Czech It Out!

Our trip through Europe next took us to Prague, which I must say is still my favorite city to visit. The more times I go, the more I love it. At this point I can mostly navigate without a map, which is very convenient since I was the only person who had one and I forgot it in the hostel on the first night. Oops.

When we arrived we went to our hostel (just down the street from the one that Amanda and I stayed in at Christmas) to drop our stuff off, then headed out in search of a bite to eat. I took us to the city centre, figuring that we could find a good place down a side street. Turns out we didn't need to even look that far. On the main street we found this "traditional" Czech restaurant. It was definitely a tourist trap, but it was well priced and looked to have reasonably good food.

As soon as we were seated this guy came up to us dressed up as St. Wenceslas. He politely informed us that he was there to answer any of our questions and to take free photographs, so naturally we took him up on that offer. We later found out that he is a student at the university and he does this job for pocket money and that he grew up outside of the city in a small town. Really nice guy.

For dinner I had goulash and bacon dumplings...it was incredible!

We happened to come on a night when there was a jazz band. These guys were soooo good. The one on the far left sounds just like Louis Armstrong...just with a Czech accent. They were all really nice and chatted with us during their breaks.

The National Museum.

I didnt expect the markets from Christmas to still be up, but they were still everywhere. It was great!

Random statue we found.

Carriage rides in the Old Town Square.

This guy had all kinds of yummy treats. We all ended up buying some.

I got candied almonds. Delicious!

It was a pretty dreary day. Lots of rain, but the city was still beautiful.

Charles Bridge. All of the vendors had to cover up their stuff to keep it from the rain.

The street we walked up to get to the castle.

View of the city.

Entrance to the castle.

The cathedral.

I bought a cheap umbrella...it was broken within 30 minutes. Oh well. Later that day I bought a hat instead. It worked out much better.


You can barely see it but the water on the roof was draining out of a gargoyle's mouth.

On our way out we got stuck because of the changing of the guard.

Very awkward guard.




At this point it stopped raining for a while, but was still pretty cloudy.


On our way back across the bridge we ran into our band playing! They were singing "What A Wonderful World" (Vhat A Vonderful Vorld, the way that they pronounced it) which is the song that we had requested from them the night before.

A whole huge shop of those wooden dolls within dolls things. I forget what they're called.

For a few minutes we got some blue sky!

This is the cute little hole in the wall place we found for lunch.

This time I got some sort of beef and gravy with bread dumplings.

We spent the rest of the day buying our train tickets to Vienna, then wandering through shops on the main street. For dinner we went back to the restaurant that we ate at the night before and all of us got pretty much the same thing. It was just as delicious the second time around.

The National Museum on our way back to the hostel for the night.



Well, I've only got one more city left to put up after this, then I dont quite know when I'll next be posting. Depends on if we do anything exceptionally fun soon. Not exactly likely since finals begin next week and for the most part we've all been locked in our rooms studying since we got home, with the exception of Jake's party and going to lunch with Amanda yesterday.

I'll try to get the Vienna stuff up soon, but I want to finish an Irish assignment today so it probably wont be until tomorrow, maybe the next day. Soon though!