Weekend in Prague

There have been a bunch of weekends that I have not written about yet due to lack of time. I will tell you about this past weekend in Prague and then after my semester break will fill you in on my other weekends, what I have been doing and visited during the week as well as my travels within Italy.

This past weekend I left on Thursday for Prague. We look an over night bus there which took us 12 hours, I mostly slept. In the morning we arrived at the Czech Inn which is a beautiful hostel (never thought I would describe a hostel that way but it really was very high tech and clean) two tram stops away from the old center of town. The group that I was traveling with was 24 girls 1 boy and our group leader. I went with two of my girlfriends Merritt and Ewilena from Syracuse. Prague is in the European Union but does not use the Euro yet so we had to exchange our money to get Koronu which are worth about 25 koronu to 1 euro. We learned very quickly that everything in Prague is very inexpensive. We were able to get settled in and then right away met a tour guide to go on a full city tour. We first took the tram (which is all on the honor system and no one checks the tickets so we got around town for free) to the National Gallery Museum. The first thing that everyone notices about the city is the incredible architecture, every building even the McDonalds are unique and impressive. We went to Wecslaw square which when you walk down the main avenue leads to the the old center of town. Everywhere you look are shops selling crystal and marionettes, these are apparently the two things that I was told you must buy as souvenirs in Prague. The old town square has the famous clock/zodiac sign/ astrological counter on the church. At the top of the hour figures come out of the clock and move around, this very much reminded me of clock in Marienplatz in Munich. After seeing this we walked to the outdoor market which sold all the best goodies from a funnelcake type of dough with cheese to sugared nuts to many many varieties of sausages. We of course bought a little bit of everything and continued our tour to the old Jewish quarter of town. Here we saw a 12 layer cemetery with thousands of graves on top of one another from the Holocost. Then we continued by crossing the Charles Bridge, which had many painters and knicknack stands on it and kept walking towards the Prague Castle. We were able to visit the Lenin Wall which truly was incredible. The colors and messages on the wall were inspiring and comprised of Beatles quotes and other cries for peace. On the way to the Prague castle we walked on a few canals and passed an Absinth store which was completely green and even sold Absinth ice cream! (which looked gross by the way). Another interesting thing that we learned was that before there were building numbers each building had to identify itself with an image and so while walking sure enough some building still had either a flying horse, or a blue pig or some other kind of symbol above its doorway which it used as its address in the past. When we got to the top of the hill we entered the Prague castle complex which had many buildings, the castle itself with guards outfront and then the Church of St. Vitus. Inside the church was some very nice stained class and somewhat reminded me of the inside of St. Patrick's Cathedral.

After our tour was over my friends and I went to an authentic Czech restaurant for lunch and I had chicken soup and goulash, which was exactly the way we make it at home ( a nice break from all the pasta in Italy). Then we shopped around the center of town and went to this place called Bohemia Bagels, where I was able to get my first bagel since leaving New York. At night we went on a Pub Crawl, which apparently is the thing to do in Prague because there are so many of them and if you are only in Prague for a short amount of time there is no way you could possibly know which pubs are worth going to. This was alot of fun since our group was about 200 people of all ages and places but many of them were from Australia and Germany. We had a great time out with everyone including our tour guide from during the day. The following day we came back to the center of town to get the breakfast donuts that are made over a fire on a long skewer, very yummy. Then we visited a few galleries in the artsy part of town and stumbled upon one with unseen photographs of Paul McCartney and the Beatles which was very cool. The streets of Prague were also packed with very roudy Polish futbol fans and we quickly found out that night was a Czech Republic vs. Poland game and they were long time rivals. That same night there were in total 5 futbol games on television and so the riot police were out on the streets just in case. We were told that we had to be very careful but we went to the Beer Factory to watch the games anyways. Here there are taps of Pilsner beer built into every single table at the bar which was very convenient. We watched a bunch of the games but once the fans got too intense we had to go back to our hostel but it was ok because we were exhausted. Overall the city was stunning and very interesting and I would love to come back and spend more time there. Tomorrow I am leaving for Brussels and Amsterdam but soon after you will hear of all my adventures.

Ciao with love,

Tania