We had a three day weekend this weekend, and we (me, Lindsay, Leah, Trey, and Kyle) headed down to Prague in the Czech Republic. We have all heard so many great things about Prague and how you have to go while you're over here, so we're able
to now check that off the list! Prague is a beautiful city. Its made up of three main districts that we visited - Old Town, New Town, and Lesser Town. Old Town is by far the most touristy part with obviously old buildings, windy narrow streets and lots of shops. The Vtalva River runs through the middle of the town separating old town from lesser town. I think I read somewhere that there are 15 bridges along the river.
That is what they're known for. The oldest one, St. Charles Bridge, was filled with souvenir vendors, street artists, and tons of tourists. Going South from old town was new town. There you'll find the main drag if you will. It was in interesting street. Almost Times Square meets Bourbon Street. Not nearly as lit up or dense as Times Square, but just as marketable, and not nearly as wild as Bourbon Street, but if you were looking, you could probably have some of the same experiences. As pretty as Prague was with its river, bridges, old buildings, etc, we found it to be a very dirty city. We also experienced many different smells as we walked around. That and the amount of tourism was what we didn't expect. We found that people were surprised that we were from America - I think Prague must be a place that more European tourists go than American.
So, this time we booked our hotel ahead of time so that we wouldn't have to walk around aimlessly for hours trying to find one. What we didn't realize was how far out the hotel that we did reserve actually was. We had to walk a good ways to get there and soon realized that this is not the part of Prague people come to see. haha. But the hotel was relatively cheap and was really nice. It even had air conditioning!!!! We finally found a place to eat that would take euro's (the Czech currency is the crown) until we could find an atm to get some crowns out. I had goulash for the first time there. Goulash is a beef dish - chunks of beef sitting in a thick stew like gravy with dumplings. Their dumplings are different than I've seen yet. They are more of a bread-like consistency than a dough-like consistency. This was tasty and very filling. We were pretty exhausted from our travels (5 hr train ride at 6:30 am), so we just walked around town and familiarized ourself with where things were and how the town was set up. We went down to old town, crossed the bridge, and ended up on paddle boats on the river. When it came time for dinner we found a restaurant on the river. I ended up getting a chicken kabob (on a skewer in the traditional sense of kabob unlike the doner kebap of Berlin). It came with some good grilled peppers and vegetables. We spent the rest of the night wandering around old town - it was quite lively. In fact, we wondered upon another World Cup game being shown in the main plaza. Hundreds of people were gathered around the big screen. This was interesting b/c the Czech team wasn't even playing, but the crowd was just as spirited. Uruguay beat Ghana in a shoot out at the end. Any Americans there were cheering for Uruguay b/c Ghana beat out the US, and I was standing by a woman who was a die hard Uruguay fan, but a lot of the crowd was cheering for Ghana.
We set out early to see all the sites on Saturday. Our hotel included free breakfast buffet and kept loaves of bread and meat and cheese out for sandwiches, so we were able to save a little money eat four free meals this weekend! The first thing we did was go to the Prague Castle. Apparently you can't go to Prague w/o seeing the Castle. The most impressive thing was the cathedral within the "castle" - we still aren't sure which part was actually the castle. My favorite thing though was, of course, the stained glass. This was just slightly different in style and craft than other traditional stained glass. This place too was packed full of people so we were getting a little claustrophobic. Everything else besides the church required tickets, so we just moved on. The castle was up on a hill so we were able to see the "best view of Prague" and lots of other good views too. Trey and I gave up the navigating roles to Lindsay this weekend. We ended up on top of another hill in a vineyard not quite sure where we were. haha We were thankful that it was pretty b/c it was really hot this weekend. We stopped several times during the day to just sit for a minute and rehydrate. We went around Lesser Town and stopped by a few of the embassies. They were nothing like the ones we've visited in Berlin. These were very much about blending in instead of standing out. We made it from Lesser Town over to New Town to catch the Germany game on tv. THEY WON 4-0!!!!! It was a great game, but it made us sad that we weren't with the Berliners on the Unter den Linden jumping on buses and what not. The Czech did not get quite as excited about that game as they do here in Berlin (naturally). After the game we found a park to sit in until dinner time. We ended up eating at a place in New Town that was a traditional Czech restaurant. I had such a good meal! It was pork over potatoes and covered w/ mozzarella. Definitely one of the best meals of the trip. We spent the rest of the night wandering around New Town and ended up at a nearby park until we needed to catch the tram back to the hotel.
Sunday we tried to see a little bit more of Old Town including the Astronomical Clock that they are famous for. Really the best parts of Prague are the streets - they just have pretty street scapes there. So, we did a lot of walking around going from one park to another just soaking up the city before we had to leave. It was so hot that we were all craving Icees or some kind of slushy drink. We asked some people on the street and they had no idea what that meant, but we finally spotted a girl with something icy from starbucks. We made a mad dash to starbucks and all enjoyed a fruity drink. We ran into a basketball shoot out in the middle of the plaza in New town. Some of us went into a couple shops in old town - my favorite being the art glass store. These shops were everywhere. The souvenir items that were most popular were bohemian crystal, puppet dolls, and paintings.
Our train ride back was not too exciting. It was an old train and was just plain hot. We had trouble getting seats b/c we didn't have any reserved, but they never marked which seats were reserved. We ended up getting up about 6 times before we found seats that weren't someone else's. The funniest thing from the ride was a class of German high school students dancing and stomping to "cotton eyed Joe" complete with a ripping "yeeehaw". We just found this pretty funny! We were sitting in a room with their teacher who was gracious enough to let some of us sit in their extra seats.
Generally speaking, Czech culture has several differences and plenty of similarities to German culture. The people were always nice and helpful. Prague being a major tourist town that is kind of expected. The currency was kind of fun to deal with. 25 crowns equaled 1 euro and 20 crown equaled a dollar. So, everything seemed really cheap. We could pay some places with euros and get czech crowns back. If you paid 50 euro you would get several hundred crowns back. Their food was pretty similar in the fact that it was a lot of meat and potatoes. They had more dumplings with things though. The language was extremely difficult to be around. We were glad we were in a big city that most people knew English. We didn't even know how to say hello. This made for some good laughs. We had a lot of fun, and I'm glad we went although we are starting to get a little worn out on site-seeing. I like being able to say I've been to the Czech Republic, and I think Prague is definitely one of those places that I might not have gone on my own later.
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