Laura's England Adventure: Prague

Prague trip: December 19-23

Prague, or Praha, is the first place we visited where English is not an official language. It wasn’t really a problem because like in other tourist cities many people spoke English and most restaurants had English menus as an option. It was nice but also made me feel bad just waltzing into the country with no knowledge of their language and expecting to be accommodated. I am spoiled being an English speaker and being able to go all over without having to learn other languages. I know if we went to smaller cities, we would run into situations where the language difference was a problem but so far all the places we plan to go are big enough tourist cities that people will speak English.

(Sunday) Our trip to Prague was uneventful and we found our hostel easily. We had booked a 3 person room since it was pretty much the same price as a room with more beds a different hostel we were looking at. Turns out we were given a 4 person bedroom with a kitchen! Fabulous! We didn’t cook any meals since we wanted to try the food the Czech Republic has to offer but we did use the fridge for breakfast and sandwich ingredients. By the time we got to our hostel it was about 5 pm and we were all hungry! So we dropped our stuff in our room and went in search of dinner.

We found a nice place to eat and all ordered from the traditional Czech section on the menu. I got schnitzel style pork and potato salad, Abby had beef goulash with dumplings and Melissa had a roast duck with potatoes. They were all yummy and we left feeling satisfied. The potato salad I had was not the American style potato salad; instead it had a vinegar type dressing which I thought was better! We went to Tesco after dinner to get breakfast food and lunch food for the next day. Only during the breakfast the next day did we realize that the “milk” we bought wasn’t normal milk. I can’t remember the translation we found online but it definitely wasn’t what you would want to put on your cereal in the morning. I think that was our only language problem of the trip and the next day we made sure to buy the right kind of milk. Before heading back to the hostel we wandered over to the Charles Bridge and walked over it and back taking in the bridge and the castle lit up at night.

(Monday) On our second day, as seems to be our norm these days, we went on a Sandeman’s tour on Prague. We met in the Old Town Square and we got there early and looked around the Christmas market. So many fun things and yummy food! The tour of Prague was very informative and interesting…and cold! It is one thing to be walking around a city when it is cold and another to walk and stop for long periods of time for about 3 hours. The lunch stop in the middle was much needed and although we all brought sandwiches with us, we opted to buy something warm to eat and the soup bagel combo at Bohemia Bagel was exactly what we needed! Warm and yummy! One interesting thing we learned on this tour was about a poor man who walked into the Church of St. James and saw jewels around the neck of a statue of Mary, he decided to take them. Surprisingly the statue grabbed hold of his arm and would not let go! When he was found the next day by a monk or priest and he could not get the man’s hand free, he cut it off and hung it in the entrance of the church to warn all other thieves. It has been hanging there for 400+ years!

After the tour we walked up to Prague Castle. It isn’t a castle we would normally picture but more a collection of buildings that surround St. Vitus Cathedral. I really liked St. Vitus Cathedral! It is so pretty! The stained glass windows were amazing as well. We didn’t go all the way into the St. Vitus, just as far as you could go without a ticket. You had to buy a ticket for the Castle in order to go all the way into St. Vitus and we weren’t interested in the rest of the Castle so it would have been a pretty steep price to pay to maybe spend half an hour walking through the rest of the church. What we did see was great! We wandered around the castle grounds (which are free), watched the changing of the guard (they are much less serious looking than the guards at Buckingham Palace!) and went back to our hostel for a few minutes before dinner.

We found a restaurant pretty close to our hostel. It has cool lamps hanging from the ceiling made out of old bottles. Abby and I had pizza and Melissa had gnocchi which I had never heard of before. I tried a bite and it was pretty yummy. My pizza was good and I decided I would eat all of it instead of bringing leftovers to our hostel because I don’t think pizza is nearly as good when it is reheated (Abby took some of hers to the hostel). I eat slow normally and Melissa and Abby eat fast….so needless to say it took me probably 45 minutes longer to finish my meal than they did! I was just chugging along and enjoying my meal but also couldn’t help but laugh a little bit at the situation. Since it is winter, it gets dark early!! There really isn’t a lot to do when it is dark and cold so we went back to the hostel to read or maybe play a card game. We weren’t in the hostel too long when the power went out for some reason or another…it was only out for about 1.5 hours so it wasn’t a big deal but not much reading or card playing happened. Oh well, more sleep is always good!

(Tuesday) Our tour guide on the Sandeman tour suggested that we get tickets to a performance or show while in Prague if we had some time. Our first order of business was to find a show to go to either that evening or the next day. We were really excited when we found out the Nutcracker was sold out but understandably so since it was showing that night and the next night. We ended up getting tickets for the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra Christmas Concert for the following night.

Then we wandered around Wenceslas Square and its Christmas market.

Next we went to the Pinkas Synagogue and the cemetery. It is a memorial to all those from the Bohemia region lost during the holocaust. One of the exhibits has drawing that children did while in Terezin, a transit camp. The cemetery next to the Synagogue is incredible. I’ve never seen so many headstones in my life! And it is several layers deep since it was a ghetto area and they didn’t have anywhere to go but up.

After this we walked up Petrin hill and saw the Petrin Tower, a miniature version of the Eiffel Tower built two years after the real on was built in Paris. We got some nice views of the city on our hike up the hill. After we climbed the hill we headed out in search of Strahov Monastic Brewery. Melissa had read about it and it sounded like an interesting place to have dinner. It was a bit off the beaten track and Abby doubted we were going to right direction for most of the walk to the Brewery but we did find it! One of the previous AMAs visited Prague and said that rabbit is a traditional food so I decided to try rabbit for my meal and it was pretty tasty. Along with some dumplings and a beer, I felt like it was a very Czech meal.

(Wednesday) The next morning/early afternoon was spent at the zoo. It was a big zoo but sadly most of the animals were in their winter indoor housing. We still got to see all the animals (except we never found the giraffe) and probably closer than if they were outside but it would have been nice if they were outside. The polar bears and the elephants were pretty funny. One of the polar bears kept banging on the door to their enclosure…we think s/he was hungry and that it was probably the door used to give them food. The elephants kept bobbing their heads like they were dancing to some silent music. One of our other favorite animals was a house cat that followed us around for awhile...can you tell we all miss our pets?

When we finished up at the zoo we got lunch at Wenceslas Square Christmas market and headed on a wild goose chase for the Jewish quarter. The pass we had got us entry to many different places and was valid for two days but we didn’t have much time and we got turned around, oh well. We spent the evening doing some shopping in the Christmas Markets before having dinner and going to the concert. It was a nice concert and although it was a Christmas concert they didn’t play anything Christmasy.

(Thursday) We got up early on our last day to see the sunrise from the Charles Bridge, sadly it was completely overcast and we didn’t see anything. Melissa and I then went on a crazy hunt for a post office to buy a few stamps and mail some postcards. We had a map from the hostel and the post offices were marked on the map…sounded easy enough. The post office must have moved because we looked exactly where the map said it should be but didn’t find one. We asked a new paper stand where to find a post office but and we didn’t find that one either. We ended up finding a convenience store that sold stamps. By the time we got back to the hostel it was time to pack up and head to the airport. The flight ended up being delayed about an hour and a half but that was ok since we weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere.

A few random things:

We couldn't leave with out trying Trdlo...a yummy treat that was being made at several stands in all the Christmas markets: