Night at the Museum (part 2)

Once again Museum Night was a huge success! The city of Prague opens up most of the city-run museums (and other interesting buildings) from 7p.m.-1a.m. and lets everybody in for free. I heard an estimate that 50,000 people participated this year. The sites that we visited weren't too crowded, but the special buses that they had running between the sites were often quite full.
We started our evening at the Troja Chateau. It's a beautiful Baroque building that's been on our list, but somehow we just never quite made it up there. It turned out that the only way to see the chateau was with a guided tour, so they only let groups of 30 or so in at a time. Luckily we were there a bit early so we didn't have a long wait. The guided tour (in Czech, of course) was more or less a wash for us, since we really didn't have any idea what the woman was saying. I did at one point pick up "interesting is ..." but then I had no idea what it was she said was interesting. Oh well.
The tour was well worth it just to see the magnificent "Hapsburg Hall." This enormous room on the second level was covered in amazing murals. The scenes were a range of events from European history and they were spectacular. They had a strict no-pictures rule, so unfortunately I didn't get any pictures (but I've included one that I found on the internet).
Stop No. 2 was the National Technical Museum -- which is actually closed for renovations, but they had some of their material on display in the parking lot. I think that the actual museum would be something like the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in D.C. The highlight of this stop was a model of the Astronomical Clock. There was a woman giving a demonstration of how it works, but again our meager Czech wasn't enough for us to really get anything out of it.
Stop No. 3 was the Stone Bell House on Old Town Square. The attraction isn't so much the house itself, but the cellars underneath. There is this incredible series of cellars that extend well under Old Town Square. One of the strangest things about them is that no they are all completely empty. We weren't able to learn much about the original use of the cellars, except that one of them was originally a chapel.
Stop No. 4 was the House of the Black Madonna, which is home to the Czech Cubist museum. It was kind of funky, but interesting.
We capped off the night with a stroll across the Charles Bridge and a climb up the bridge tower on the Mala Strana side. We have visited the tower on the Old Town side several times (because it's got a much better view). But it was interesting to see that part of the city at night -- it was around midnight by the time we got there.
I've included some more pictures from the evening on the picasa site.