4.07 Prague/Praha

Czech me out!

Prior to the trip, we bought Eurail passes. These are passes to use the trains that connect the countries. We did four countries and five travel days. This is important because it becomes very important while restructuring our trip. We decided not to reserve hostels (which ended up being a good and bad thing) because, although we had a rough estimate of how many days we wanted to spend in each place, we didn't want to restrict ourselves if we wanted to stay longer, or limit ourselves if we wanted to leave earlier.

We took the train from Berlin to Prague. It was about 4.5 hours travel time. My first impression was not good. The train allows you to see the countryside a bit more. What I saw was scary. Old houses with the brick was literally discintigrating, and they had broken windows and graffiti everywhere. Really, buidlings that should have been condemmed, but it was almost as if the country was too poor to demolish them, so they remained, wasting away. This was not the only place graffiti was prevalent. In Naples, they had graffiti that had a date of 1987 that the city had yet to clean up. Everything that wasn't moving in Berlin was graffitied. It's like the city knows that people will keep tagging stuff if they fix it, so they just don't even try to clean or repaint the walls and trains.

When we got off the train, I found myself wondering if the Czech Republic was a second-world country. Unlike everywhere else we went, the signs were not in both English and Czech. Their language is so different that you can't even guess what the signs meant. We found our hostel which was decent, and huge. There must have been at least 50 rooms of 8 people each. We met an English soccer (football) team which was cool. While introducing ourselves, they mentioned that someone else was at our hostel who was also studying in Hatfield from America. Turns out that is was a group of guys we knew! Small world. Spencer, Zac, Adam, and Nick who are part of our same exchange program. We hung out with them and the soccer team and went to a small club which cleared out. The DJ ended up just playing really American rock songs to entertain us.

The next day, we met up with the boys we knew and decided to go to the street fair in Old Town. We went wild eating the vendor food. It was amazing. There was pikle which are mini churros and trdelnik which is traditional cake that they cook in a spiral on a spit and then you can get it with stuff in it. Speaking of traditional foods, Europeans LOVE their Nutella. It comes on everything: waffles- Paris, their version of funnel cake- Czech, gelato-Italy, donuts- Germany.

Jan, Stacy, and I walked through New Town looking for a grocery store. This is where clubs and shopping and the more recent establishments are. While there, there were a group of monks singing and dancing, so we joined in. Now we tell everyone we were in a parade. We wanted to take a bike tour of the city. As we were at the bike shop, we looked outside and it was raining heavily. It had also done this on the first night, apparently Prague is subject to sudden weather changes. We ended up having to hide out at a pub. Although our friends told us stuff was so cheap in Prague because they use crowns, it turned out not to be true. There are about 20 crowns in a dollar and stuff was proportionally priced. Dinner would be abotu 200+ crows at their equivalent of Chillis, so it didn't end up being cheaper at all. At many places they also accepted euros, yet Czech Repub won't just switch to euros even though they are in the EU. Must be some political thing going on that I am missing.

We wanted to experience some of the nightlife so we went home and got out of our wet clothes and at night we came back out with the boys we knew from school and went to a Cuban restaurant. It was a happening place, I loved the atmosphere. They had live music and live girls doing salsa dancing. The boys got Cuban cigars, I got ice cream. Then we went to the casino. There were surprisingly a lot of them. However, they aren't as big as the casinos in Vegas. They are just small establishments. The boys played Blackjack, Stacy and I watched.

The last day, we went back to Old Town where the historical buildings are. We saw the Clock Tower, Charles Bridge, and the Prague Castle. On Charles Bridge, we saw a bunch of people rubbing a certain place on a statue. The paint was clearly worn off there, so these weren't the first people to touch it. We asked people why they were doing that and no one seemed to know. So... like true tourists, we did it too and even took pictures. Finally one lady was like I think it's for good luck. This just goes to prove the point that you can get a few people to do anything and tourists will follow thinking that it's something important. My philosophy is that I didn't care about so I just stood to the back until our group was done observing. If I didn't know anything about the history of something, I didn't act like it was lifechanging just to see it. 1/4 of learning is to see or tour a site, but 3/4 of it is knowing the significance of that site. But we started thinking that it might have really been good luck because Stacy, the only one who half way believed it, found 200 Budapests within five mintues of rubbing the statue and 400 crowns within 30 minutes, both on the ground. Makes me wonder....

We went to the Prague Castle next. It was beautiful! We sat in the courtyard for at least an hour just dozing off and relaxing. Then we saw a bunch of media standing around and realized that there were secret service cars and a ton of guards. Once again, like true tourists we were like something important must be happening. So we stopped and waited for a few minutes. In fact something very important was happening. We found out later that Jan Fisher had just been appointed Prime Minister http://www.euronews.net/2009/04/09/interim-czech-pm-appointed/ and that all those crews had shown up just to see him exit from the building. So, I have seen the new Czech Prime Minister from about 40 feet away. He waved to the cameras, and just like the US media, they were shouting questions at him but he just got in his car and left.

This night we were in seach of traditional Czech food and we found it at a restarant named Kelt. It was a little hole-in-the-wall and they serve food by weight. You order 200 grams of chicken and 20 grams of butter and so on. I got a baked potato with cheese and chicken steak smothered in ham, cheese, and some gravy. It was amazing!

The next morning we got up and got on a train to Vienna, Austria. At this point, I'm beginning to adjust to living out of a bag, walking at least 8 hours a day, and always being on the move. I have also noticed that all these countries have rivers. But instead of the river bank having trees and being set apart from the city, these cities just make the rivers into canals and build right up next to them. Also, people will make out in public, they take it way past kissing. This has been the case everywhere but Britain so far.