Night at the Museum(s)

Saturday was Museum Night in Prague. Once a year, all the museums in the city (and apparently in several other European cities as well) open from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m. and have free admission during that time. We decided to take advantage and see some of what the city had to offer.
The best thing was probably at Vysehrad, which we visited a couple of weeks ago. On that trip, however, we missed the museum, so this time we headed for it (it had a symbolic 1 crown entry fee). The first part was a kilometer-long walk through the casements in the fortified wall of the old fortress - a long, eerie stone passageway. We were walking at dusk, which probably added to the atmosphere. When we got to the end of the tunnel, there was a big stone room with high ceilings. This room, which was apparently used to store secret supplies during previous centuries, is now used to house several of the original statues from the Charles Bridge.
Our first stop was at the Czech Folklore Museum. This showcased different Czech traditional costumes and tools (including the infamous sticks used for, as the sign in the museum put it, "the Easter thrashing of girls"). There were also demonstrations of traditional crafts, including a clay sculptor using a manual-powered pottery wheel that Chelsey found fascinating.
Our last stop of the evening was the City of Prague Museum, which we really just wanted to see for the miniature model of Prague it features. The model was made of paper and wood in 1834, and covers most of the historical centre of Prague in astonishing detail. It's apparently a very accurate 1:500 scale. Quite impressive. We went in, saw, and left without giving the rest of the museum too much thought.
In between those highlights were a futile effort to find an attraction called "Hot Air Balloon in the Night", which sounded neat but we were unable to locate, and aborted sorties to different sights of the Jewish Museum. I would like to make it there someday, but both synagogues we went to had lines around the block, so we chose to pass.
More pictures from the evening, as well as other adventures, are at Chelsey's Picasaweb site.
-Jason