Friday, May 6, 2016

Czech yourself before you wreck yourself....(just always have coins)

Prague

Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve had any smooth start to a trip. Prague, however, had the roughest start of them all.

To save some money, we booked a 7am flight to Prague from Dusseldorf. This meant being at the airport around 5:30, which meant leaving Bonn around 4:30, which meant getting up around 3:30… Good idea, right?
After the farewell party on Friday, many of us went to Maya and club Untergrund for one last rally. I didn’t want to miss this even though I knew I had an early start for Prague. A few others from the Prague group went too. However, we didn’t leave Untergrund until 2am.

Lauren’s host family was kind enough to let us spend Friday night at her house since they live so close to the Hauptbanhof. By the time we got back to Lauren’s and in bed in was 3am and we had to wake up at 3:30… Great idea.

5 of the 7 people made it to HBF on time and got on the right train. The other two were still asleep…They ended up having to take a taxi from Bonn to Dusseldorf in order to make the flight. The troubles didn’t end there, though.

Even though we had made the right train, we all fell asleep and missed our connecting stop. So we ended up taking another train back to our connecting stop before getting on our last train to the airport.
We all made it on the flight, even though Elaine forgot her passport! Good thing the Schengen agreement exists.

So finally we make it to Prague. We get to our air bnb, and it’s great!  Then we try to make our way into the city center…

We get to a subway station and we try to buy tickets, except the machines only accept coins. We didn’t have coins. So we tried to get change, but no place would give us any! So being the dumb Americans we are, we decide to chance it and go down to the platform. Great idea.

Just before the platform, we run into two ticket inspectors! When we couldn’t show our tickets, they took our IDs and told us we had to pay 800 koruna. I was tired and irritated and not about to drop 800 koruna, so I argued with them for a bit. They wouldn’t budge, so we had to pay.

Somehow, we finally made it to the city center, and it was actually a really cool city.

On Saturday, we walked to the castle, walked along the bridges, saw the John Lennon wall, bought some art, and ate some Czech specialties like trdelnik (basically a churro) and goulash. Blake and I also went into a Thai massage place and paid to have fish eat the surface of our feet… This was an interesting experience, especially since I’m extremely ticklish. Fish between your toes is an odd feeling, but in a weird way, it was calming.
 
           

That night we had planned to check out this famous 5-story club. However, we were completely drained from traveling and sightseeing, so we decided to take a quick nap before going out. Great idea.
No one woke up… but at least we got some nice sleep.

The next day, we walked around old town, saw the astrological clock, and ate more Czech food.

We made it back to the airport later that evening with no troubles, but we didn’t get back to Bonn until very late. While most everyone went straight to bed once they were home, I had to pack up everything in my room because Monday night I was leaving Bonn for good. I stayed up until 4am packing before I decided I should probably get some sleep. Monday had an early start, one which I almost missed…


                                         

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