Praha

Mikey and I flew into Prague on Dec 6th. I was whining the whole way about how we should have stayed in Morocco and my experience in the Prague didn’t make me whine any less while there.

Of course we were unorganized and hadn’t booked a hostel previous to arriving. I plugged my computer on and paid some ridiculous price for 30 minutes of internet while Mikey collected our bags. We wrote the number down to a few hostels that looked cheap but comfortable and headed out through customs.

We took money out of the ATM, but had a really hard time finding anywhere to get change for a pay phone. Even the guy working at the money CHANGE counter didn’t want to hook us up. After 10 minutes or so of frustratingly lugging our bags around to all the airport bars, we finally found another CHANGE counter that did give us some coins. I know, its a big favor to ask some one to actually do their job, right?

We rang Hostel Elf – lucky for us they had a double room open. The receptionist was extremely helpful and had the cutest Czech accent. He gave us perfect directions from the airport so we stepped out side into the freezing Eastern European night.

As we were getting on the bus for the city, I overheard two guys trying to decided if they should get on or not.

“I don’t know man, everyone else is getting on this one.”

“Do you think its going into the city? oh man”

I decided to help them out and told them it was the right bus for central Prague. They laughed and after thanking me and paying their fare they asked us if we had a place to stay. They seemed embarrassed that they were so unorganized, but i assured them that we weren’t much better. They followed us to The Elf and had no problem booking a room. Mikey and I finished watching our pirated Moroccan dvd from the night before and called it a night.

The next morning we moved into a dorm room to start budgeting since we were soon moving onto more expensive countries. This made me think about how I wished we hadn’t left Morocco – That we were still in our own big affordable room with an ocean view and warm breeze. I’m a spoiled brat, I know this.

We started the day off at Charles Bridge and headed up to the top of Castle Hill to check out the Prague Castle and St. Vitus Cathedral before it started to rain. I was not in the mood to be hiking up a very, very steep hill and was grumpy for most of the torturous walk. Once at the top we just took a few photos and walked back down to get some food. We weren’t interested enough to go inside any of the buildings and check them out but we did get some beautiful photos of the city from such a high view.

We walked over what seemed like most of the central part of the city in one day. It’s a small city and easy to navigate. We also rode all the trams and buses with out paying, which is easy to do, but the fine for being caught can be up to 900czk (about 25 GBP). We met a few people that had been caught and didn’t recommend shirking the responsibility, but we kept taking the chance, probably stupid, but we weren’t ever caught.

That night we went to see an Ozzy Osbourne Revival show at Kain the rock pub next door to the Elf. We dragged our Californian/Pennsylvanian roommate Ben with us. He seemed entertained and a little scared while Mikey and I head banged in the front row. The singer let me sing into the mic when they played War Pigs as the final song and I think it was the highlight of my visit to Prague (not too many exciting things happened in our short stay, so yes, I’m serious, it was the highlight). We stayed in the bar for a while after the gig, just talking shit about our life theories, and Mikey was annihilated by the end of the night so we took him home to bed.

Day 3 started with breakfast for me, and a big old hangover for Watkins. I made him take me to a vegan restaurant I had read about, Albio. There are a few Albio joints in the city and this one was only about a 10 minute walk from the Elf. A health food store in the front with a cute cafe area in the back and killer vegan treats. I highly recommend eating at this place even if you’re not a vegan nerd. I had the chili in a bread bowl and Mikey had pumpkin soup in a normal bowl. I ate the entire bread bowl while Mikey looked at me with a hangover disgust. Sorry honey, I’m a fat ass.

After stuffing my face, Mikey took me shopping in the center of town near the Christmas markets and endless malls. All we could afford were some mittens at H & M (thank you, little underpaid child laborers…) and afterwards we checked out the big (dumb) astronomical clock. We were both a little confused as to why the clock is such a huge tourist sight, other than the fact that it’s huge and ancient and little things dance out of it on the hour (every hour). I don’t know if its just us, but those things aren’t all that exciting to me. I guess some people really love old architecture and monuments, and maybe if I had read more about the history of the clock I would have been more interested…or maybe not. It’s just a damn clock…oh well. We were bored and made our way back to the Elf.

We started a game of scrabble in the lounge at the hostel and soon enough Ben came and joined us. I lost and Mikey won. I was pissed. Soon we were distracted by a couple from Holland who came to sit with us. They were friends with one of the hostel workers and more of their friends piled in after them. One of their friends, Amy, was this 21 year old going on 45 Australian chic. she was friendly enough and kept Mikey, Ben and I entertained with her current experiences teaching English in Prague. After a few hours of chatting, everyone started getting ready to head to Cross Club, a place I had heard a lot about since we had arrived at the Elf. We didn’t really feel like dancing the night into oblivion via techno beats so instead Amy offered to take the 3 of us to a bar she knew.

The first bar had really loud house music on and none of us could hear each other – prrretty awkward. We finished our drinks and let our Australian tour guide take us to another bar just up the road. This new pub had table football – but more importantly it had strawberry scented & decorated toilet paper! I wanted to take the whole roll, but decided on just a small slice. Wrong choice – the bitch lost its smell by the end of the night after being crumpled up in my stinky pocket all night. Oh well, so we played a few games of girls vs boys foosball before we sat down for a little more dry and dwindling conversation. Amy and Ben seemed pretty tired or maybe just bored, but Mikey and I were getting sick of making pointless small talk. We called it a night and thanked Amy for [nothing.] taking us out.

I forgot my favorite scarf once the boys and I had already walked down the hill the bar was on and had to fun back up by myself. On my way up I watched a drunk boy trip over himself and roll down the hill a little while his friend looked really annoyed and walked off. He then proceeded to ask for my phone number when he caught me laughing. “No you little Czech idiot, I’m laughing at you not with you.”