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Published: December 6th 2014
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Prague
The View next to Charles' Bridge So I fell majorly out of love with my blog when it decided to delete a whole post that I had spent a hours (well, a long time) writing which is why I haven’t posted on here for a while. I’ve now forgiven it slightly and am writing this slightly mammoth post /the following mammoth posts on Word.
Waaaaay back on 11
th November there was a bank holiday in Burgenland called ‘Martini’, and since I spent every lesson leading up to this week being told the story in various different fragments by the students (hence I heard it over 20 times) it’s only fair that I record it. ‘A long time ago there was a man called Martin who lived in Burgenland. He was walking through the streets one day and he saw a poor, homeless beggar on the street and in an act of kindness Martin split his coat in half and gave one half to him. Because of his kindness, the people wanted Martin to become Bishop, however he didn’t want to become Bishop so he ran away and hid in a goose shed. The geese in the shed cried so loudly that the people went to look
Prague
Old Town Square to see what the problem was, found Martin and took him to be Bishop. He is now the Patron Saint of Burgenland.’ The 11
th November is now a bank holiday in Burgenland where the shops are closed and there is no school, and is celebrated by eating goose with red cabbage and bread dumplings. There is also some kind of lantern festival where the primary school children make lanterns and walk through the streets with them after dark singing a song, which, based on my student’s ramblings I think goes something like: ‘Ich geh’ mit meiner Lanterne, und meine Lanterne mit mir. Dort obern leuchten die Sterne, hier untern leuchten wir.’ (I go with my lantern, and my lantern with me. Up there the stars are shining, and down here we are shining). To celebrate this holiday, my school decided to have Monday-Wednesday off, meaning since I don’t work Fridays anyway I had a very long weekend followed by a one-day week.
Jacob and I made the most of this time off by taking a trip to Prague, a mere 5 hour train ride away from Vienna. It was a slightly strange concept for us to just turn up
Prague
A birds-eye view of Prague at the train station and catch a train to another country, without even so much as a passport check, however also highly convenient (and cheap?!) Prague is such a beautiful city and we had a great few days visiting the famous Charles Bridge, the old town, Namesti republiky, the Old Town Square and many other sights. We also found a Marks and Spencer which was exactly the same as they are in Britain, all in English with the same packaging and everything, and we were far too excited about seeing British food again! We had a few problems with the currency in Prague; the exchange rate is approximately £1= 35.24 Czech Koruna and so everything seemed to be ridiculously expensive. However we quickly found that this was far from the case when we withdrew 1000koruna (about £28) and that bought 2 meals, souvenirs, a metro ticket, a café trip and various other bits and pieces; it’s fair to say the cost of living is fairly cheap in Prague! The roads were also a terrifying experience; for one thing Trams in Prague have priority at zebra crossings which meant a green man didn’t necessarily mean you could cross, and driving in
Prague
Charles Bridge the Czech Republic is unnecessarily fast, aggressive and basically dangerous at times, so it definitely wasn’t worth trying to dart between the cars. I also found that the roads made very little sense; the tram lines appeared to run in a different direction to the rest of the traffic and the roads seemed to be zig-zagged and crossed each other at seemingly random sections, which made it very difficult to navigate them!
We also had our first ‘language student’ moments in Prague, when we would speak with someone in a language that wasn’t Czech or English, not necessarily because it was their language, but because it was a mutual language. Neither Jacob nor I can speak Czech, but between us we can speak English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and basic Chinese so we decided we should be able to get by, and although English sufficed for most of the time, the others did come in useful! We developed a tendency to discuss menus that were shoved at us by pushy sales people outside restaurants in German in attempt to confuse them (which for the most part worked quite well and they accepted the fact that we weren’t coming in
Prague
The start of Charles Bridge without question) and also managed to direct a lost tourist in German after her attempts at English didn’t get her very far (She wasn’t German, we weren’t sure where she came from) and Jacob’s Italian came in useful when attempting to decipher menus in Italian restaurants. We did have a Czech phrase book, but it wasn’t really that useful!
I really enjoyed being a tourist around Prague for a few days and having the chance to visit such a great city, but several nice meals and a coffee and cake at Prague’s most famous café later it was time to go home. It was quite strange leaving Austria and we realised we’d actually missed it quite a bit when we returned! However we had such a fantastic time in Prague, such a beautiful city, great sights and food; I would recommend it to anyone!
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