Europe Trip 2011 #24: Up the Astronomical Clock tower

The first thing that I did today was visit the Astronomical clock tower. I saw this yesterday, but it appeared to be closed. The view from the tower is quite impressive as you'll see in the photos. The first photo was at the top of the walk up. Unusually for these historic monuments, this one had almost no stairs, but instead what was essentially a ramp all the way up. They had also installed a lift down the middle. After much self congratulations about my walking all the way up I took the lift down...

The large church in the third photo is the local Catholic church - not open at the moment for some reason, but it looks impressive [as many of them do in this part of the world]. The fifth picture shows some of the crowds around the base of the building, and the last one is of the trumpeter who plays his tune, waves to the crowd, and gets a big clap every 15 minutes.

Actually, he was quite a funny chap - at one stage he "invited" me the have a go... yeah right! He also did a good job of pretending he could not play immediately before and after going out to play on the balcony. A nice touch!