Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Prahaha

Prague was one of the places that I was most looking forward to visiting and it definitely did not let me down. After an uncomfortable 17-hour overnight train (we thought we booked a sleeper car, when we actually didn't), we arrived in beautiful Prague around noon, checked into our hostel, and wandered around the city.

Old Prague is amazing - from the cobble stone streets, to the architecture, to street musicians and craftsman on the Charles Bridge - I loved every moment of it. We ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant which was so good and later went to a bar crawl. Even though I didn't make it through the whole crawl (I'll explain in a moment) it was still a lot of fun! We met a lot of really cool people from all over the world. Somehow though, Krissy, Graham, and I (who were in a different bar crawl then I was) met up and lost both of the bar crawls and ended up wandering the streets of Prague trying to find everyone. No luck though...we ended up at a weird bar/art gallery which was pretty funny to find the pictures of us standing next to random sculptures the next day. It sucked that we didn't finish the crawl, but it was still a fun night.

The next day we did all the touristy stops, which were all worth it. First, we went to the Astronomical clock tower which had some of the coolest views. It was nice to see the bird's eye view of everywhere we had been walking. Then we went to the John Lennon wall, which I don't really know why it's there, but it's this wall that people graffiti and draw on, and I just love that concept of being able to see the expressions of hundreds of people who have been there before. I left my mark too, of course. Afterwards, we went up to Prague Castle, the largest ancient castle in the world. On the way up to the castle we stopped at this lookout and saw some of the most gorgeous views. There have been quite a few moments on this trip that literally take my breath away and this was one of them. It was so surreal looking out across all of Prague, I could have spent all day there, but we had to continue on our way up to the castle. Unfortunately, we got there after it was closed so we couldn't go inside, but even the outside was awesome. It's crazy to the see the skill and detail from the 9th century.

Astronomical Clock

View from the clock tower

Writing on the John Lennon wall

"People will kill you over time and how they will kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases like 'be realistic'"

One of the best views I've ever seen

 Prague castle

Sunday, we spent all day walking around and doing a little shopping. Prague has definitely become one of my favorite places ever, so I bought each of my family members a little Christmas present here because I just wish they could've seen Prague too. I know my siblings would have loved it - I miss them so much! We ate lunch at a Czech restaurant. They were really rude to us, which sucked, but was actually quite refreshing. As an upperclass, white American, I don't get a lot of prejudice against me, so it was kind of weird, but in a weird way, I also liked it. It was also interesting, as this was the first place we travelled to where the language barrier was extreme. In all other places we could get by by knowing a little of the native language or people just spoke English. However, in Prague it wasn't like that, which made it more difficult to communicate with anyone, but I appreciated the change and actually feeling like I was completely submerged into another culture.

We took another long train ride home - again we thought we booked beds when we didn't (we really need to figure that one out) - but I have come to really enjoy the train rides, so I didn't mind too much. Besides, Prague put me in such a good mood, nothing could bring me down anyways.

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