Prague
Prague was one of those places I’d been looking forward to, I guess I’d just heard so much cool stuff about it, I’d also heard how the place was over run with tourists and sometimes seems a bit commercial and ‘sell-out’. As much as I like the city I did feel it falls into the later category…not all the time mind you just daytimes, especially weekends. The best way to enjoy Prague I found was at around 4am when your just about the only people on the streets!
Anyway I did have a good few days there, once arriving myself and Cameron went off to a hostel leaving Boris to find his hippy boathouse place somewhere on a river. The hostel was really cool, a tram ride away from the town centre but no big deal as escaping the tourist crush of the old town is definitely a good thing. And the hostel had the biggest, comfiest beds with massive pillows and duvets, after the overnight train it was heavenly! So caught up on a couple of hours sleep before heading into town to find our good friend sweet chillie. Feeling cultural like always we ended up trekking across town in order to find some bar we had heard was good. Of course it turned out to be closed ( I guess it was 1.30 in the afternoon) so we spent a nice afternoon in a park frolicking in the autumn leaves, and taking cheesy photos. Despite being a bit colder it really is a good time to travel, not as many tourists and its mostly sunny and pretty amazing looking with all the leaves and autumn colours. So yes we really did frolic in the autumn leaves….is there a son with that line?
Chilled out at the hostel before meeting up with Boris at this awesome restaurant right next to our hostel. It really did have amazing food, so to continue my trend of eating ridiculous amounts every day. Dinner conversations was about as polite as you can imagine for 3 guys and me in the middle….always interesting and I think got worse over the next few days…boys….
We did end up going to the coolest club I;ve ever seen later that night. It’s made out of crazy car junk all welded together to create different levels and rooms. Very very funky and there was a totally insane band playing with lead singer dressed as a super hero and one girl in bondage gear, pretty much what you’d imagine from an underground eastern European band.
Against all my moral travel ways I joined the hostels walking tour the next day to actually see a bit more of Prague than a park. Basically there is this eccentric crazy old guy that lives in the hostel giving walking tour because he had a tu our in his leg and walking in good for it….very weird but despite all his crazyness he’s quite a cool guy..in weird sort of way. He’s German or something and is an exprofessor and hates tourists. Detirmined to show us the ‘real Prague’ (an illusive goal of every tour operater) and abuse as many tourists along the way we set off first to watch everyone else watching the famous astrological clock. Made by a guy who later had his eyes gorged out to avoid making anything as beautiful again. We stood right underneath and watched with perfect timing as Stephan cued in the cameras, the late comers running and the clapping. All a very odd sight and unbelievable amounts of people there every hour to see the clock do its thing ( I missed that thing as was too busy laughing at everyone else). Stephan taught us a lot about the history of the town, showed us the back streets, it felt very much like a university trip! The only thing you needed to know was to NEVER argue with him though as he seemed incapable of people having different opinions, one very funny argument was with a random girl about John Lennon’s contribution to peace. We all walked away very slowly… SO with Sweet Chilly and Cameron already headed to Cesky Krumlov I met up with some other people from Krakow including an American chick who studies film in Prague. Do you know that there are something like 69 000 Americans in Prague? We went out with a whole lot of her film school friends for another amazing meal and a few drinks at some cool bars. So 2 nights in Prague and the next day it was off to see the boys in Cesky Krumlov, a place mentioned in Lonely Planet as the next big thing…so was I early enough to beat the onslaught on tourists that are sure to follow any Lonely Planet recommendation?
Tags: Czech Republic, Travel, Videos
admin
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.