26 May 2011

The Full Story: Day Three

Traveling to Prague involved two very, very bad ideas.We were in for a six hour train ride. Luckily there were very few people in the compartment the entire length of the journey. Somehow, I couldn't fall asleep. I read The Protector's War by SM Stirling and watched the countryside pass me by out of the window.

Now for the bad ideas. Number one, not eating enough breakfast. Second, writing the directions to the hostel down in my notebook instead of finding somewhere to print a map. Herp. Derp.

The train we were on did not have an eating car, so from 8AM until 4PM I had a piece of bread, nutella, a banana, and some water in my stomach. This would not have been so bad if we were able to go straight to the hostel. Unfortunately, my not-so-brilliant sense of direction led us in the wrong direction for about an hour. I was a mess. Hunger, fatigue, and frustration set in and my friend had to lead us through Prague and ask an Asian student, who luckily spoke a little English, for directions. We arrived by 5PM and when the receptionist saw me she immediately asked what was wrong and offered me a banana to eat. Not everyone hates Americans.

After settling down for ten minutes, we got a map, I made a call to my dad, and we were on our way to the souvenir shop to pick up our concert tickets for the next day. Everything was better from then on. I had half a pizza for dinner. After that we went sight-seeing. We walked across the Charles Bridge and up to the Old Prague Castle. The view from the latter is magnificent; one can see the entire city as well as ruins of a military fortress.

After our sight-seeing, we went out for a real, Czech budweiser beer at a restaurant across the street from our hostel. It came on-tap as a 0.5L glass. I barely scratched the surface on mine. After that, we went to a kebab place and shared some fries with mayonaise. The "guy behind the counter" was pretty drunk and hit on us. And on that slightly disconcerting note, we ended our night.

No comments:

Post a Comment