The Prague Blog

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Saturday, 8/23
I woke up early to pack for Prague. We saw that a train was leaving at 10am, so we decided to meet at 9:15 to make it to the station to buy our tickets. We hopped on the train, finding a cabin that was only occupied by one person so far. The lady in the cabin was from Australia, specifically from the southern island of Tasmania. She was a single mother who needed a break from her life and managed to get grandma to babysit her kids for two months as she frolicked around Europe. It didn't take long before I realized we had crossed the border into the Czech Republic. The signs at the train station looked different aesthetically, but the language also looks very different. It then dawned on me that I didn't have a Czech phrasebook, and would really be winging it. Stop after stop, more people piled onto the train. They were sitting on the floor in the hallway and in front of the bathroom. I thought the train had a maximum capacity, but people kept piling on. Our cabin gained two people in the process, neither of which appeared to speak English. Finally making it to Prague 4.5 hours later, we searched desperately for any sign of where to go next. I really wanted a Sprite, but was reminded that I had not changed my money into Czech currency yet. We changed our money and bought tickets for the metro. They cost 18. At first I was confused, 18 what? I realized as the trip went on that based on the number system used in Czech currency, the differentiation between dollars and cents was pointless. So I paid 18 units of Czech money (called crowns- I have been corrected by a real Czech) and got my ticket for the subway. For reference, I later paid 500 units for a good dinner. We made it to our subway stop, and walked to the hostel. The hostel we booked was the nicest one that I have stayed in so far. The room was spacious, the ladders to the top bunks were not treacherous, and the bathrooms were decent. It was also set up so that it was easy to make friends with the other travelers. We put our stuff down and went on a walk around town. Prague is bigger than Salzburg, but easy to navigate by foot. We crossed bridges, climbed hills, and walked the cobbled streets while orienting ourselves to the city's layout. We were also scanning the streets for a good Czech restaurant. We later found a restaurant with a live jazz band and a 'tourist menu' and decided to eat there. I had a broccoli, cheese and bacon dish as a starter, garlic soup, pork goulash and dumplings, and a fruit plate for dessert. I was sad that the goulash/dumpling dish was sub par. But the garlic soup reminded me of my Dad, maybe I will find a recipe and make it at home! We headed back to the hostel and decided to hit the sack early. We were bummed to not have more energy for a Saturday night, but we reasoned that every night is a party night in a town like this, and we would be much happier the next night with some energy. I slept like a log, thanks to my earplugs!

Sunday, 8/24
We woke up around 9 to get breakfast. I was given a sandwich at the reception desk, and it was ham with one egg slice, one tomato slice, and one pickle slice, all in a row. So depending on which end you started from first, you either ended with pickle or egg. We walked out towards Wensceslas Square and the Astronomical Clock, when we heard someone yelling for Kelsey. Our Australian cabin mate from the day before was hanging out at a cafe along the side of the square. We chatted for a bit and headed on our way to the castle. We followed to map and hiked up more stairs than I was in the mood for to reach the top of the hill and the castle and church. The church was beautiful, with gothic architecture. I feel like I can kind of identify the difference between gothic, romanesque, and baroque architecture now, but Europe makes it easy by having all three in a row. In the square of the church was a fountain that was designed to work properly in a complete absence of wind. But since we were at the top of the hill, the wind was blowing enough that the fountain was making a mess everywhere. I thought of the person who designed the fountain and how they really didn't think that one through. We wanted to go inside the church, but the line had about 400 people waiting. We couldn't tell if that meant that the church was super cool inside (which I doubted) or it was the only free thing to do in town. Going with the latter, we passed the line and headed for the gardens. In the gardens was another fountain meant for still air, but this one was known as a 'singing fountain' so we stuck our dry heads dangerously close to the water to hear the sound of the singing water. We wandered around the castle a bit more, and decided to get some lunch. We had scoped out a good lunch deal at a Bohemian restaurant the day before, and headed back there. To our luck, the lunch special was only for weekdays. We ordered food from the normal menu, and I also ordered a cheese platter. There were a few cheeses on the plate, including what I thought was a cheese but found out (with a mouthful) that it was actually butter. The experience of having a mouthful of butter (while expecting cheese) kind of scarred me for the day. Tiffany ordered a salad that had these weird green things that resembled olives but had a stem. Kelsey decided to try one, and the look on her face suggested that it was pretty gross. Not to be outdone, I ate the other one. It was delicious! It was in the pickle and olive family in terms of having a bitter salty taste from pickling. It tasted more like an olive but had little seeds resembling sesame seeds that were squishy inside. I've never seen these peculiar pickled delights before, but hope to find them back at home. Finishing our lunch we divided up, Kelsey and I wanted to see the Museum of Communism and Tiffany wanted to see the Mucha museum. The communist museum was the first I've been to that had picture captions in 6 languages instead of an audioguide. As a visual learner, it was easier for me to pay attention this way. We learned about the two times that Prague was invaded, the first time with joy and the second time with fear. I have studied communism, but forgot what role Prague played in the fall of Communism. I watched a video in the video room about the Velvet Revolution, which happened in 1989. As I was watching the video, I recognized the street where protestors were being beaten by the police. It was very exciting for me to remember that communism, a concept that has always felt so foreign and far away, was a very real thing for Prague less than two decades ago. I bought the museum's book on communism, and look forward to reading it. We met Tiffany at the Russian tank in the main square, brought there to commemorate the 40 year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Prague (which happened August 21, 1968). I had to write a term paper on 1968 in high school, but I chose to write a boring paper on Arthur Ashe. In retrospect, I realize that a lot of stuff much more interesting happened that year. We had arranged with the Irish roommates at the hostel to meet at the Irish pub in town to watch a football match. For the hour we were there, I felt like I was back in Ireland. The girls were named Sinead and Fiona, and they were expecting 4 more friends to be arriving that night from Berlin. We arranged to all go out, and we would start the night off with a cocktail party in the hostel. We headed back to the hostel to hang out for a bit before getting a pizza dinner. The supplies we purchased for our cocktail party paled in comparison to the quantity that the Irish girls bought. Their 4 friends had arrived and wanted to join in. Tiffany, Kelsey and I realized that there is indeed a population of people louder and drunker than Americans: the Irish. I didn't notice it while I was in Ireland because the general loudness and debauchery mirrored an American college town and the cultural differences in drinking and volume were never apparent (primarily because between the US and Ireland they barely exist). Being in the quieter and more conservative Austria made me more aware of my volume. We all headed over to the 'largest club' in Prague, and were pleasantly suprised to find that it had 5 levels, all with different themes. The bottom floor had American hip-hop, and it was amazing to hear music from home. The second floor was a typical European techno room, with far too much groping for my taste. The third level was a disco floor, complete with a light-up dance floor and ABBA. We ended up spending all our time on these 3 levels. At one point of time I was chatting with a Croatian boy, and he asked me if I even knew where Croatia was. Offended that someone would doubt my geography skills, I replied with "Duh! I could name 5 cities in Croatia!" When he challenged me to do so, I could only think of 3. I wondered if I could get extra points for knowing the Croatian word for Croatia (Hrvatska) but since I couldn't pronounce it, I let it go. After enough dancing, we headed back to the hostel for the night.

