A brick-built St. Wenceslas looks over Prague's first Lego Store

The very first Lego Store in the Czech Republic opened on Thursday at Prague's Westfield Chodov shopping center, and it includes a few surprises and gifts for local fans of the popular Danish brand.

The presence of an official Lego Store in Prague has been long-awaited, and its late debut is somewhat ironic given the company's presence in the Czech Republic. Lego has just five manufacturing plants in the world, and one of them is just outside Prague in Kladno, at a factory that employs around 2,500 people.

It was at the Kladno plant that the centerpiece of Chodov's Lego Store was constructed: a brick-built representation of St. Wenceslas modeled after the statue on Prague's Wenceslas Square, constructed by 13 designers at the Kladno factory over the course of 580 hours.

The Lego St. Wenceslas stands over 2.5 meters tall, and was made with a whopping 269,381 individual Lego bricks. It includes a button that can be pressed to make St. Wenceslas "speak."

The Lego model also includes a mosaic of the National Museum in Prague as a backdrop, along with brick portraits of other landmarks across the Czech Republic. See if you can name them all on your next visit to the store.

Upon opening on Thursday and throughout the weekend, Lego Store employees maintained a queue at the entrance to manage the number of guests allowed inside. During a Friday visit, we waited about five minutes to get into the store.

The first 1,000 customers to make a purchase at the new Lego Store were given a unique 4x2 "I love Lego Store Prague" brick tile. Through November 9 and while supplies last, customers that spend 3,000 crowns also receive a 402-piece Lego Store set, which is only given away when a new store is opened and cannot otherwise be purchased from Lego.

Lego VIP members that spend 1,300 also receive a Fun and Funky VIP pack of assorted pieces. You can register as a VIP online or in the store, and accumulate points that can be redeemed for unique gifts or vouchers worth about five percent of what you've spent.

And visitors to the Lego Store at Westfield Chodov can also obtain a new "Prague" stamp in their Lego Passport, or get a new passport if you haven't previously collected one from another Lego location.

Prague's new Lego Store boasts the latest November releases from Lego, including a brick-built playable foosball table that runs 6,399 crowns. It can even be tested out on display.

While the new Lego Store at Chodov has all of the brand's latest sets, however, we were a little disappointed to find that it didn't have all of the sets exclusively available from Lego, such as the hard-to-find Daily Bugle. The entire Monkie Kid line, another Lego exclusive, was also absent from Lego Store Prague's shelves.

Still, Prague's new Lego store offers local fans a number of unique opportunities including the ability to build your own minifigure (79 crowns for one or 199 crowns for three) and the "pick a brick" wall, where you can fill up on all the individual pieces you might be missing (269 crowns for a small cup, and 499 crowns for a large one).

Like locations in other countries, Prague's Lego store will also offer special promotions, including build events where you can create an item in-store and bring it home for free. The first of these events runs next weekend, November 12-13.

Lego Store Prague is open at the Westfield Chodov shopping center, located on the C metro line, daily from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.