Sunday, February 18, 2007Off to Prague today. We flew on
AlpiEagles, and I swear I have never been so paranoid about crashing and burning before. As soon as we stepped into the plane, I just about had a heart attack. Talk about circa 1980! It smelled of stale cigarette smoke, the seats were that fake leather material (some may call vinyl), and there were holes in the arm rests from where the ashtrays used to be. It was not a relaxing flight at all. I spent most of the time making sure that parts of the wings weren't falling off, and at every bump I almost fainted. In fact by the end of the flight, I was feeling pretty ill and I even took out the airsick bag, just in case. By the way, that is the FIRST TIME EVER that I have felt a little dodgy on a flight, so I don't think it was just me.
We landed at Prague airport, collected our bags and changed some money. I got a sandwich from a small shop to help with my feeling sick, and we proceeded to find the bus to take us to the metro station.
We saw the bus pass us, so we ran and jumped on, not noticing that we were the only people on the bus. We validated our tickets and settled down for the ride, only to be told to get off the bus about 5 minutes later. We were a bit perplexed since the bus had taken us to a parking lot, and not the metro station downtown. I asked the driver, and he told me something in Czech. All I could make out was that he pointed the other way. So we got off the bus and stood around not really sure what to do. But then we saw a bus across the street where the driver had pointed, so we walked over to the bus stop to catch a bus that would hopefully take us to the metro, not a parking lot.
Eventually we managed to navigate the transportation system and we found our hostel. It seemed pretty nice, but also very quiet. In fact, we didn't see anyone there the whole 3 nights we stayed. Although we did hear two people having a bath together.
Ick.
After that, we went out and about exploring Prague, to see what we could see. The city is beautiful, and we had a nice time just finding our feet.
We had been warned about constantly being on your game because the locals try to rip you off at every turn, so one must be
vigilant about checking the bill, counting change, etc. And guess what! The waiter tried to scam us at dinner. He brought us a bill for almost twice what we really owed. When we pointed out to him that it was not our bill, he laughed saying it was for another table and that he had got confused. He brought us our correct bill and it was half the price of the first one. Ha ha! He didn't get away with it that time!
After dinner and before heading back to the hostel for the night we decided to go to the Torture Museum. Yikes! Some of those torture mechanisms were brutal. Humans can be pretty sick and twisted. I sure am glad I was not alive during the Inquisition.
Monday, February 19, 2007Today Debbie and I got up early, went for breakfast (I think we got scammed here because they never gave us a bill, but we were too tired to actually notice until later in the day), and then crossed the Charles Bridge to see the
castle in Prague. We paid to go inside, and what a rip off! The castle was essentially a huge space with nothing inside, and half of it was under construction. We were not impressed. Luckily I was able to use my student card to get a discount on the ticket price, but still. Not worth it at all.
Then we went to the toy museum, which included a whole floor of Barbies. Now I can't say that I am, or ever was, really into Barbie, but seeing Barbie through the ages was actually pretty cool. Also, there are so many different barbies that I never even knew existed, like the complete collection of The Wizard of Oz dolls. I have to admit that it was a highlight---especially after the crappy castle.
We stopped for lunch before going to the Jewish section of Prague. We saw several sights, but the two most memorable were the
Pinkas Synagogue, and the
Old Jewish Cemetery.
After a bit of a rest, we went to see "Cats in Prague," a black light theatre show. It was pretty good. I think Debbie enjoyed it more than I did. I kept
focusing on the props and how the actors were creating the effects instead of actually following the story line, so I got a little confused by the end. It also didn't help that the actors were lip-
synching to really bad English music with Czech accents, so between analyzing the music (bloody linguistic tendencies), and trying to dis-illusion the props, I really had no idea what the hell was going on. Debbie explained it to me afterwards, and it seemed to make sense so that was good enough for me.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007We decided to take a day trip to
Kutna Hora to see the
Kostnice Ossuary. I had heard about it from several other travellers that I had met, and really wanted to go see it. We had to take a train from Prague to
Kutna Hora, and then walk about 10 minutes to the
ossuary.
Getting our train tickets was quite the adventure because not only did we have to visit the information desk twice to find out which train was actually ours after we bought the ticket, but the lady at tourist info place in town completely lied to us and we had to wait in the shady Prague train station for over an hour and a half! It ended up being
ok because we used that time to visit the nearby bus station to get our tickets to
Czesky Krumlov for the following day.
