Terrible at updating, I know. Sue me.

Since you last saw me:

End of the 10th: Warsaw, Poland.

We went out to dinner at a nice sushi place after going to the Chopin Museum – the museum was nice, great sound booths, and the sushi was good too, if rather expensive. We didn’t do much else due to the rallies going on outside of our hotel. Maria ended up getting video of that, so, go over to her blog to see that.

11th:

Another not incredibly exciting day, we woke up early to get to the airport in Warsaw where we flew to Athens. We ate a nice little breakfast and then proceeded to get on a terrifying flight – the weather was too warm in Athens, so updrafts and stuff made it not a very nice flight. After exiting the airport with all of our luggage, we got a cab to our hotel (which is super nice), and walked down to lunch in the Plaka. Dad ended up getting sick, so we bustled back to the hotel for the afternoon, and in the evening we ate at a nice little restaurant down the road from our hotel. Then we tried to stay awake and died of sleep deprivation.

 

Today:

We woke up kind of late this morning, due to awesomely light blocking curtains. We headed out early this morning to the Acropolis, and wandered around there. We ate lunch down the hill in the neighborhod I stayed in last year, then walked through the Plaka back to our hotel. We hung out in the spa for awhile – hot tub for the legs, sauna for the soul. Then we found out the restaurant we wanted to go to was closed on Tuesdays, so we wandered down the main road and found a weird little cafe that was playing club music and showing cooking channels on tv. Now, you are all caught up.

 

I’m feeling rather uninspired today and altogether more exhausted feeling than I should be while staying in this nice hotel, but alas. I shall update eagain soon. Pictures are up on Facebook.

Bad Luck weekend: Prague fires and Polish Presidents

April 9^th

So, I’m sitting in the hotel room in Prague, watching some Sky News, trying to spend as much time as possible in the hotel before we become homeless and have to wait for the night train.

Today we’re trying to figure out the next leg of our trip, without having to spend a million euros, and having an actual place to sleep.

We’re going to go mail our box full of things back to the UK today, since we did over pack quite a bit. Hopefully it doesn’t cost toooo much, and hopefully it actually gets there.

Nothing else to report, really. Maybe I’ll type again on the train. :D

April 10^th

It’s the anniversary of Lech Kaczynsky’s (and others) death here in Poland today. We didn’t realise this fact until we were sitting in a coffeehouse watching everyone walk down the street with Polish flags. I can’t believe it’s been a year since those 80+ people died and completely changed the government here.

Yesterday, in Prague, we were wandering around wasting time until our train, really, and we came upon a fire in a building, which was one of those terrible things you have to watch. It’s been a rather bad luck set of days.

 

The train to Poland was fine – the toilets were crap, but other than the beds being waaaaay too hard, it was a good trip. We stopped in Katowice for like an hour at 1am, which was unsettling and bothersome, but the trip was good.

The palace our hotel is near.

The square by our hotel in Warsaw

Part of the old town of Warsaw

John Paul

Our street.

Our hotel.

There’s nothing really to report beyond that. We’re trying to figure out the tail end of our trip, and tomorrow morning we leave for Athens. I’m super excited for Athens. Seriously. I missed the city. It’ll be nice to be in the warm weather too.

I’ll update later tonight with Poland things!

<3

Bad Luck weekend: Prague fires and Polish Presidents

April 9^th

So, I’m sitting in the hotel room in Prague, watching some Sky News, trying to spend as much time as possible in the hotel before we become homeless and have to wait for the night train.

Today we’re trying to figure out the next leg of our trip, without having to spend a million euros, and having an actual place to sleep.

We’re going to go mail our box full of things back to the UK today, since we did over pack quite a bit. Hopefully it doesn’t cost toooo much, and hopefully it actually gets there.

Nothing else to report, really. Maybe I’ll type again on the train. :D

April 10^th

It’s the anniversary of Lech Kaczynsky’s (and others) death here in Poland today. We didn’t realise this fact until we were sitting in a coffeehouse watching everyone walk down the street with Polish flags. I can’t believe it’s been a year since those 80+ people died and completely changed the government here.

Yesterday, in Prague, we were wandering around wasting time until our train, really, and we came upon a fire in a building, which was one of those terrible things you have to watch. It’s been a rather bad luck set of days.

The train to Poland was fine – the toilets were crap, but other than the beds being waaaaay too hard, it was a good trip. We stopped in Katowice for like an hour at 1am, which was unsettling and bothersome, but the trip was good.

