Everyone says that Prague is beautiful. And in this case Everyone is right.
We got into Prague two days ago and after five minutes of wandering narrow streets, gazing at the river and the copper spires turned green with age, we stumbled upon an open air performance.
It was modern dance, performed in full suits to harsh repetitive electronic music and with a dozen or so desks as props. Chelsea and I stood entranced for the whole thing. They managed to work in people dropping pages out of phone books from the five story buildings surrounding us and a naked man in a window with a cell phone.
This is the first city where the tacky “I heart 'insert city here'” t-shirts has been tempting. We love Prague.
Also – 1 USD works out to nearly 20 kroner here. And as opposed to Denmark where a similar phenomenon meant nothing, here we got Indian food for two people for less than 10 dollars. As stated: We love Prague.
We spent most of the day, roughly 9ish hours, walking around today.
This though I blame on Paris. A result of our stay in Paris is that we got used to small spaces on city maps taking us a long time to traverse on foot. Paris is huge, so an inch or so on my Paris map is roughly 15-20 minutes walking. But now, in smaller cities, and especially old city centers, we tend to cross whole blocks of the map without noticing – hence we missed Amsterdam’s red light district the first time we walked through it.
So in Prague, when we look at a map with our hostel and the zoo literally on opposite sides and then gauge from our walking the day before that it really wouldn’t be that bad of a trek we shrug our shoulders and head out.
And as we are heading back, it is less of a bother to walk than to try to figure out the bus.
We are safely in the hostel now – tomorrow we take off for Vienna. Our feet hurt and we could stand to do laundry. Soon. But we love Prague. Ciao!
Okay – For everyone’s sanity I’m going to do another recap. We will surely backtrack a little in a few days here, as we have been doing, but I figured it might be good to mention some highlights and where we are now.
Since we left Nice a lot has happened.
We got to Geneva, met my sister (YAY!), climbed a tower (awesome, but we feel like after Monteserrat it takes a lot of stairs to impress us), and witnessed what Chelsea has dubbed simply “The Spew”
After that we went to chill in Heidelberg, and experienced, once more, the power of chocolate and the pure ingenuity of the German varieties of this godlike substance.
From there we hid in Bad Homburg, and with the kind and timely help of the Von Wuthenaus, we recouped.
down time + excellent people = happy Chelsea and Hanna
And then back to Paris. The city of lights and love did not disappoint. Well, actually, considering what we were warned to expect in Paris, we were happily surprised. The people were nice. The streets were as clean as one might hope in a huge city. And of course, there was something of historical/literary/aesthetic/artistic significance on every other street corner.
After an epic misadventure involving a cathedral and twitter (which deserves its own post) we met up with Jane and Kiyash. Who, in turn, addicted us to Pierre Herme macaroons (which we hunted, purchased and consumed on each successive day of our stay in Paris. They don’t ship the macaroons. We were sad.)
And that brings us to Amsterdam. Amsterdam has a certain reputation. In order to fully experience the city we did the only thing possible. We went to the science center! Yes, we spent our one day in Amsterdam playing at the Nemo with a bunch of science happy Dutch children. It was brilliant.
From there we took the sleeper (or tried to) to Copenhagen. After running 3.5 hours late (“too late”, according to our charming conductor) it left us in Padborg.
Never heard of it? Well, neither had we. We arrived in Copenhagen 5.5 hours later than planned with an extra Ethan we picked up along the way. He probably deserves a post too.
That brings us about up to the present. We met Lee yesterday – fellow contributor to Auslander (theforeigners.tumblr.com) and are traveling together today. Assuming his train is on time.
Cheers!
