Wednesday, May 13

Prague!








For the record, this weekend the plan is simply to sleep in for the first time in three weeks and then WORK!!!

Anyway, so the week after London was pretty short... considering we got back Monday and I was out of the country again on Friday. Hans, Matt and I met at 8:00 Friday morning at the train station for our 6 hour train to Prague. It's actually surprisingly cheap to travel to Prague... if you know what you're doing. It was a 33 Euro Bavaria day ticket for three people (11 euro each)to Pilzen (in the Czech Republic). Then we took a 95 Koruna (<4 style="font-style: italic;">that cheap. Food cost between 80 and 120 CZK, and since the exchange rate was 26.5 CZK to the Euro (we rounded down to 25 for simplicity's sake), that's 3-5 Euro.
Anyway, we got to Prague, dropped our stuff at the hostel and headed out to explore. The New Europe (free walking tour that I've been doing in every other city)tour just recently started in Prague... as in 3 weeks ago, so we got really lucky. That was the plan for Saturday morning, so instead of walking around the city we grabbed some food (A Czech Gyro... I gotta say, the German Turks do them so much better. I was not impressed) and headed down to the Vysehrad. This is pretty far south in the otherwise very walkable city. It was the original "city" and is now considered the "ruins". It's basically a walled complex with a cathedral and buildings from the the 10th century. The current city of Prague was built up around the Prague Castle (in the city center), however. Now there's a very big graveyard in the Vysehrad which includes such people as Dvorak. Hans basically came to Prague to see Dvorak's grave and thus was very disappointed when we found out that the graveyard had closed 40 minutes before we arrived. He vowed to go back the next morning. We walked up the coast of the river to the famous Charles' Bridge and then around the city to check out the nightlight. We ended up finding a nice little pub that was playing live music... live Czech music! It was a bass/violin/accordion trio and they kept us very entertained while we sipped our Budweiser (Budvar... originally from the Czech Republic... A&B stole the name) and ate our Czech honey cake. Then we headed off to bed.
Saturday we woke up and headed to our 11 am free walking tour! Like all the others, it was well worth it. Three hours around the city took us from the old square with the famous Church of our lady Tyn and the world renowned Astronomical Clock, to the new town square, to the Jewish quarters with all the Jewish synagogues, to the Powder Tower and Henry Tower from the original city wall. We saw statues concerning Kafka, the "Cubism Building" (an actual example of cubism in architecture), the Lennon Wall (a monument to John Lennon) and the Prague Castle. Prague is actually a beautifully intact city. Turns out the Nazis loved it as much as the Romans had (it was the capital of the Roman Empire for a time), so they spared it almost completely during the war... it only got bombed once a few days before the end of the war when the otherwise low-laying people of Prague decided to rebel a few days before they were liberated by the Russians. And thus their city hall was destroyed. But yeah, unlike Munich, most of the buildings are old and original!
Following the tour we went up to the castle. It's actually the largest medieval castle in the world. And it's really more of a walled city within a city on a hill. It doesn't really look like a castle... it really looks like a wall around a cathedral. Because there is a huge cathedral inside it. Apparently they wanted an archbishop in Prague so they had to build a cathedral worthy of one. Haha. Unfortunately we couldn't go up the towers of the cathedral due to maintenance so we just wondered around inside and around the castle grounds.
Then we stopped back at the hostel, grabbed dinner, and headed to an Opera! Yes, an opera! We got tickets to The Marriage of Figaro for only 10 Euro each! The Marriage of Figaro is a Mozart opera that actually premiered in the Estates Theater in Prague in 1768 (or somewhere around then...). We were seeing it over 200 years later! Actually, the importance of the Estates Theater is that Mozart's first opera, Don Giovanni, premiered there. So that was kinda cool. It was really good... mostly because they had English translations of the songs so we knew what was going on. After the opera we decided to do the one other bit of tourism/nightlight we had to experience in Prague... Absinthe.
As background, Absinthe is illegal in the States. It's a very strong green spirit and "apparently" makes one hallucinate. This has been declared a myth and while a version of Absinthe is available in the US, the original form still isn't. On the other hand, it's everywhere in Prague. I mean, everywhere. All the tourist shops have bottles of overpriced green alcohol next to the shot glasses and magnets and postcards. We found an Irish pub that looked promising (a surprising number of those in Prague...) and ordered a shot each. The other cool thing about Absinthe. They set the shot on fire. Basically, the shot is poured in a whiskey glass. You fill a spoon with sugar, slightly dip it in the alcohol so it's just soaked, set the spoon on fire, and then rapidly stir it into the shot such that the Absinthe is on fire. Then you're supposed to blow it out and take the shot immediately.
Well... all for the experience, right? Wow. It burned. Possibly partly because it had been on fire 30 seconds ago and possibly partly because it was 72% alcohol. The sugar didn't seem to do much for the taste... needless to say, one was more than enough and we determined that we had crossed that off our list and head back to the hostel for the night.
Sunday... we found an all-you-can-eat-buffet for about 5 Euro nearby the hostel. There was fruit and crepes and croissants and eggs and cereal and pretty much everything. Well, worth it. Then we headed over to the "Mini-Eiffel Tower" for a view of Prague. Built 2 years after the original (1891), the Petrin Tower is 1/3 the height of it's big brother. We took a tram to the top of the hill it was perched on and then climbed 299 steps to the top for a great view of the city. From there we headed back to the main city to peak in the churches we had been walking past but not stopping in. We also wandered around trying to get through the city the easiest way possible because there was a marathon going on. Thus it was pretty crowded and a lot of streets were blocked off. We did not take part in the marathon, fyi.
Finally, at 3pm we headed back to the train station and got on our 4 pm train back towards Munich. It was a Czech train. Let's return to my previous statement about Eastern Europe. The train scared me. A lot. I felt like I needed a seat belt. It was without doubt the bumpiest, loudest train ride I have every experienced. The writing on the seat signed August 1988 (before I was born) did not help. The ride back was not as easy. We bought a 3 Euro ticket from Prague back to Pilzen. Then we had to get off the train in Pilzen to buy another ticket to the Czech/Germany border for another 4 Euro. Luckily we were back on a Germany train after that. Then we had to hop off at the border and buy the day pass for Germany and hop back on before the train left (we had 10 minutes. We made it). We finally made it back around midnight. In all though, we calculated that it was around 30 Euro round trip by train to Prague. Considering our hostel was 30 Euro for two nights, that was a very cheap weekend trip!

