Praha

So this past weekend, I went to Praha (Prague) in the Czech Republic, and like most people that go there, I really enjoyed it. It is an old city that is well preserved, so it's visually appealing, it's pretty cheap, and it's fun. To get there, we took a night train to Stuttgart, took a train to Nurmberg, and took a bus to Praha. It's pretty far away (14ish hours by train), which is unfortunate because I would've liked to have spent another day or two there.

Since I went on this trip with different (and fewer) people, this trip was different than the others. Of course, we saw all the normal sites - the castle (which isn't actually a castle, kind of a let down), the astronomical clock, old town, Charles Bridge, etc. But, a little differently from normal, I also got to try lots of beer. One of the people I went with loves beer, so he wrote down some good places in Praha to try beer. The first place (Pivovarsky Klub) had the largest selection of beer in the Czech and the second place (Klasterni Pivovar) was a monastery that brewed their own beer (and it was really good - coming from a person who doesn't really care for beer all that much). Both of these places also had excellent food.

The second place was also really cool for another reason. As I mentioned a few posts ago, in Europe, they'll seat you randomly with other people. Well, at the monastery, we got seated with a British guy in his 70s and we talked to him for literally like an hour and a half about random things - he was basically traveling the world (it seemed like he'd been everywhere) and told us about how he used to work at a brewery, places he'd been, showed us pictures, etc. He was really soft spoken and had a really strong accent (he was from Newcastle). It was really weird having a conversation like that and saying bye, knowing that you'll most likely never see the person again (he said bye in the following way: "Have a nice life," which I think is what got me/us thinking about that). It was nice traveling in a smaller group because I feel like this would never have happened had it been than the two of us at the restaurant.

Anyways, it was also really fun because one of our friends knew some cool people studying abroad there, so we went and hung out with them both nights we were there.

I also came up with an idea that may or may not work well. I'm going to try and get a nice map from each city I've been to and make something with them when I get my own place - like on a wall or something.

On the way home, we stopped in Berlin for a couple hours and I took a few pictures of the city at night, but that was about it.

Astronomical clock

Views from city

Franz Kafka, who I apparently really need to learn about.

Learned about this guy last semester!

Another discovery:

Every famous European city has a river and like 4 famous churches.

And an aside:

I successfully got train tickets to Praha by myself in (mostly) French. I felt very accomplished. And that has renewed my interest in learning the language (a little bit).