Prague - walking tour experts!May 31, 2010
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| After the magic of Berlin, I was admittedly very sad to leave. I could easily have spent the rest of the week there.... actually with a few German lessons, I could move there but we need to continue on with the journey! The 5 a.m. wake up to head to the Hauptbahnof to catch our train to Prague did not help my wanting to not leave the city, but we were all very excited to pass out on the train for the next couple hours. We got even more excited when we were able to find a 6-person cabin (Harry Potter style as Sam describes it) and able to nap somewhat more comfortably. The scenery was amazing as we passed through small towns such as Dresden...I have made a list of more places in Germany to visit. We got into Prague around noon and trammed our way to our amazing hostel. We stayed in the HostelOne Prague and highly recommend it for anyone who is planning on passing through Prague for a few days and looking to hostel. We had this beautiful apartment style room. Lo and I had beds in the loft, which were really cool at first but the 2-foot distance between floor and ceiling made things, like changing and backpack item retrieval, a little more difficult but we managed to develop quite the throw down system to our roommates below. We were able to navigate ourselves to literally grab lunch and run to make it in time to catch the Sandeman’s free-walking tour of Prague. We have slowly become addicts of this company’s walking tours. They are free and have been wonderful every single city we’ve been in. Our Irish tour guide, James, took us all over half the city known as the “New town” where we ventured to several places throughout the city including the Jewish quarter, etc. The tour ended at the Charles Bridge by the water at what we have decided is our favourite time of day. It is around 5ish when the weather is starting to cool and the sun starting to fall and we all just sigh and think “what-a-day”....our lives right now.... this cannot be real. We met 3 fellow Canadian boys on our tour from Montreal who were conveniently staying at the same hostel. We all decided that a pub crawl would be an excellent idea for the evening’s festivities. We picked up some groceries for dinner on the way home. Eastern Europe, especially after experiencing places like London, will make anyone feel like a millionaire. Any currency that requires me to move the decimal point over to the left to find the Canadian dollar value is my type of currency. Three days worth of fruits, vegetables, yogurts, and dinner amounted to approximately $7 Canadian.....word. I will admit now, though, that grocery shopping has posed a few challenges throughout our travels. When you can’t read labels you often have to guess. Nutrition information is almost incomprehensible. One of our biggest challenges we have is finding still water. Europe seems to love the fizzy water, I do not. We have developed strenuous shake tests in the grocery stores that are getting more and more accurate which is good. We have also realized we have been on a steady diet from the last couple weeks of crackers, cheese, yogurt, muesli (with chocolate because it is almost impossible to find it without & it is delicious), apples, bananas, Corny Big granola bars, and we cover absolutely everything with Nutella. Lois and I also thought it would be fun to try a new chocolate bar in every country we went to....it has turned into trying a new chocolate bar every other day. We have decided to ignore this addiction to chocolate and diet coke although we may have to face the repercussions of these nutrition decisions when in our swimsuits in Croatia....that is later though. The good part is we have discovered our favourite chocolate bar thus far –Minonky. Layers of wafer separated by white chocolate then dipped entirely in chocolate– sort of like a KitKat bar but better in our, now officially unofficial expert, opinions. They are also very cheap which helps its ratings on our scale! After some much needed showering and dinner we headed out to the pub crawl which we convinced ourselves that all of us would remember more of than the one in Amsterdam. After an hour and 40 minutes of free beer and shots at the first bar it was questionable but we did manage to accomplish our goal and minimized our hangover for the next day of tour. The next morning we headed to see the Jewish quarter in the morning. We saw the Old Ceremonial hall that explained a lot of different Jewish traditions. We then walked through the Old Jewish Cemetery that has 13 layers of buried bodies and thousands of gravestones. It was one of the more ominous walks as everything is so still when you walk through the open air cemetery but all around you is the hustle and bustle of the many tourist attractions that surround it. We finished the morning off with the Pinkus synagogue where the names of all the local Jewish men and women who had to experience the horrors of the Holocaust are listed on the buildings walls. In the upstairs of the memorial synagogue is a showcase of artwork that was made by the children of one of the nearby concentration camp. These works were made by these children under the guidance of a teacher in the camp who collected materials for the camp children to draw each day. There were pictures by the children of various ages of the their lives before living in the camp, some tragedies they witnessed living in the camp, and what they hoped life would be like when they got out. None of us left with dry eyes. This is not something to be missed for anyone visiting Prague it is so sad but also an experience. The weather was looking a little precarious when we stopped for a filling lunch before the walking tour. We were hoping our previous luck with weather would help hold out while we did an afternoon tour of the old city and Castle. We couldn’t have asked for a better tour guide than the Scottish man Colin who took us around the castle gardens and gates as well as other parts of the old city. The weather did hold out and we finished the afternoon by heading to the Kafka museum to witnessed the two peeing statues. These statues are ones you can text a message to a number and they will write it out with their “pee”. It’s very weird but entertaining. As our favourite time of day drew near, we walked across the Charles Bridge. Lois was the only one that rubbed the lucky women statue. The Czechs have this messed sense of humour. There is one statue on the bridge that have brass etchings and if you rub the etching of the woman it is suppose to bring you good luck. The locals, however, have also made it look like the dog is rubbed too, however the dog does not bring you luck – it apparently brings upon pregnancy. Sam, Erin, and I decided to take the necessary precautions and not touch either rubbing in order to ensure that we did not get our dog and woman luck mixed up. |
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