Czech-ing Out the Golden City Pt. 1

Foremost, excuse the dreadful pun above. A weekend spent surrounded by words that you absolutely cannot read, accompanied by the best (and cheapest) beers this side of Fat Tire (and outside of France!) makes for lots of time to make bad formerly-Soviet nation puns while traversing the entire glorious city of Prague in the span of less than 2 days. The money is in thousands (1€ = 25 Czech "korunas" or the anglicized Crowns), the bars play only VH1 80s pop videos and a medley of Classic American/British Invasion Rock including the Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, and (interestingly) David Bowie, and you can walk the entire breadth of the 2.1 million-person city in about the course of an hour. Two days in Prague.

Thursday evening I began to pack my bag for two nights in Prague with winter staples and a multitude of antibacterial products for the dreadful morning I felt awaiting me. At 6:30 am, I would have to wake up and take the metro across Paris to catch a bus to the discount airport of Beauvais, about 80 kms north of Paris where airlines like RyanAir and our preferred mode of transit to Prague, W¡zzAir. More on them soon. At 6:30, I awoke to my French mother bustling around downstairs. After my shower, my 19-year-old brother Julien knocked on my door to ask if I had a cigarette. Forgot a couple of things, had a yogurt for breakfast, hustled out the door sans headphones, which always makes for a more interesting metro ride, and met Abby on a very cold and rainy corner of Paris's 16th arrondisement where we were to catch the bus to cart us off to Beauvais. No such luck. Turns out the buses don't actually leave as often as I had thought and the last one that would get us to the airport in time had left 10 minutes ago. EEK! So, lesson learned, this is the time when an executive decision was made that it was cheaper to take a cab than to miss our flight, we took a cab to Beauvais. In our time of urgency, my French was not garbled enough to ask how much for a cab to Beauvais and how long would it take us to get there. Not awesome, but we got there in plenty of time to check in and go through teeny-tiny security before being introduced to WizzAir.

Their planes are pink, the flight attendants all wear pink. (Needless to say, I was clashing terribly.) WizzAir does not subscribe to the traditional philosophy of assigning seats on planes. So our early Friday morning flight was jam-packed with excited Europeans, shouting like they had all been friends their entire lives. I slept awfully fitfully but when I woke up we were landing in Prague. Excellent!

Despite the gobbledigook nature of the Czech alphabet, we were easily able to get around because every single important thing in the city was either in Czech and English, or they were thoughtful enough to have pictures on the directional signs. My pre-ordered van to take us to our hostel wasn't there and, antsy to breathe some Eastern European air, we found an ATM to spit out our huge Czech bills. I actually took 4000 Crowns out of the ATM. That is equal to a little over $150. This lasted me pretty much the entire weekend, through paying for our entire hostel with one 1000 Crown bill, paying for drinks with dark and very pirate-esque coins, and copious amounts of Czech food of various varieties. Our first move was to find a ride into town, which was pretty simple and cost about $4. We shared the van with 2 older Norwegian ladies and 4 fellow American travelers, much LOUDER and more American stereotypes than either me or Abby by a long shot.

(Hilariously, we ended up running into them again that night on a street near Old Town (touristy-downtowny) and then this morning on our flight (looking none too jolly).)

Driving into Prague was unbelievably gorgeous. The city is kind of situated in a little valley sort of thing with very high hills on one side of the river (where you can find Prague Castle, St. Vitus's Cathedral, and a series of cool parks and extremely charming neighborhoods), and then the other side, the dip of the valley, I suppose, where we stayed (south) and the Old Town square with the famous (and crazy) Astronomical Clock and lots of gold-roofed old Czech buildings (north). To the East, there is Vinohrady, another inconceivable Czech word and a crazy neighborhood that we wouldn't discover until Night #2: The Girls Go Out All Night, to be addressed in due time.

Our van driver was very pleasant and didn't speak much English, but did offer to pick us up again on Sunday morning for our 9:30 flight. He was so funny that we had to say yes, plus we got a discounted rate on the way back. Alright! $3! Juliet's recommended hostel, Chili, turned out to be just as cute and helpful as they appear on their website. We shared a room with a British couple in Prague together, and a bathroom with a bunch of European boys who walk around in their tiny briefs when they wake up.

After dropping off our bags, we decided to go ahead and take advantage of the afternoon. Despite leaving our houses at 8:00am, we arrived in Prague and were able to go exploring by about 3pm. Our hostel was extremely close to the main "must-see" sights if Prague, including the Old Town Square, the Charles Bridge, and the Museum of Medieval Torture Instruments (a gem that we, sadly, did not have time for). So after obtaining a city map and a vague idea of the things we must see, we chugged off in the direction of Old Town Square.

Walked through a few skinny pedestrian-only-kindof streets where there were shops full of Bohemia crystal, marionettes, Russian stacking dolls, and Praha Drinking Team t-shirts. There was a T.G.I.Fridays (T.G.!) and cute international boys hawking the International Pub Crawl every night starting at 8 & 9. We explored a little bookstore and I got some cool Kafka & Prague postcards for my next round of postcard sending. Then we spotted a place claiming it had the best cuisine and beer in Prague, and, feeling a little peckish, we decided to test out their claims. Our first Czech beer was large and delicious, especially paired with our Czech cheese plate with various types of stale-ish bread (we're pretentious after being in France too long). The cheese was wonderful and had flavor though, which was a nice break from some Parisian cheeses. We decided to search for a traditional Czech place for dinner and uncovered a place with lots to choose from in terms of traditional E. European fare, i.e. whole-roasted duck, goulash, dumplings, onion soup. Very hearty and good followed by a coffee.

I was very sleepy, having not napped much on the plane and was feeling like I might not be the best party-crawler that night, but after a brief trip back to our hostel and consultation with the reception, we set out to find some street "that begins with a D" for bar discovery. Happily, it was not too hard to find and we followed a group of party-looking-people down into this bar called Jack's(?) I think, which ended up being pretty Western and cheesy, but also fun and amusing.

There we proceeded to drink whiskey & lemon, beer, and, though I tried my hardest to explain an applesauce shot to the bartender, he just made us Midori mixed drinks. Ew.

I must make a sandwich for dinner in order to further explain the remaining hilarity of Prague.

A bientot!