Like i said before, the trains just kept on getting worse and worse. This time it felt like we were all sleeping on stone w/ itchy wool blankets like the ones your grandma knits for you but without the love in every stitch that makes them tolerable. Anyway, we only got about 2-3 hours of sleep and terrible sleep at that then found ourselves in Prague.
I found the hostel that we stayed at here to be the most boring aesthetically. It was basically just a flat of an apartment building that they transformed into dorm like rooms. This place was weird too you had to unlock the door with a key on the inside in order to get out. So hypothetically we had the capability of locking ourselves in. Dumb. But the location was absolutely prime, pretty close to new town square and had a great view of the huge river which runs through the middle of Prague.
We took another free tour by a guy named Paul at new town square. This is where i started realizing that tour guides can pretty much feed whatever they want to their audience and they'll probably believe it. Kinda caught wind of this when he took us to a church and tried to explain how one of the relief sculptures was of a priest who had just been castrated by his dog. Needless to say I enjoyed the Berlin tour a lot more and found it a lot more believable, but regardless, tours are still awesome in taking you around the basic mainstream attractions around any city that you can explore in depth later.
The St. Charles bridge was probably the most impressive piece of architecture in Prague. It's one of the bridges which spans across the river with 40 unique statues flanking both sides of the bridge. Paul brought us to one of the more famous ones of one of the deciples with two gold relief sculptures on the facade. Everyone was rubbing the one of the right so i decided to go left. Apparently the one on the right was for good luck and the one on the left was supposed to make you pregnant within the next year. Lesson learned, go with the crowd. Another really cool thing was the John Lennon wall near the bridge. Apparantly immediately after John Lennon was killed people in Prague started flocking to this wall to write messages/draw portraits. People in Prague were that obsessed w/ the Beetles.
We eventually made it to one of the higher points in the city to this amazing Gothic Cathedral. I think this style is probably my favorite out of cathedrals with how much sharp intricate detail to compliment the smoother style arches and glassing. It’s amazing too how theses massive buildings in no way compliment the space they occupy. I had to lay on my back in the farthest corner I could find just to get a shot at the top half of the thing. Another 5 minute walk landed us at this amazing panoramic view of the city. The density reminded me a lot of San Francisco but there was defiantly a lot more red-orange tile going on than SF. Either way, absolutely gorgeous.
On the way down we stopped by this bar-grill type place that Paul recommended. The food was almost at cheap as Krakow but not $60 US meal for 10 bucks cheap. Ate amazing goolash, was very happy. A short power nap and rendezvous with Jeremy, Andrew, and Anna we cruised out to this 5 story dance club right by St. Charles that had a different style of music playing on each floor. Met some really cool French girls (The French apparently have this incredibly aggressive clicking sound to get peoples attention and get terribly offended if you don’t respond, believe me when I say this) and spent most of the night making asses outta ourselves on the 80’s floor staring in wonder at the multicolored disco-lit floor.
We spent the next day pretty much aimlessly wandering around the city. Prague is pretty much divided into old town and new town. You pretty much know what part of the city you’re in from the architecture (i.e new town is much more modernized than old town). There were the standard facilities in old town, big elaborate churches, cool looking statues. But at this part of the trip all that stuff was looking pretty similar to me. That night we ended up at this music club that was recommended to me by some locals named Lucerna’s that was throwing an amazing 80’s and 90’s party with a giant screen on the back wall and spent the whole time jumping around to Michael Jackson and White Snake.
On our last day we went up to explore inside castle, which really wasn’t as impressive as I had hoped. They turned most of it into museums full of art exhibits, but none of them were really anything I was interested in. Daniel did manage to catch the changing of the guard which from the pictures looked pretty cool. We did our fare share of acting like obnoxious tourists posing with them. I just found out too that if you touch them any way, shape, or form, it’s completely at their whim to beat the absolute hell out of you. I’m betting these people wait around all day for some poor guy to accidentally brush up against them and go ape shit. Anyways, we spent our daylight here, ate our final Czech dinner, and then took off for a night in the Airport and an early flight to Amsterdam to finally begin our semester.
At this point in the trip having been in my 4th country in a week with 3 different currencies and was completely exhausted. I was really pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this trip considering I had planned to go to Spain originally for the 10 days. I think I’ll be able to weather the cold a lot better after this trip too considering most of the time it was between -10 to -15C. One things for sure though, this 6 month trips gonna destroy the bank account.
