Travels Home ⇒ Intro &rarr Munich&rarr PRAGUE &rarr Krakow &rarr Bratislava &rarrVienna &rarr Budapest &rarrLjubljana &rarr Salzburg &rarrMunich

Prague

Cliffs Notes Version:
Day 1, we walked around Old Town and met up with Sarah and Rachael for a night.
Day 2, we did some sight seeing around Prauge with Colby and Josey.
Day 3, we head out into the countryside with them to visit two very different spa towns.
Day 4, we went back to Prague for an afternoon before catching the overnight train to Krakow.

Day 1

We got up early the next morning and got on a train to Prague. Prague was big on my list to visit as three out of four of my grandparents were Czech (the 4th was from Atlantis). Colleen thought I should wear my "Czech yourself before you wreck yourself" shirt, but in the interest of not getting my ass kicked by some distant cousin I decided against it.

Anyway, we walked from the train station to the hotel. It was about a mile with 50 pound backpacks but we also saved ourselves about a fifty dollar tab from the sketchy cab drivers at the train station. Sarah and Rachael did the cab option and had to sell their eggs to a fertility clinic to pay for it ... in the cab company's defense they are now old and nobody wants their eggs so they didn't get much for them.

TRAVEL TIP: Never get a cab from the train station. Call a cab company and have them pick you up or rent a car with insurance and then hand the keys to a stranger after driving to your hotel. Both options are cheaper then getting a cab from a train station in Europe.

We got to our hotel and went to our room, which was enormous. We had a sitting room and in the bathroom ... a bidet. If you don't know what a bidet is Wikipedia has a description and a surprisingly thorough write-up on how to use one. After spending 20 minutes playing with the bidet, we knew we had some time to kill so we walked down Wencelas Square which is a long street running down from the museum to Old Town. We finished our walk down by the Astronomical Clock.

The Astronomical Clock apparently tells the position of the sun in the zodiac, the sidereal time, the time between sunrise and sunset, and the time until sunset. I think it can be used to find out what time it is too, but I haven't been able to figure it out. There's some links [1],[2] to the inner workings of the clock, if someone figures out how the thing works let me know.

At this point, we needed to get back to the hotel. Sarah and Rachael were in town for the night as they had come to Prague after Munich. Colby and Josey were also in town for the next couple days and they were going to become our travel buddies. As a reminder, Colby is a woman and Josey is a dude. Things might not make as much sense in describing the coming days if that point is not clear. We got back to the hotel and with an entire city's restaurants at our disposal, we made the bold choice to go to the one directly across the street from the hotel. In our defense, it wasn't McDonalds.

The restaurant served traditional (more on that later) Czech food and I wouldn't shut-up about my Grandma's dumplings so Sarah tried ordering them and got shot down. The waiter wasn't going to let anyone order dumplings without some kind of juicy dish to go with it so you could use the dumplings to soak up the juice and Sarah had ordered a single carrot as her entree so it didn't make sense. Josey and I got dumplings with our dish, however, and Josey hated the dumplings. They were a bit dry, I will admit, but Josey didn't need to swear at me in Italian at my perceived botched recommendation.

After dinner it was decided that we needed to take some Absinthe shots. We were looking for a good time and what better to do on a weekday night in a foreign country than to take shots of the alcohol that Van Gogh was drinking when he decided to cut off his ear. We actually walked a good block away from the hotel and found a bar. Since we were in Prague it was guaranteed that every place would have absinthe so we ordered a round and did the traditional technique to take the shot. The steps are as follows,
1. Put sugar in a spoon
2. Coat sugar in absinthe
3. Sign waiver
4. Light spoon on fire
5. Blow out fire (very important step, ask Josey)
6. Stir caramelized sugar in with absinthe
7. Drink shot
8. Grimace
9. Cut off ear (optional)



Step 4
After the round of shots, we went back to the Rutar suite and had an after party in the foyer until the conversation got nerdy and Sarah and Rachael left. Admittedly, Colby and Colleen comparing their worse protractor scars was not nearly as interesting in real life as you'd think.

Day 2

Wednesday was our only full day in Prague so we wanted to make sure that we saw everything we wanted to see because we were leaving for the countryside the next day. We started out by walking past the "Dancing House" which is this building that kind of looks like Jennifer Grey's nose. Its full name is the actually "Pre Surgery Nose of the Girl from Dirty Dancing House" but for brevity it's just called the "Dancing House."

