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Published: November 16th 2009
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So rich!
- Day 52 - Day 52
Friday 31st July
Goodbye Germany…. Hello Czech Republic After a great sleep in, we were up, packed, had had our breakfast in the carpark, and were away by 11am, heading back towards Dresden on our way to the Czech Republic capital of Prague.
After somehow managing to escape the force-field that is Dresden, we finally crossed over into the Czech Republic in the early afternoon. Flo doesn’t register Czech, so we had to revert to the old-fashioned way of getting lost, relying on signage and maps…
Our plan was to try to find an information centre and/or follow signs to the nearest caravan park in Prague. While we did momentarily find a caravan park sign, we soon lost it again, having more luck a few kilometres later when stumbling upon an information centre. The lady inside gave us details on a cheap accommodation option quite close to the city - which, when we eventually found it, turned out to be student accommodation now vacant due to the university holidays. While looking like an absolute dump from the outside, complete with broken windows and chipped pain, the
rooms where actually quite nice on the inside - looking very much like how I imagine American college dorms to look like: each level containing rows and rows of basic rooms, with a shower and toilet room and a small kitchen at each end of the building. And so, happy that it was not as bad as it looked from the outside, and relieved at not having to venture out again in search of accommodation, we called it a day.
After carting our stuff up to our rooms, including the fridge thanks to Mr Muscles Craig, I made some dinner (chicken, or perhaps turkey, tikka masala curry - food is a bit of a gamble when you can’t read the writing…) We all jumped through the showers, then piled into Lucretia and Craig’s room to watch a movie - ‘PS I Love You’, which was surprisingly and disappointingly terrible - before heading off to bed.
Day 53
Saturday 1st August
Prague Another great sleep although we were woken somewhat prematurely thanks to some maintenance works being done on the building - at 830am on a
Saturday - they must pay them more than they do back home!
The morning was spent doing some research on the internet given the free wireless access at the dorm. The four of us have decided to re-jig our itinerary so that now we are skipping Turkey and Greece on this car/camping sector of the trip, and then after returning back to the UK, selling the car and shipping stuff home, we plan to fly back to Turkey or Greece, making or way over to the other, and then heading on to Egypt on the way home. It makes more sense for a number of reasons but now also means that we have a lot of research to do on organising that section of the trip.
Lucretia and Craig made a lovely lunch of creamy mushroom and sun-dried tomato pasta before we all got ready to head into town. And that’s when Dav and I realised that our good walking shoes (that we spent a fortune on in Spain) weren’t in the car,,, or in our bags…or in the room. After puling everything apart looking for them, we gave the Berlin camping ground a
call and found out that they had indeed been left there but luckily someone had handed them into reception.
Good to know the mystery of the whereabouts of the shoes was solved, but then we had the problem of getting them back to us… The campground claimed that they couldn’t post them, and it was an eight hour round trip to drive back to collect them… so not really an option. We looked online at courier services but all the courier websites in English were based in the UK, meaning that the shoes would have to be collected from Germany and go back via the UK before then being sent out to join us wherever we were ie they couldn’t just courier them directly. And so the next idea was to obviously look at German courier companies… but all the websites we could find reverted to German once you got into the nitty gritty details - which were a tad hard to understand with our basic German. Luckily though, we knew just the Germans who could help - and so we emailed Katja and Rudi to see if they wouldn’t mind organising it on our behalf. Very
handy to have such lovely friends - life-(shoe)-savers!
And so, still frustrated at the simple but annoying mistake, but with nothing else we could do, we set off to explore the city, with not many hours left in the day to do so.
We walked from the hostel towards the Prague Castle, stopping at a nearby cathedral where I bought some really lovely paintings from a stall. It was then on to the Prague castle where we ran into Lucretia and Craig. The castle is the largest in the world based on land coverage and while it is not the most dazzling of buildings, it does have a massive church, St Vitus’ Cathedral, right in the middle of its grounds which is quite spectacular.
The four of us then continued the walk down the hill towards the river and city, stopping on the way at a restaurant overlooking the St Wenceslas’ vineyard, where we enjoyed some wine and cheese platters - fancy!
Continuing on, it was over the river and straight into the old town - which was full of gorgeous buildings, cobbled roads… and hundred and hundreds
of tourists. We sat in the Old Town Hall Square for a while, listening to live music and watching the world go by, before starting our search for dinner.
We ended up walking quite a way in search of a medieval restaurant that Dav had read about in our guide book and had his heart set on. We did eventually find it, although it didn’t look too flash, so we decided to just have one drink there and then continue on in search for another place to enjoy dinner. So we had our drinks (me very coolly blowing out my burning b-52, stirring it and drinking it with a straw - apparently that is not the way they are meant to be drunk…) and played some cards. While we were sitting there some other patrons received their meals which actually looked really nice and so in the end our hungry bellies won, and we decided to eat there as well. It turned out to be a great move as our meals were delicious, and so we ended up staying there for a good few hours, eating and drinking and playing cards.
When the time
came to leave at about 10.30pm, Dav realised that the medieval restaurant was actually next door, not the place we had spent the evening at…. Whoops…
We headed to a multi-story nightclub that the really friendly waitress had told us about, ready for a night on the town. It is apparently the ‘biggest music club in central Europe’ and has four different levels, all playing different styles of music, from hip hop to 80’s to techno (I know which floor I was headed for... I’m such a child of the 80’s) However there was a cover charge ($8 each) and the bouncers were complete power-trippers, with the security measures stricter than that you have to endure at the airports … Dav couldn’t get in because he had deodorant in his backpack, and a couple of bottles of water… I don’t think even MacGyver could make anything nasty out of that combination… Anyway, so needless to say, we decided to call it a night and head back home, walking the 45 minute trek back up the hill to our hostel.
Back at the room, it was straight into the showers after a very sweaty trip
home thanks to the hot day that persisted into the night. We had not long been out of the showers when Lucretia and Craig also made their way back, having tried another bar where Lucretia could get in for free but Craig had to pay an entry fee, so they ended up giving up and calling it a night too.
And so we eventually got to bed at about 2am.
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Gran'ma
non-member comment
OK. I've got this far....Now what happens??? Not long now, and you will be home again, just in time for a pre-Christmas panic! Love you.