The other thing we noticed about Prague... a surprising number of people did not speak English. Like didn't speak any English. A surprising number did, however, speak German... was pretty interesting.
On a side note, in London we noticed that German was also extremely common. It was easily the second most often heard language outside of British English... hmm....

Anyway! As I said, this weekend I'm taking it easy. I have a paper for research that I'm hopefully going to successfully manage to write up before next Wednesday (busy weekend, I know...), because next Wednesday (countdown 7 days!) Steve arrives! And after that chances are I'm not getting much done because we have a lot planned for those two weeks. The first weekend we'll be heading down to Hall to visit Austria. The second weekend we'll be heading off to Paris and then Brussels! He flies home on June 2nd (I think?). June 8th (the following Monday), the Americans are cooking (remember Thanksgiving dinner?) again. This time we're going a little easier... the current plan is mac&cheese, grilled cheese sandwiches and apple pie... still need to find an oven for the pie though. And then, today I bought tickets for Barcelona the weekend of June 19th-22nd. So life isn't slowing down anytime soon it seems! Anyway, here are some pictures and look for a post (most likely two...) after Paris/Brussels!

Pictures:
Castle (with Cathedral) at night
Matt and I on the castle wall
View from the Petrin Tower... the city of Prague
The Old Town Square
Church of Our Lady Tyn (picture this at night with fire burning in all the spires... it looks pretty spooky)
The Astronomical Clock
Me with my Czech money

2 comments:

Großmutter said...

Kels,
When you are back at school in the states, you are going to find life rather boring, methinks!
Glad you are having fun. Take care -
Much Love,
GM

Großmutter said...

So what have you been doing lately??????

Love,
GM