

In a courtyard we found a man playing the violin.

After that it was time for lunch. I set my heart on a place that was described as a beer hall that had been there since the 13th century. Rather to my surprise we found it.

We walked in and sat ourselves down in a room full of wooden tables and benches. A man came over and asked us what we wanted and when I asked for some dark beer he directed us upstairs to where he said there was a brewery.

The route took us through a number of low slung rooms filled with more benches and tables until some stairs took us upstairs.

There we found ourselves in a narrow room with a half dozen or so tables down one side and the brewery down the other. In the brewery we could see great copper casks and wooden barrels overflowing with brown wort.

I ate prunes soaked in slivovitz and wrapped in bacon followed by a pice of pork in sauce with chips. I still regret not having the knuckle of pork that looked big enough to feed five.

We talked about the breweries in Birkenhead and how much better they could do if they had a long room next to the brewing selling slabs of good food and maybe some bread. I think that somewhere in there we were talking about a possible career change!

On the way back we walked under a man hanging on for dear life.

That first evening in Prague we are in a restaurant 10 minutes walk away through some dark back streets – Budvarska. Leafing through the menu I started to come to terms with the extent to which the eating of meat would come to dominate our eating time over the course of the next few hours. The only concession to the vegetarian amongst us was a dish of deep fried cheese with tartare sauce. There were a couple of fish dishes (but we were a long way from the sea) and otherwise it was all variations of pork, beef or duck with various combinations of white or red sauerkraut and dumplings. All was well with my world and I started with a plate of Old Prague Ham and butter followed by half a buckling with red and white sauerkraut and dumplings washed down with a few pints of very good beer.

We went to bed early with the intention of getting up early to walk the city. I slept peacefully.

In the event out anticipated leaving early was disrupted by the early return of the smiling man with a moustache. He arrived whilst we were still in pyjamas with a mate intent on fixing the boiler. The apartment was so small that we were stuck there in our pyjamas for the forty-five minutes or so they spent banging at the reluctant boiler with hammers and various other noisy implements. They left with more smiles and ‘Good-bye Mister’ and reassurances that all was working.

The apartment was situated in the north of the city a 30 minute walk up to the back of the castle. We set off avoiding avoiding trams and segways bumping into a couple of lost Italians. The streets were quiet at the start but as the buildings got older and the streets more cobbled  you could feel the slow gathering pace of tourists until we turned a corner and they seemed to be everywhere holding up their phones and ipads to take pictures.

On the segways the closer we got to the castle the more of them there were. They travelled in groups. A cheerful Czech leader heading up charges who followed behind in various degrees of nervousness. At the back there were always a couple muttering under their breathe ‘I look a twat I look a twat.’ Another unsuccessful element of the weekend was my failure to crash into one of them.

Having walked through the crowds in the castle and admired the Sturbucks with the best view out of all other Starbucks we came down the hill into the city proper. We carried on walking admiring some vaguely homoerotic statues until we found another bar for lunch. In between It was opposite a grand looking cafe were we had thought about going but it had white table-clothes and we weren’t sure if that was for us. In the event we did the table-clothes in the evening.

The bar for lunch was more wood and waiters anxious to refill my glass of beer. They appeared as if by magic to ask if I wanted another just as I was slurping up the last sip. The sort of behaviour can enamour one to a city.

There was more meat to be had on the menu along with a section headed ‘Meals to Accompany Beer’!!

Some of the dishes on the meat menu are worth repeating:-

– 1/2 roast duck, served with bread dumplings and potato dumplings, white and red sauerkraut

– roast leg of wild boar with rosehip sauce and Carlsbad dumpling

-beef sirloin stuffed with good things you know

– roast leg of young goose , served with apple-flavoured red sauekraut and potato dumplings

– turkey schnitzel coated in cornflakes

– succulent rabbit in garlic and shallot sauce with home made spatzle

There was enough variety to justify a visit each day of the week. I had the rabbit and it went down very well with dark beer they kept serving me.

After lunch we watched a family boating on the river.