The palace our hotel is near.

The square by our hotel in Warsaw

Part of the old town of Warsaw

John Paul

Our street.

Our hotel.

There’s nothing really to report beyond that. We’re trying to figure out the tail end of our trip, and tomorrow morning we leave for Athens. I’m super excited for Athens. Seriously. I missed the city. It’ll be nice to be in the warm weather too.

I’ll update later tonight with Poland things!

<3

I am dying of fat poisoning, Or, The last day in Prague

We're sitting downstairs in the lobby of our hotel and surfing the webs on the hotel computers, so I decided I should write my post for today. It's not incredibly exciting, though, and my computer spazzed and deleted two days worth of pictures! How will I ever remember now!?

After everyone was fed on the lush breakfast served at the hotel this morning. So, despite my best efforts, I will have another picture free day. Maybe I'll google some pictures for you, dear readers.

This morning we hopped on the tram and made our way to Prasky Hrad (Prague Castle), which was totally glorious. The weather was much colder today, but still sunny. We bought a short visit ticket to go see the St. Vitus Cathedral, St. George's Basilica, Rosenberg Palace, and the Old Royal Palace. It was pretty impressive, but pictures weren't allowed inside, so there weren't many pictures to begin with. :)
After the castle, we wandered home and lazed for an hour or two, and then went out to dinner at a place called Lary Fary, where I got mushroom risotto, mom had a Czech dish of beef medallions on a bed of bread (wtf?), Dad had a huge skewer, and Maria had a tuna salad. It was a yummy meal, and now we're just vegging out, man.

Tomorrow we're off to Poland on a night train, so I probably won't be updating unless there is WiFi on the train (please, dear God, that would be amazing!), but I doubt it. We reach Poland at 7am Sunday morning, and will check into our hotel and probably collapse and die before going out sightseeing. :)

Anyways, good night all!

Good morning, world.

Hello hello, faithful blog readers. Sorry for the utter lack of posting yesterday, and the half-assed attempt the day before. I’m still not going to have a very spectacular post today – mostly because I didn’t bring my camera down and the WiFi is in the lobby here at this awesome hotel.

Yesterday, Maria and I went to the Emmaus (Emauzy) Monastery in the morning. It was beautiful and so peaceful. We finally left there after an hour and meandered over to the National Museum area – where Maria and I parted ways: her to the museum, and I to the airport!

I dropped down into the metro station and bought a 20 minute ticket and rode to the main train station. There, I had to ask just about everyone where to buy a ticket for the airport express bus, and, once I bought that, where to board the bus! After half an hour of trying to figure things out, I finally was directed to the bus (in  Czech) by a nice train lady, and waited about 10 minutes for the next bus to show up. The bus ride was sweltering because the weather was so intense yesterday, but it was nice. The city towards the airport is exceedingly nice and has some very green grass and large houses. I finally reached the airport and found that my parents had been waiting for me to get there! They didn’t even get a stamp on their passport.

We got into a taxi and sat in traffic for awhile before getting to the hotel. Once we got to the hotel we vegged out – mom and dad took showers, mom then took a nap and dad and I went downstairs for a beer. Then we met Maria at the old hostel and brought our bags to the new hotel, and took showers then popped out for dinner. We had dinner at a restaurant I can’t remember the name of, but mom and Maria had the Czech specialty of roast pig’s knee. It was pretty awesome. Dad had the knee of lamb, and I had a yummy flank steak (they like their leg meat here!). We then rolled ourselves back over the Charles bridge to the hotel – stopping to buy some chocolate on the way. Basically, after that, we hit the beds and slept until now (well, everyone else is still asleep I do believe).

I got sunburnt yesterday! That’s how warm it was. And today look very nice out already, just a bit cloudy (which will be good for my toasty skin). We’re planning on going to Prague Castle today and wandering around and exploring that. We leave tomorrow night for Warsaw, so we’re jamming in a bunch of Czech sightseeing in the next couple of days.

Maria and I have also decided we’re going to mail some of our stuff back to London because we grossly overpacked (I never knew 10 shirts for 30 days would be too much), and it’ll lighten our load through the rest of our trip.

Anyways, I’m going to go see if anyone else is up yet.

Day 6: Prague

This won’t be going up until late, because the internet sucks hardcore tonight. Hopefully it will get better by morning, or else I’m going to have to make a special trip to the lobby to send this off! I also can’t post my pictures on facebook or here, properly, either. UGH.

Anyways, today!

