well i’m on my way…

Before you continue to read this, I must warn you.  I cannot find the question mark nor the exclamation point on this keyboard, so bear with me if I sound a little dry.

When we arrived in Prage and I refreshed myself with the public tranportation system, I started feeling super excited and had a grin on my face that didnt leave until after we checked into my favorite hostel of all time, Sir Tobys.  (The reason Sir Tobys is my favorite is because it is the first hosel that blew me away by its character, cleanliness, excellent staff, and delicious worth the price breakfast.  Since then Ive seen others that are similar, but Sir Tobys is what sets the standards in my book.)  The hostel worker was very pleased to hear that I was a returning customer, and even more so when I told him I always recommend Sir Tobys for other peoples travels.

We got to our room and met Tash, an Aussie and the two of us chatted about Western Australia, my favorite part of Oz and her homestate.  I recalled an amazing restaurant near the hostel called Pet Penez, and the three of us went.  We all had pasta dishes-very Czech, I know-for under three Euros.  Cheap and delicious.  What a perfect way to begin our stay in Prague.

The next day we checked out early to meet Ryans brothers frat brother, Joe, who has been working in Prague for the last year, and invited us to stay in his flat while his roommate was away.  Awesome.  The flat was pretty clean, considering three guys live there, and the rooms were pretty spacious.  Ryan and I had the largest of the bedrooms to ourselves.  Joe and his roommate left for work and we showered, taking our time and savouring the fact that we didnt have to wear flip flops nor worry about using too much hot water for the line of other travelers outside.

Once we freshened up, we headed out to see the sights.  Since I was in Prague two years ago, I was still able to naviagte the winding cobblestone streets.  We saw the New Town, the Old Town, crossed the Charles Bridge, and just wandered, looking at the lovely architecture.  We noticed that where Berlin had the communist style buildings (big and blockish), Prague did too, but they seemed to take some time to make it look nice.  We rubbed what we thought was a good luck statue (we learned later that a local rubbed off another part of the statue so it looked like you were supposed to rub it-Jerk) and basically walked around getting lost and finding our way back again.  We got back to the hostel exhausted, with half assed plans to go out, and did some laundry (yay free laundry) and crashed.

The next day it was raining, so we stayed in until the skies cleared up.  We had intentions of wandering and getting lost, but we found a beer garden with Budwar Budweiser ads all over the canopies.  This is what Annheuser Busch (sp question mark) got their name from, and theyve been fighting over the name ever since.  So we sat down and ordered one, and another, and another.  So much better than the American version.  We noticed people arriving from after work, and with their beers, these men in suits were ordering huge plates of fries.  They looked delicious, and when we learned they were less than 2 Euros, we ordered a plate.  They came with tartar sauce that tasted more like a tzatziki sauce minus the pungent garlic and ketchup that tasted a bit cinnamony.  We scarfed them down and had one more beer before we decided to leave.  The sun was still out and we were loving Prague even more.

We wandered around Prague some more in search of the supposed largest horse statue in Europe.  I had to see it, after being on this trip of the biggest, largest, southern most, and all those other things that belong in the Guinness Book of World Records…We found the TV tower en route, and commented on how ugly it was, scarring Pragues baroque character until we noticed statues of babies crawling up and down the tower.  Then it became wierd so it was OK in our books.  Next to it was a Jewish Cemetary that looked overcrowded, with headstones literally inches away from eachother.  We wanted to go in, but I noticed a locked gate, while Ryan was sizing up the jumpability of the fence.  We ended up looking at it awhile, until it got dark, and we headed for the horse statue, which was starting to come into our view way up ahead.

We found the statue after walking under a couple viaducts and down some very dark streets and what do you know, the area around it was under construction.  We couldnt get as close as we wanted to the massive statue, and wished we could so we could determine the scale of it.  Could we touch the belly of the horse, we wondered.  How big was the mans boot that was riding the horse, we wanted to know.  Oh well, we saw the largest horse statue in Europe, and thats all that matters.  Right.

We took the free tour of Prague the next day and everything we walked by and learned about Ryan and I had already seen.  It was nice to get the running commentary, but our tour guide wasnt as enthusiastic about it as our Berlin guide was, so we couldnt get into it as much.

After the tour we went back to Joes flat, where he and his friend Eva from outside of Prague were having drinks just hanging out and would we like a drink-of course we would, it was our last night in Prague.  After we finished the juice and nearly finished the vodka, we decided to go out.  Since both Ryan and Joe are gay, we of course went to a gay bar, since gay men love dancing with girls anyway it seems…Valentino had three levels, but the levels went down instead of up.  We started with a few beers on the street level, sitting at a table, watching people come in.  After we caught a buzz, we headed down to the next level where there was a dance floor.  We had more beers, a shot of Absynthe (yuck) and danced and danced.  After Eva left, we went downstairs, which had a smaller dance floor and lots of couches.  We met some of Joes colleagues, and when they started hitting on Ryan, Joe wanted to leave.

We went to another bar, that I cant remember the name of, and bought our last beers.  The music here was much better than the last bar, and I ended up dancing with a bunch of good-smelling men, since Ryan was ready to leave and Joe had disappeared.  I like dancing with guys who arent the least bit interested in me; gay men are so much fun and theyre excellent dancers.

When we left the bar and noticed the sky was getting light.  We decided then that we would go back to Joes, grab our stuff, and head for the bus station, since our bus left in a little less than three hours from then.  Sleep would be pointless.  We got to the train station as the sun was rising and chatted with other travelers who were also waiting for busses, after having the same idea we did.  We finally boarded our bus, and fell asleep, hoping we wouldnt wake up until we arrived in Budapest.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Europe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.