April Fools, Easter and the End of Winter

We have April Fools Day here on April 1st and it's much like everywhere else except that for some reason they associate a potato as being the joke. I first saw this when my younger son made a colour copy of a Czech banknote but only half the note. He then drew a picture of "Mr Potato Head" on the other half and folded it so that only the coloured part was visible. The joke being that people think they've found money on the floor but then get the potato. I still have to find the origin of this. My own little April Fool for 2017 was published here.

The End of Winter

According to insurance companies, Winter officially ends at the end of March when the requirement for Winter tyres ends. Of course if bad weather is forecast then you leave them on a bit longer. According to Parks and Gardens in Prague, Winter ends at the end of March because most places will have Summer opening times from April 1st.

Historically, Witches Night on April 30th marks the end of Winter and we celebrate this with a festival so see one of my 3 page picks below.

Easter

A relatively late Easter this year with Easter Monday on April 17th. You can read about a Czech Easter on one of my 3 page picks below. Remember that we don't have "Good Friday" as a holiday but usually the schools give kids the day off. Monday is a National Holiday. No doubt we'll be out on a trip in our local area to see the locals demonstrating their egg-painting skills. I think this might be the last year for our kids to go around the village whipping girls as they are getting a little too old.

On the Old Town Square throughout the month you'll have an Easter Market which looks very similar to the Christmas Market except with different decoration. Again, painted eggs will be the souvenir of the visit.

You'll find the churches will be open with services being performed all over the period.

What's Been Happening on the Site

Technically almost the whole of March was taken up in an effort to "Secure" the site. Although the Walking Tours have bank level security for transactions, my website did not fully show it so I took the plunge, bought an SSL certificate then spent 3 weeks converting all pages, posts, products, pictures, plug-ins and code to secure versions. You'll now find that if you visit any page on the site it will be prefixed by either "Secure", "https" or both. In January 2017, Google indicated that it would begin prioritising "Secure" over "non-Secure" in an effort to increase the overall security of the web so I figured I better do it now rather than later.

The next set of content will be published shortly and that will be for university students. 

Memorable moment

Not many people realise that although the Prague Castle historic buildings close at 5pm, the courtyards stay open until 10pm. So I took some guests through the castle at night, a 77,000 square metre complex just for us, four soldiers and a police dog patrol.

Wishing you all a great April. Feel free to follow and share my content. My 3 picks from this month are below.

Jason