is there time to do both in 5 days?
 

Is there enough to do in prague for five days or should i split my time between vienna?

Need more context - - is this the entire trip to Europe? And if not, what comes before or after these five days?

Welcome to the forum.

Best wishes,

Rex

yes we leave saturday from chicago and go to prague. Not sure if we should take a train to vienna and spend half the time there and take the outbound flight from vienna on saturday.

This raises more questions than it answers. You leave THIS Saturday (December 4, 2004)? and your return flight IS set from Vienna? or not set from any particular location?

I see from another of your posts that you'll be going in March.

Yes, it is possible to do both. My husband and I did that in September 2004, starting in Vienna and ending in Prague.

It is not our preferred style of travel. We like to see places in more depth than that if possible. However, Vienna and Prague were tacked on at the end of a longer trip to Hungary and Serbia, and we just couldn't stretch the trip any more.

Like you, we had an uneven number of days to devote to the two cities. We had to decide which city would get more time and which would get less. From our reading, we gathered that Prague was smaller and more compact than Vienna, so we decided to give Prague less time than Vienna. I now feel that was a good call.

You could minimize the dent in your effective sight seeing time by riding the train in the evening. For example, there is a direct train that departs Prague about 18:00 and gets into Vienna about 22:30.

You could take a picnic dinner onto the train with you, or you could purchase something in the dining car (you are permitted to eat it in the dining car or take it back to your seat).

I guess it depends on the depth in which you want to see your destination city / cities.

With 2 days of WALKING around Prague, we managed to cover Staré Mesto (the old city, on the east side of the Vltava River, which has the majority of museums, churches, etc.) and Malá Strana (opposite the old city, on the west side of the river, the side on which Prague Castle is situated). I printed the suggested walking route from a travel website (sorry, can't remember which one), and it worked out very well.

That said, we didn't have time to visit any museums. We did go into several churches, and we watched the famous clock at the Old Town Hall do its thing at 12 noon. The only site that we explored in some depth was the Castle (oh my gosh, I LOVED St. Vitus's Cathedral). But even this brief exposure to Prague at least gave us some sense of what the city was about.

In Vienna we didn't have a huge amount of time, but enough time to get an overview of the city and then see a few places in a good amount of depth.

It probably is a crime that we didn't see Prague in more detail, but it did round out our experience of places that had belonged to the former Austrian Empire, and provided us with some basis for comparing them.

Everything in Prague is on a smaller scale than it is in Vienna. Everything about Vienna (the palaces, the Ring Road, etc.) is on a grand scale. It was the centre of the empire, and that is very evident if you have the opportunity to visit Vienna and one or more cities in the outlying parts of the former empire.

Anyway, while it is feasible to see both cities, it depends on what kind of experience you want to have -- fairly superficial visits to two cities that will give you an opportunity to compare them or a more in depth visit to one city.

When we were there at the end of September 2004, the weather was JUST starting to cool off and feel like fall. Weather websites indicate that March is considerably cooler than September, if that counts for anything.

Thanks judy, that was extremely helpful!!

1) No. 2)Yes. Or, use Prague as a base and day trip to such gems as Chesky Budevijce (sp?), a fine old town known as Budweiser in German, and the home of Budvar (Budweiser) beer or Chesky Krumlov, a town near Bud that is even more old-world dreamy. Or day trip to Kharlovy-Vary the once-posh and still impressive spa town once favored by rich Germans ('Karlsbad' in German), or Marianszke-Lanzske, a similar spa town but less impressive, or Karlstejn, perhaps the nicest Bohemian town (in Bohemia, not necessarily Bohemian, a short hop east of Prague. Karlstejn is known for its fanciful fortress built buy Emperor Chas IV to house the crown jewels and religious relics; the Chapel of the Holy Cross here is decorated with inlaid precious stones and famous medieval paintings; or to Terezin (Theresienstadt in German), the infamous Nazi concentration camp, or to Kutna Hora, a once thriving silver mining town but now famous for its Church of the Bones (thousands of human bones from dug-up cemeteries fashioned into intricate floral designs- macabre to the hilt! But five days in Prague itself, as exceptional as Prague is, is too much for the average tourist. If you havn't been to Vienna, then definitley go there as well.

Hi Nat,

We very much enjoyed 3 days in Prague.

With 5 days, I think you would want to do at least one daytrip.

Alternatively, 3 days Vienna, 2 days Prague.

In Prague, we very much liked Pension Dientzenhoffer.