We tried to have an early start this morning – I woke up at 7, waited for the shower till 7.30, then got Maria up at 8. We then went down to breakfast, but I had been kept awake for a long time last night by our noisy hostelmates – two who left today, one is still around, but I can deal with his stupid radio better than talking/yelling/throwing shoes. Maria’s lent me her soundproof headphones.

Anyways, I went for a nap while Maria wrote a non-drunk blog post about yesterday, and we dawdled until noonish. Then we took the tram up to the Charles Bridge and walked around. The bridge was beautiful, and horrifically crowded, but still worth it. We then walked from the bridge to the Jewish quarter, where we saw all of the old synagogues from the outside, and the old Jewish cemetery. It was really pretty, but the synagogues were rather expensive to get in, so instead we shopped in little souvenir shops – Maria got some postcards and we looked for a glass frog thermometer.

After that we decided to eat at the Kafka Cafe, which was cute and quaint. We had a nice, healthy meal there, then we moseyed on over to the Wenceslaus Square and toured the Kafka House. It was pretty cool, but pretty much everything Kafka has been torn down. Oh well.

After more souvenir shops, we settled into a Cuban cafe and had drinks which cost entirely too much. So we decided not to eat dinner out and just came home – Maria walked, I took the tram.

Tomorrow, Mom and Dad are getting in town – so I’m going to the airport to get them and hopefully that won’t be too much of an adventure.

This internet crap is throwing off my blogging skills. Excuse the lame post. <3

Praha on my mind!

So, despite a certain homesickness that struck last night due to exhaustion and leaving the comforting home of Simon, we hunkered down and saw lots of Prague today.

We started the day walking from our hostel, which is pretty much a million miles away from the center of town, but it’s only another night after tonight, so we’re dealing. We’ve also figured out how the trams work…sort of. We walked for about an hour before we reached the center area of town on the left side of the river. We met some swans on the way who gave us the stink eye and the fluff of anger, but they left us alone after we stopped taking their picture. We stopped at a cafe called the Cafe Savoy, which was very lush, and rather overpriced – but still cheap, this is Prague.

We found a map in the Cafe Savoy which was more useful than the others we had, and figured out we were basically at the base of Petrin Hill. Petrin Hill, for those who don’t know, was written about by Kafka in ‘Description of a Struggle’ and by Milan Kundera in ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’. It’s a beautiful hill and in the middle you can already see all of Prague and the Vltava river out in front of you in an awesome landscape.

We reached the top and wandered around the gardens up there and tried to go up the observation tower, but it was rather expensive. So, we bought a couple postcards (mine is an old-fashioned 3D picture viewer card!), and headed down a windy set of stairs into the Mala Strana area. We saw a cute little cafe called the Booze Bar (ha), and no one was in it except the very kind waitress who spoke very good English. She made us homemade mixed berry iced tea and I had a ginger ale, and some streudel (how do you even spell streudel? It’s too late for me to be writing this!), though I did try to get some kolacki, but it was cherry, so I renegged. We spent an hour or so there, listening to the eclectic music and feeling like it was a very home-y environment, then we toddled on down the street again. We found a market to buy dinner food, then we went across the street into a witchcraft store and bought some awesome tea. After that, we found a fruit stand and bought dates, apples, and oranges. Apparently we’re addicted to those fruit! Anyways, we found where the tram home came, but decided to go into the church of the Infant Jesus, which was both hilarious and beautiful. I can’t believe they dress up a wax doll of Baby Jesus every few months (in a secret ceremony at night) that is from the mid-1600s in Spain! Weird. But pretty church nonetheless. We hopped on the tram, not paying the fare, because we didn’t know how, and got home without any issue. We then made a yummy Italian dinner of pasta and tomato sauce (which is still in the fridge cause we made too much), and Maria drank lots of wine. We’ve just been lazing around at night – everyone in this hostel is here to get drunk and stay out till 2am, so it works out well for those of us who like quiet evenings and going to see the sights at a normal hour of the day.

The weirdest thing about this city is the crosswalk signals –they are the normal green and red men, but when it’s red, they make a slow flap flap flap noise, and when it’s green, they make a fast flapflapflap. I get that it’s for the blind, but that’s rather disconcerting to hear the flapping everywhere around you in a busy intersection. Also, the blind must have better hearing than me, because, shit, they all mix together when I’m standing on a corner.

Anyways, I’m off to bed. Sleepy time is calling me!

Pictures are here, for those who want to see them!