Everything tagged prague
We took a cab to the hotel. The driver reminded me of Kornblum from "Kavalier & Clay." the hotel was nice and didn't have one of those funny "shelf" toilets that I see in Eastern Europe. We unpacked and decided to head to the "Old Town." lt took us about 20 minutes and two trips to the subway station and back before we were on our way.
Our first day in Prague was really two. We left the house a little late, and than found out that we were dealing with rain, holiday weekend, and Friday afternoon traffic. We got to the airport as they were boarding the flight - in fact, it was mostly full when we got there. So we got two middle seats. For an over night flight. Yay. However, the flight to Zurich went relatively quickly. we had a five hour layover in Zurich, and we saw something about day rooms. So we decided to check them out. They were very white, sterile rooms with a communal toilet and Shower down the hall.
I'm having a hard time this morning, because I'm having a bit of a food hangover. We went out with friends of David to a place that turned out to be a tourist trap. It's called "U Kalicha" and is based on a popular Czech novel, "The Good Soldier." It was a stereo typical Eastern European event, complete with an accordion player and a tuba player. As soon as they sat us down, they looked at us and said, "Beer?" We said yes and they brought us each the biggest mug of beer I have ever seen. It had to have been at least a liter.
So we got to the hotel and packed. Nothing too eventful. The flight home was a little trying. The flight to Zurich was in front of two blabber mouths that couldn't talk below a shout. And American Airlines didn't have us sitting together on the way home. We were persistent in our complaining and eventually got two seats together. The flight felt very long on the way home.
David was at conferences most of today, so I did some exploring on my own. I started off near the Prague Castle to check out some of the "Little Quarter". My first attempt at reading the map resulted in a wrong turn. Once I re adjusted, I was fine for the rest of my excursion.
When I was at marchFIRST, David asked if I would join him on a trip to Prague. I said yes at the time, but then a major project at work was scheduled to go live near the time of our trip, so I backed out. Then marchFIRST went bankrupt. I vowed never to pass up a vacation for work again. Well, Century 21 scheduled a project to go live within a month of my trip, and I said "screw it, I'm going!"
I had heard a lot of the ossuary at Kutna Hora. So we found an excursion to take us there. The town is an old mining town, which used to act as the mint for the Czech Republic. The town ranks high on the "quant scale"; but unfortunately, our tour guide was not so great. At our first stop, a beautiful church, she simply read from the english text that they give all tourists. She also added extra prepositions to the text and occassionally asked for help with words like "apron". Worse yet, we found out that the tour would not be stopping at the ossuary.