Today was our last big dinner as a group for our Czech Republic trip. To celebrate, we took a dinner cruise on the Vltava river. It lasted about 3 hours and we went all over the place, being concentrated mainly around the Charles bridge observing the Prague skyline. During the river, I noticed a few cool things that had been engineered so boats could bypass the Staroměstský jez (a low damn across the river to maintain a stable water level upstream and control flow. To the side of this damn, there was something called a navigation lock. It’s a canal like passage that allowed our boat to bypass the damn, and go from the lower to the upper level of the river since this small and seemingly underpowered dinner boat would most certainly not make it up the damn straight on. This makes sense since our boat was basically standing still in the lock for a while, waiting for the water level to adjust before continuing with the cruise.
Towards the end of the cruise, we went underneath a bridge that was undergoing construction. The bridge was almost completed, with only a gap in the very center needing to be filled. It was cool to see the concrete piers up close as we went by, getting close to them really emphasized how they distribute the load of the rest of the structure downwards into the foundation.
Swanson School of Engineering 