En Reconnaissance de Paris: Prague is never cold if you just stay in your castle...

Hi everyone!

This weekend spent in Prague was an awesome experience, but Paris is still our favorite city, and it's nice to be back.

We arrived in Prague on Thursday after a very short flight-- barely over an hour-- and an easy intra-city commute. Five of us traveled together-- Abbey, Gina, Christy, Lauren, and Me-- so by the time we got each other and our things settled into the hostel, we were starving. We decided to get a late dinner at a place called the Beer Factory. It's a good place for burgers and such, but mainly a cool setup. You sit around a table where a beer tap is built into the middle, you're given a mug, and you fill as much or as little as you want for yourself. There's a meter that tells you how much you've poured yourself, and at the end of the meal you're given a bill based on that amount. It was a pretty fun place to go. There were a lot of young people there and a live musician playing some of our favorite songs from high school, which was really entertaining.

Friday morning we went to a place called Bohemia Bagels for brunch. It was really a scene-- apparently where all of the abroad kids are told to go-- so we saw lots of other English-speaking kids there. The bagels were pretty good considering you can't get a bagel anywhere else around here, but I'll still take a New York bagel any day.

From brunch, we took a walk down to the river. Along the way we passed the Lennon Wall. It was a really good time of day to walk by because the sun was shining. The bright-colored graffiti looked amazing, and we took a bunch of pictures. We wished we had thought to bring along a sharpie to write our names on the wall somewhere.

We continued towards the Charles Bridge, but before reaching it we passed a small pedestrian bridge whose fences were covered in love padlocks. I don't know if you've seen one of these before-- they exist in lots of cities-- but it's a really sweet idea. Basically, two people together fix a padlock onto the bars of one of these fences and then throw the key into the river below. (I know the metaphor is super complicated, so I won't try to explain.)

Then we walked across the Charles Bridge-- this was something we ended up doing a bunch of times over the course of the weekend. It's a really wide bridge with some very interesting old statues along it's sides, but what we found most entertaining about it was all of the activity. People were selling jewelry and paintings, and performers of every genre stationed themselves along the walkway. One moment we would be hearing a violinist's sweet melodies and just a few steps later, a four-man-band of brass instruments would completely change the mood. Some of the performers were surprisingly talented and really added a nice feel to our stroll over the river.

After crossing the bridge, we found the Astronomical Clock. We were told this clock was an entertaining sight on the hour and that we should stick around for the show. So we decided to fill that 20 minute gap of time with a quick stop in a cafe. Obviously that led to us discovering baked apple strudel with vanilla ice cream and whipped cream. Needless to say, rather than using up 20 minutes, we used up about an hour and 20 minutes-- just enough time to make it back out for the next hour. It was a good thing we made such good use of that time because the event was terribly anticlimactic. Basically, a man stuck his head out the window, blew on his trumpet a few times, and the Italian tourists behind us screamed, "YEAH! ITALIA!!" No regrets though-- the apple strudel was great.

At about this time, Brian, who was also visiting Prague for the weekend, arrived and met up with us. We all wandered around the streets for a little longer until we were pooped from all the walking and decided to go back to the hostel and rest. After our naps, Brian and I decided we would go out for a late dinner. However, as we wandered down the street, we found that practically every place had stopped serving food. After getting turned away (not so politely) by several restaurant/bars, one nice man felt bad for us and let us in. He had to limit the menu because the kitchen was shutting down, but we ended up still having a really nice meal. We basically had a private dining experience in this cute little place, and although some of our first choices were off limits, I had a very good piece of salmon and Brian had a well-seasoned steak. The waitress was really sweet and didn't make any moves to rush our dinner along at all.

The next morning, we took another walk around the streets of Prague. We came across a really cute street-fair-type market where we saw some great paintings, jewelry, scarves, hats, and other cool trinkets. Then we decided to find ourselves some authentic Czech food. We went into a place recommended by a man working at our hostel. Between our steak tartare starter, chicken schnitzel for me, lamb for Brian, a side of french fries, and a complete disregard for the fact that in the Czech Republic, you don't get Paris-sized portions, we ended up getting an absurd amount of food. That said, we really conquered it all. It ended up serving as our breakfast, lunch and dinner. The final shock came with the bill-- a bit over 500 Czech crowns. No, that is not outstanding because it's so much, it's outstanding because this insane meal totaled to about ten euro each. Three days in Prague and we basically felt like billionaires.

After this meal, it was hard to move; however, we decided to take a walk to the Prague Castle. By the time we trekked there and all the way up, the sun had gone down. It got really cold, but as the city's lights came on it was really beautiful. It was too late to go inside any of the buildings, but we still got to see some really nice architecture. From the outside, the big church looked both like Notre Dame de Paris and Westminster Abbey. I took a picture which could easily be confused for one taken of Notre Dame in Paris a few weeks ago. (Sorry if that's offensive to a dead architect somewhere.) We also happened upon a small changing of the guards ceremony. It wasn't really all that exciting-- nothing like what happens in London-- and it only lasted less than five minutes.

Today we had to fly out, but we had a little bit of time in the morning to explore some more. We headed over to the Jewish area in hopes of going on a tour of the Synagogues. For obvious reasons, the tours had been closed on Saturday, and unfortunately, after getting there, we realized there was not enough time to do the tour today. We walked around the area anyway and saw some of it from outside, which was still pretty cool.

On our flight back to Paris, Abbey and I sat separately. Overall the short trip was entertaining-- I got to observe a 4-year-old singing French nursery rhymes and Abbey embarrassed herself by waking up from a nap, disorientedly thinking her neighbor was me, violently grabbing her arm to get her attention, and finding out that she was actually an annoyed French woman in the middle of making out with her boyfriend. Good times (for me).

Now it's back to school this week, and then off to Barcelona on Thursday! I'll be back to blog soon!