Dem bones, dem bones

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Luckily we were good boys and girls on Saturday night and got ourselves to bed by 2am. Prague nightlife is second only to Amsterdam, so it would have been easy to party on into the wee hours. In fact it was the sweltering central heating and not the absinthe that gave us the drys and had us taking our clothes off in the hostel!! We had a reasonably early start on the Sunday, as we were taking a tour out to the famous bone ossuary in Sedlec. Situated an hour from Prague, it was great to get out into the countryside and see more of the Czech Republic. The fields were covered in snow, and we saw lots of deer, rabbits and massive birds of prey. (They of course had nothing on the 'ice rat' we'd seen skating on the Vltava River the night before.)

The chappel contains artistic assemblances of 40,000 plague victims' bones. It came about when the cemetery in nearby town Kutna Hora was so overflowing with corpses that a chappel was built to house the remains. For some reason a monk began to arrange the bones creatively. He never finished the ossuary, but artist Frantisek Rint eventually completed the project in 1870.

After the ossuary we headed to Kutna Hora - a prosperous mining town in the 14th and 15th centuries. It was colourfully painted, which was one of the first things to happen after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Then after a stein and a nice starchy lunch, we walked to see the beautiful Saint Barbara church.

Back in Prague that evening, we headed to the local for a huge Mexican meal, and then into town for a ghost tour - always good for a different twist on a place's history. The only spirits we saw though were in an Irish pub, where we had a few quiets to finish off the day.

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