Our eventual target was to get to Prague Castle, which I think is the biggest castle in the world. It may not be, and right now some Wikipedia editor's head is going to explode because they can't edit this page and correct me ... that is if anyone actually read this blog much less a Wikipedia editor.

The resemblence is eerie.


Anyway, it was quite the hike to the castle and we stopped for lunch along the way. Josey ordered dumplings again and continued to be a hater. I ordered dumplings as well and thought they were quite good. At this point, Colleen pointed out there were 17 points of interest in her Rick Steves' guide to Eastern Europe that were "on the way" to the Castle. After about the fourth point of interest detour, Nick took the guide book from Colleen and punted it. Coincidentally, the next point of interest was a church that contained the patron saint for unhappy marriages where you could light a candle. Colleen, for whatever reason, was really pushing us to visit this church. After Colleen exhausted a book of matches we finally made it to the castle.

Prague Castle is a series of buildings and churches, most of which are free to enter. We walked through the castle including St. Vitus Cathedral. After a couple hours, we were done with the Castle and we started heading back to the hotel by way of Charles Bridge.

Charles Bridge is another one of the famous Prague landmarks and along it there are various merchants and artists selling their swag. The bridge is lined with a bunch of statues including John of Nepomuk, who was tossed off the bridge back in the day and was rewarded with a statue where supposedly if you rub part of it you can make a wish. Well, I suppose you can rub any statue and make a wish but these wishes actually come true. Take that Disney, you can keep your stars, I got a martyred patron saint to wish upon.



Colleen looking out towards Charles bridge

That night Josey claimed that he didn't have the self discipline to stop ordering dumplings even though he hated them. The girls and I had an intervention and we took poor Josey to an Italian restaurant to break him of his self-hating dietary habits.

Day 3 (Chodova Plana & Karlovy Vary)

The next day we set out to go to a couple spa towns that were somewhat close to Prague. Josey drove because every rental car in Europe is stick, and I've been saving myself to learn stick from John Cusack ever since I saw 'Say Anything.'

After a short drive, we ended up in Chodova Plana. This small town was the home of Chodovar Brewery. Besides the brewery, Chodovar had a small spa which was the purpose of the visit, specifically the beer baths that they offered. Colleen and I did the beer baths while Colby and Josey did the more traditional massage.



Since our small camera was "lost" at Oktoberfest, I had to superimpose my head on another person's picture. However, I do think this is the exact tub Colleen and I had. 		The beer bath itself was in some kind of medieval looking cellar. We walked down the stone steps where we were greeted by a woman who started speaking to us in Czech. Seeing the blank stare on our faces, she then started with German. We responded with our usual, 'English'' query and she responded with an emphatic 'No.' That didn't stop her from herding us through the hallway with two dressing rooms where she handed each of us a sheet and shouted 'STRIP' on loop until we grabbed the sheet and went into our separate rooms. I then came out wearing only my sheet where I was shown by scary European lady to the stainless steel tub filled with the proprietary mixture of beer, mineral water, and love. There was a curtain to give a little bit of privacy so I shed my sheet and jumped on in. A few minutes later Colleen joined me and they gave us both a beer to drink while in the bath. This place was hard core. Sitting in a bath tub full of beer apparently wasn't good enough, you had to ingest it simultaneou sly as well.

After 20 minutes of a very relaxing bath a man opened up the curtain and made it clear bath time was over. He picked up my sheet and held it out in front of him and motioned for us to get out. I backed out of the tub and into the sheet and wrapped it around myself. Easy enough. Colleen didn't quite grasp the concept and when her turn came she went front first into the sheet the guy was holding up, confusing the guy as he was trying to offer Colleen some modesty by having her back into the towel. He tried to convey this message to Colleen in broken English. This confused Colleen even more to the point where she did a weird half turn, half turn back move in the nude until she finally figured out his intention. By this time the damage was done, as the poor employee had experienced the strangest and most unique erotic dance Eastern Europe had ever seen courtesy of Colleen.

After Colleen and the employee had finished smoking a cigarette, they took us to a small brick room where they wrapped us up like cocoons in blankets. After about thirty minutes of this, we walked back to the original dressing room where we were met by the original woman who greeted us who then shouted 'NO SHOWER.' I must say, if it weren't for the case that I was married, I might have been strangely attracted to a woman whose only English words in her vocabulary were No, Strip, and Shower. I think that could be the foundation of a very solid relationship. After putting my clothes back on, but definitely not showering, I went to the main counter and left a tip for the man and woman that had helped us. Colleen came out a couple minutes later and the man gave the money I had given him right back to Colleen as a belated tip for the exotic dance Colleen had provided.

