Prague, Czech

I made it to Prague yesterday evening, after a long train ride (9 hours) from Warsaw. I am learning quickly that long days of traveling mean long hours of recovery, so once I found my hostel (without a map or directions, only the memory of briefly seeing its location on google maps) I decided to have a calm quite night in. I took that time to plan for the day ahead. I have begun to see why Lonely Planet guides are so popular; it is nice to have a little bit of research done on a city before one gets there. The hostel (run by two Canadian friends, who decided one day to pick up and leave Canada to open a hostel in Prague) was full of information on tours, sights, and events.

Today I ended up taking "The Ultimate Tour" of Prague. It was a little more than what I would normally spend on a tour, $65, but it came highly recommended by the guy from the hostel, and seemed to include lots of different tour types. The tour lasted 6 hours (twice that of Gilligan's Tour) and included walking tours, a boat tour on the Vltava River, and a tram tour to the Prague Castle (The Guinness Book for largest Castle in the world). The tour included lunch and a free pass to come back to do their Ghost Trail Tour, so I thought that $65 was quite a steal. I learned loads about the city over the 6 hours, had some great food, meet some fun people, and developed an overall love of Prague.

Even though the map of Prague is quite big, it is really an easy city to walk. (Except for this one intersection near my hostel that gets a little tricky). Our guide actually had his degree in history and up until 4 years ago, all tour guides in the city had to take an exam in order to legally work as a tour guide, so he knew loads. Per his advice I think I am going to go see Rigoletto at the National Opera tomorrow night.

Once the tour was over I decided to take in a few more sights around the main part of Prague while I waited for the Ghost Trail tour to start at 8:30. This is just a beautiful city, and it makes me laugh how the communist buildings stick out like sore thumbs. (After seeing what Europeans refer to as a "Communist Buildings," which I know were in fact built by communists, I marvel at how all contemporary American architecture looks "Communist". Does that mean something about all of our architects in the States? Do they all have some sort of hidden Communist agenda? LOL).

The Ghost Trail was great, just 5 of us on the tour. I believe it was a small group because of the rain, but the wet weather added to the charm of starting all the stories with "It was a dark and stormy night." Most of the tour was just legends, although we did get a little Czech history mixed in, and every once in a while a guy dressed in costume would jump out at us from behind a corner scaring us to death. Well worth it. The Czech accent made the stories especially creepy, and when I couldn't understand her I would just insert horrible, gruesome words that probably made the stories way scarier than what she was actually telling. I think I also taught her a few slang terms for the word "prostitute" because in one of the stories she said "prostitute" a dozen times, so I thought she might like to spice it up by saying things like: "streetwalker", "hooker", "wench", "lady of the night", and of course "whore." That way she wouldn't have to say prostitute" so many times in such a strange accent.

After such a long day of touring, in the rain, I think I am going to spend a nice night indoors, relaxing and planning for tomorrow. I did skip out on the Pub Crawl that a bunch of other people were going on, but I really prefer walking. Crawling is hard on my old knees.