Anyways, we finally caught our train to
Kutna Hora, walked to the
ossuary, and were there for about 15 minutes. It was much smaller than I had anticipated. I mean, when you hear of a place that is full of the bones from over 40,000 dead people, you kind of get the idea that you would need a really large area to decorate with all those bones. Not so. But no matter because we had a nice Czech lunch at the little tavern next door, and they didn't try and rip us off! Bonus.
Then it was back on the train to Prague and off to the grocery store. The main store near us was
Tesco (like
Walmart), but you would think it was the only grocery store in the whole
freakin' city it was so busy! We got some snacks, and then headed back to the hostel for a rest before going out to dinner.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007Off to
Czesky Krumlov! We got up early to catch our 10am bus to
Czesky. While we were waiting for the bus, we saw several nice coaches waiting at various platforms. We spent our time predicting which bus would be ours, and pointing out buses that we would refuse to get on---one in particular was this run down, bright green crap-mobile that looked like it should belong on the
gua gua run in
Santo Domingo!
Well guess which bus we got!
Once we arrived, we found our hostel, which looked great, but was a pretty
weird place. It was kind of like a hippie commune. They made us take off our shoes, and
separate our garbage into recyclables. Not that there's anything wrong with recycling, but..... Anways, we had to climb up these wobbly, wooden stairs to our room, which was rather difficult with our suitcases.
The town itself was beautiful, but pretty boring. We saw another castle with a great view overlooking the town, and that's about it. We tried to go out for dinner around 9:30 at night, but everything was closed! I mean everything. Even the Chinese restaruant! Thank goodness for the snacks we had bought the day before or we would have starved. I even checked the hippie commune kitchen to see if there was any communal food, but nada. The communal pasta jar was empty. It was pretty depressing.
And the beds were made of foam, so you could feel the wooden slats poking at your bony bits while you tried to sleep. We had three beds in our room, one of which we were told not to use, but by about 3am I was so fed up that I went to the other bed to see if it would be any better. I finally fell asleep about an hour and a half later, but I think it was probably the worst night's sleep I have had in a long, long time!
Thursday, February 22, 2007Off to Vienna! We figured out train times and decided to take the 9:50 bus from Czesky Krumlov to Czesky Budejovice, where we would catch the train to Vienna. The bus ride to CB was pretty sketchy. I have never noticed how bad body odour can be until I was cramped in that little bus for an hour. Not pleasant.
We finally arrived at CB and found the train station. We bought our train tickets and then went ot get a bite to eat before catching the train. Our train stopped in Gdorm (or some such town), where we had to catch a connecting train to Vienna. Problem was that we only had 3 mintues to make the connection!
As we approached our supposed arrival time, it became clear that we were not going to make the connecting train, so we stopped the conductor and pointed to our tickets and then to our watches to make the point that we were late for our next train. She said something and then made a 'telephone' gesture. So we figured that she was going to call the next train to have it wait for us.
When we got to Gdorm, we saw our train with the conductor hanging his head out the window. We started waving madly and ran like the wind to get to the train on the next platform. We passed a man who started talking to us. At the time we didn't realize that he was a policeman and he was asking to see our passports since we had crossed into Austria. We just kept running like, sorry but we have a train to catch! Well, he finally yelled "Passport!" and we realized who he was and instantly dropped our bags and handed over our documents. The he escorted us across the tracks and to the waiting train, which had now been held up for more than 10 minutes because of us!
By the time we got to Vienna and found our hostel, it was starting to get dark, so we walked along one of the main streets, had dinner at a nice Indian restaruant, and went to bed.
Friday, February 23, 2007Today we went to see the
Imperial Apartments and the other sights in the Ring of downtown Vienna. What a beautiful city! We totally loved the atmosphere and the delicious cake and coffee shops! We also jumped on tram 2 for a do-it-yourself tram orientation tour that was listed in one of our travel books. At around 5 we headed out of the centre, stopped at the grocery store, and then made our way to the sudbahnhof train station to catch our night train pack to Padova.
Let me tell you that night trains are not the great and practical idea that everyone thinks they are. This whole idea about saving a night's accomodation and making good use of your time by travelling while you sleep is just nonsense. First of all, there is relatively little sleeping to be had on the night train since trains are acutally quite noisy and the rocking motion becomes rather nauseating when one is trying to sleep. That being said however, I did get more sleep on the night train than I did in the hippie commune hostel!
Saturday, February 24, 2007Arrived in Padova at 6:22 am and took a taxi home to catch a few more hours of sleep!