We then met up with Colby and Josey after their more traditional massage and went on the tour of the brewery and ate in the on-site restaurant which is located in a natural cave. Both were really cool. From there, we got in the car to go to our next spa town, Karlovy Vary.

Karlovy Vary is famous for all of the natural hot springs in the area that are supposed to have medicinal properties when ingested. We stayed at the Grand Hotel Pupp, which we booked solely on the basis that it was the hotel where some of the shots from the Bond movie 'Casino Royale' were filmed. We got there around sunset and it was raining so we hung out around the hotel a bit. Karlovy Vary hosts a film festival and because of that the hotel had large posters of some of the celebrities that had stayed there. Josey was personally offended by the inclusion of Whoopi Goldberg as one of the celebrities and didn't think she should be held in as high of esteem as other featured celebrities like Woody Harrelson and Soleil Moon Frye. I dare say Josey hated Whoopi even more than dumplings.

After the rain subsided, we walked around the city a bit and grabbed some dinner. The hotel had a very weird 'The Shining' vibe to it but it was cool nonetheless. Because of the Bond ties to the hotel, we tried ordering vodka martinis at the hotel bar but because of the difference in pronunciation of 'v' and 'w' between English and Czech the waitress thought we wanted Johnny Walker and some martinis and so brought us both. Drinking the extra drinks allowed us to dive deep into Josey's hate for Whoopi Goldberg though so it was worth it.


View from our room at the Grand Hotel Pupp

Day 4

We all woke up and walked around the city to experience the biggest draw, which is the natural mineral water with medicinal properties. To drink the water, they have special glasses that look like a flattened mug where you fill up the large opening and drink out of the handle. Many people go to doctors within the town and get a regiment known as 'The Drinking Cure' which incorporates the mineral water in treating all sorts of things. We walked around the town to the various natural springs (with various temps from warm to boiling hot) and drank the water. The water tasted ... well, not the greatest, but after drinking it the medicinal properties kicked in and Colby's sinuses cleared up, Josey grew a full head of hair in one day, Colleen no longer needed braces, and I stopped being allergic to peanuts. Unfortunately, we found out that like the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade the power of the mineral water was restricted to the city of Karlovy Vary and after leaving everything went back to normal. However, we'll never forget all of us strolling down that main street, Snickers bars in hand with our full heads of hair and straight teeth. Thank you Karlovy Vary, thank you.


Colleen at one of the fountains.

Two spouts mean two people magically cured at the same time!!!


After leaving Karlovy Vary we started the drive back to Prague where Colby and Josey had to catch their train to Berlin. Along the way, we stopped at a small town to grab lunch. We ended up at a bar where the owner was an older woman who spoke less English than the woman at the beer spa. I was a little disappointed that I was not commanded to strip during lunch, but I made due. Since there was an obvious language barrier I went to the menu on the wall and started pointing at random dishes at random ... and pizza. Apparently, pizza in Czech is 'pizza.' The dishes came out and they were all pretty random. All of the dishes were nothing like all the 'authentic' Czech food in Prague. This made us wonder, since we were in a small town where no tourists ever stopped, wouldn't this be more authentic than all of the touristy places in Prague. However, the places in Prague served similar food to the traditional food my Grandma makes so it must be fairly legit. I reasoned that bar food is bar food no matter what country you go to and it's authentic there the way mozzarella sticks and jalapeno poppers are authentic U.S. food.

After dropping off the rental car, Josey and Colby left for their train and Colleen and I were on our own again. Back in Prague, the first place we went to was the Jewish Cemetery. Because of limited space and very strict religious rules about the moving of bodies, new dirt was constantly added to the cemetery and people were literally buried on top of one another with the tombstones moved up every time more dirt was added. This lead to a very surreal cemetery to visit.

Jewish Cemetery


Visiting cemeteries always makes Colleen hungry as she is part zombie, so we went straight to the Chocolate Museum after that. The chocolate museum kind of sucked, don't go there. We walked around a little bit and took it easy after that and then went to the train station and got on our train to Krakow. Our overnight train was cool because we had a private sleeper compartment which was quite the splurge for us as usually we just do the six person sleeper couchette. We got as much sleep as we could in a train, even with our own compartment, and arrived in Krakow the next morning.
Travels Home ⇒ Intro &rarr Munich&rarr PRAGUE &rarr Krakow &rarr Bratislava &rarrVienna &rarr Budapest &rarrLjubljana &rarr Salzburg &rarrMunich