Monday, 8/25
We woke up Monday morning, jumped in the shower, and packed my things. We checked out and put our luggage in the baggage room. We decided to spend the day souvineer shopping and seeing the clock chime at the hour. We stopped for breakfast at this stand that was selling cinnamon-roll things that were wrapped around a metal pipe, heated, and pulled off the pipe. They were like cinnamon roll tubes. We gathered in front of the Astronomical Clock 5 minutes before it was scheduled to chime, and there were tons of other people gathered around. When the clock chimed, it opened up its little doors above the clock face to reveal, one by one, the 12 apostles. Meanwhile, a skeleton next to the clock was ringing a bell. It was kind of creepy. When that had finished, we shopped for souvineers. Most shops had the same stuff, so we just kept poking around looking for good deals. Since Kelsey didn't get a cinnamon roll, we stopped at McDonald's. She got a meal that had egg rolls included. I guess McDonald's was doing a promotion for the Olympics, but I was interested to see the Czech version of an American interpretation of a Chinese dish. We got our stuff from the hostel and headed to the train station. We got tickets to Vienna, but the time table didn't say which platform the train was leaving from. There were only 3 to pick from, so we split up to each investigate one. My platform had a train heading to Brno, and so I postulated that mine was the right train, as Brno was a city we passed through on the way in. We got on the train (which looked rather run down) and waited until to conductor came by to ask if we were on the right train. He said we were, but we had a 2 hour stopover in Brno. Bummed that we hadn't realized this when we bought the tickets, we resolved to see if there was an earlier train to Vienna. We arrived in Brno 3 hours later, and Kelsey consulted her travel book to see that Brno is the second biggest city in the Czech Republic, but is by no means a tourist town. No one spoke English, and we again couldn't figure out which platform our train was leaving from. The trains on the time table were departing within 45 minutes, so we decided to buy some time until our train was within the 45 minute range. We headed back to McDonald's, which seemed to be a safe place amidst grumpy looking Czechs and strip clubs. Sad to admit we went to McDonald's twice in a day, but I felt like Mitch Hedberg looking for the Subway sandwich shop and it feeling like an American embassy to him. We went back to the train station, and got to witness the Czech form of child punishment. This lady had 4 small kids running around her, and the smallest one pissed her off somehow, and she picked him up and whapped him hard on the butt like 10 times as he cried. I've seen spankings, but never that many in a row. We tried to keep our eyes on the train time table, and literally jumped for joy when "Wien" showed up. We rushed to the platform and sat on the ground for 45 minutes before our train arrived. We had the cabin to ourselves on the way home, and managed to get off a stop early, much closer to our dorms. We had made it home. I never thought I would be so relieved to be back in Simmering, with a language I could manage, a money system that made some sense to me, and access to my computer.

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Photos

Vienna 601
view from the hike up to the castle

Vienna 579
Czech money- "crowns"

Vienna 582
a peahen and its baby

Vienna 594
McDonald's!

Vienna 609
singing fountain

Vienna 612
absinth specialty store

Vienna 615
Lenin

Vienna 624
the tear says 21.8.1968

Vienna 626
eww!

Vienna 631
the Astronomical Clock, I loved it!

Vienna 632
we're going home!

Comments

[Prague girl]

They units of Czech currency are called crowns and JESUS the statue in the museum is LENIN not Stalin (what do they teach you in America???) Otherwise interesting seing my country with someone so non-european eyes, and you are right about the trains.