I somehow managed to avoid Prague on my four month study abrouad trip when everyone else and their mothers seemed to have gone there. It was also not in the itinerary for my April trip, but that has now changed once and for all. Shame I only budgeted basically two nights and a day to take it all in.
After missing two separate buses coming out of Budapest, one because I just didn't feel like waking up that early due to a certain day after drinking condition and the other because I realized I had left my camera back at the hostel about 10 seconds before I was about to board the subway to the bus station, I didn't arrive into Prague until around 5pm local time. For my weekend in Budapest I was treated to gorgeous 60 degree weather and sun, but sometime in the middle of the bus ride, I ran into a fog that just wouldn't go away.
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| Prague Castle and Vltava River in fog |
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| Charles Bridge by night |
My first night there I did a little exploring to get my bearings of where I was relative to the city center and sights. Prague is divided into two separate parts by the Vltava River, very similar to Budapest. The old Old Town, New Town, and historic center were on the eastern bank (I was staying just south of the Old Town two blocks of the river) and Prague Castle and the Lesser Town were on the Western bank across Charles Bridge up on the hill. I was in no mood to go out and party so I stayed back in the hostel to get some rest. As I was laying in the dorm room two fabolous Kiwi girls (Kiwi is the name given to people from New Zealand) checked in and seemed to be a riot! I quickly befriended them and informed them of the upcoming birthday celebrations I was looking to get into the following night and all of a sudden I had the makings of a b-day posse.
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| Street up to Castle |
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| Prague Castle Entrance |
Woke up around 10am the following morning and set off to Czech out Prague. Since I was only going to have one full day of sightseeing I wanted to see as many of the main sights as possible but not be skimpy doing so. My first order of business was to walk over the Charles Bridge to Prague Castle. Not the easiest of walks, some of the roads were on a very steep incline and there were numerous large staircases involved. At the top, I was treated to a changing of the guard ceremony, which was nothing compared to what I saw at Buckingham Palace in London a few years earlier but was still entertaining in its own right, although lacking a bit of pizzaz. Immediately following, I bought the all inclusive tourist ticket to visit all available buildings on the castle grounds, including the St. Vitus Cathedral. The castle area was pretty neat and I spent about two hours walking through all the different courtyards and alleyways.
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| Tyn Church |
Venturing back down the hill and across the river I moved over into Old Town to see the infamous Astronomical Clock Tower and Tyn Church and onward to the New Town where the major shopping area is, Wenceslas Square, which winds into a long thoroughfare arching upwards toward the National Museum and rail station. The fog was still lingering overhead, so it began to get a bit darker earlier than I had imagined it too. I made my way back to the hostel by about 5pm, stopping at Frank Gehry's "Dancing House," an excellent display of modern architecture right on the river.
That evening I met back up with Cat and Sarah, the two Kiwi girls, and headed out for a birthday dinner to a place that had been recommended to me by multiple people: U Fleku'. U Fleku' is a traditional Czech Pub/Beer house where everyone sits at communal tables on long wooden benches and drinks pints of the house beer and shots of whatever hell they were brining around in trays of like fifty. We ordered some hearty fare, had a beer or two, but decided not to get two into the drinking as the birthday celebrations had yet to begin.
We decided over dinner that we would attend the infamous Prague Pub Crawl so to partake in guided, supervised drinking rather then wondering off on our own. Back at the hostel as we were getting ready, two American's checked in and were inquiring about the nights activities, so we happily invited them out for the crawl. We walked the 20 minutes or so to the meet up spot and were immediately bombarded with shots of absinthe. Talk about swallowing gasoline. The group as a whole mainly consisted of Aussies and Brits, as well as our little group, and we were off to a few local bars and hang out spots before we finished the night at Karlovy Lazne, the biggest music club in Central Europe. On a Wednesday night, it wasn't TOO crowded, but it was still five levels of pure disco ball/strobe light/fog machine/ dancing madness. Definitely a great night and I do recall some public mischief on the walk back to the hostel at 3am that night.
This morning, I wanted to catch the earliest train possible to Berlin, which was around 8am. Currently I am sitting on the 12:30pm train (that was delayed around an hour) due to arrive around 6pm. Effectively, I am missing out on half a day in Berlin. Yea, was that kind of morning...
All in all, I'd love to revisit Prague sometime when the weather was nicer and dedicate more than two days to explore the city a little bit more intensely.
My first stop in touring Berlin the next morning was Alexanderplatz, one of the main squares of the city where the iconic TV Tower is located. I had wanted to take the trip to the top for a bird's eye view of Berlin, but again, that pesky fog disrupted that idea.
