Praha!

After another long train ride after a day of classes we ended up in Prague, or Praha! I was a bit apprehensive to go to Prague since it was the most east I had been in Europe thus far and as we all know, Eastern Europe can be extremely sketchy. From pick pockets to the aggressive personalities of people in the Czech Republic I was a little intimidated by Prague and our first experience with cab drivers did not help that image. After we arrived to the train station in Prague we went outside to get directions to our hostel. We knew from the website that it was extremely close to the station and could walk there in about 10 minutes. Naturally, we all looked like a huge group of tourists so the cab drivers thought it was their time to pounce. Little did they know that we knew they would be stingy and would not accept their extremely high-priced offers. They tried to tell us it cost 800 korunas, about 30 euros, to go 1 km! insaneeeeeeee. of course we wouldn't have it and tried to figure out where our hostel was so we could walk and eventually the cab drivers said 400 korunas, so about 4 euros each. We stayed at the Czech Inn, haha funny play on words, and it was one of the nicest hostels we had stayed in- probably the nicest. Everything was so clean and the towels were actually warm and not a paper-towel like fabric, imagine that. Its funny that real towels seemed like a small luxury to us in the "hostel world" because we had stayed in such dumps over the past weekends. They also served a buffet-style, all you can eat, breakfast for only 4 euros, talk about winning!!!! :)

On our first day in Prague we set out to do one of the famous "New Europe" walking tours that we had loved across many cities in Europe. Much to our disappointment we ended up with a old tour guide who had very conveniently lost his voice, I'm still not sure why he didn't take the day off. Although our tour guide had no voice and we couldn't hear anything he was saying we tried to stick with the tour, hoping that  we could reap some benefits from it. After what seemed like hours of listening to nothing, we made an executive decision to ditch the tour and explore Praha ourselves. Naturally, with most of the group being girls, we found a market on the way to the Palace... but who could really resist when the markets all had something unique to offer. After shopping around for a while, we trekked over to the Palace, which was absolutely beautiful and had amazing stain-glass windows! We at first didn't realize that the whole complex we were in was the "Prague Palace", we had assumed we would find something like the Palace of Versailles, and were very confused till I embarrassingly asked a few people where the palace was-- such tourists.

After exploring the Palace, we also saw the embassy, which had beautiful gardens and visited the Lennon Wall, which was one of my favorite things we saw in Prague. There was so much beauty in the graffiti on the wall and hundreds of amazing, heart-felt quotes. The wall was once a normal wall but since the 1980s people who were inspired by Lennon changed it into the work of art it is today. An amazing thing about the wall is it is ever changing with new graffiti put on it from numerous people, one of which was me :)

That night we went to a 5 story club, which was one of the most fun clubs I have ever been to. My favorite floor was the hip hop floor, of course, which was called "black music" floor. haha. We danced for hours and had so much fun!!! We eventually made it back to the hostel and were so exhausted we all fell right asleep!

The next day we explored more of the city ourselves and enjoyed the yummy local food, such as a delicious pastry and potatoes and pesto pasta. After chowing down on some grub, we went up to the top of the clock tower and saw some magnificent views of the entire city. It really showed how beautiful the city was, which really surprised me since I had thought it would be so sketchy. I left Prague loving it a lot more than I thought I would and with nothing stolen, so all-in-all I would consider that a successful weekend in Praha!