Trip to Prague - March 27 to 29

Unlike my trip to Salzburg, where I didn't do much as far as planning, this time around I took a more active role: finding and booking a hostel for our group of 7. Since most of the rest of the group had early class Friday morning (one advantage of not being in the German program), I decided to head down early to figure out the hostel situation in advance. Following a nice nap on the train, I arrived in Prague for my first European trip outside of Austria.

After withdrawing some Czech koruna from the train station ATM (the Czech Republic isn't yet on the Euro) and buying a transit pass, I set out on the subway for the hostel. It struck me how similar the metro system in Prague was to that in Vienna. The only real differences were the language and number of lines. That feeling continued once I left the subway and reached Prague's downtown: other than some minor differences, it all seemed fairly similar to Vienna.

Walking to the hostel, Kafka's Castle, I felt a bit of anxiety. $170 two nights for 7 people at a hostel located in Prague's downtown seemed too good to be true. So I was a bit wary after hearing the hostel owner's instructions to meet him outside the building as there was no reception office. Not helping was matters was that, as I soon found out, the hostel is only two floors above a pub called Skybar. I was bracing for some catch, but luckily it all worked out. Actually, I shouldn't really even call it a hostel: as you can see from the photos on Flickr it had more of an apartment-style layout. I was very impressed.

That settled, after dropping off my stuff I headed back to the train station to wait for the rest of the group. After they had dropped off their stuff we went out for dinner and then met up with Petrz, a friend of Kim's. He has lived in Prague for almost two years teaching English, and offered to give us a tour of Prague the next day. In the meantime, we explored Prague's nightlife. Among other things, you can see to the right a photo of the crazy old man we ran into who alternated between dancing with himself and trying to get us to dance with him.

The next day we were off to meet Petrz for his tour of Prague. Before going out though, we went to the internet cafe Kava Kava Kava, and along the way ran into some sort of marathon. Among other things, we saw Nové město, or New Town - which has among other Wenceslas Square with many shops and restaurants, and then at the top of the National Museum (which we did not have time to go into) – Prague Castle, evidently the biggest ancient castle in the world; and Charles Bridge, which goes over the Vltava river and is lined with shops. After a long day of tourism we stopped for dinner at U Fleku, a traditional-style restaurant with music and special beer. That night we went first to a bar and then the, uh, interesting looking Cross Club (don't have any photos of that, but it looked it a converted warehouse with tons of rooms and several people looking to sell drugs).

The following morning I went out early with Tony, who I knew from middle and high school, to get breakfast items. While he made us breakfast, I checked us out of the hostel. Following that we hiked up to the Hladová zeď, or Hunger Wall – so named because, according to myth, the purpose of the wall was strategic but instead to employ and thus feed the poor – and then went back down into the city to tour the Staré město, or Old Town, which included, among other things, the “famed” Orloj , or Astronomical Clock (which seemed pretty lame when we were there, but I guess we must have missed the performance they put on). Thoroughly worn out by that point, we cooled off at a coffee shop before boarding the train back to Vienna.

In the meantime, here's the set of photos from Prague - http://www.flickr.com/photos/32227991@N02/sets/72157616570108571/