Trippin thru Europe

After a sad breakfast at McDonalds, we said goodbye to our beautiful, magical Prague and left for Karlovy Vary a very small, spa/resort town. On our way we watched tons of people getting fines for not having the proper tickets for the metro, we had a similar problem and faced a hefty fine, so be sure to get your proper tickets or you must be very stealth. Anyways so we found our way through the maze that is the Czech Republic transportation system, we really are awesome, and boarded a train to our small resort town. Yes I wanted to indulge and get all sorts of beauty treatments that hopefully we could splurge on. For your information on our way home from Europe I watched a Queen Latifah movie, "Last Holiday", that is about her dying so she makes a trip to her dream destination for a spa week and the whole movie is set in Karlovy Vary, pretty cool, huh? So we arrived however much later by train, and it was a big guess where we were, can you believe that they did not have one single sign that said the name of the town? We did the jump off and hope you are in the right place kind of thing. So we were and we headed off to who knows where. We took a taxi to one of the addresses in our book and found there to be no such place. Close by we found a hostel and after searching up and down the treachous hill we gave up and went for the hostel at the top of the hill. We were starvin marvins so we headed down the other horrendous hill towards the pictureqes little town. I really mean that it looks like it came straight out of a fairy tale, really small and cute. So it turned out that they dont really appreciate ATMS and the only one we found was of course out of service!!! Luckily my partner in crime had some money left so we explored the extremly over priced shops, all thirty of them and then went for a nice supper. From our little walk we had pretty much decided that we were out of our league by 40 years age difference and a million in income. So we walked more and gave up and went to sleep. The next day we went to the big attraction, the natural water springs, one specifically that shoots 30 ft in the air. All around the place are different tempuratures of water that you can try and are supposed to be very healing. So I filled my water bottle up, bad mistake this stuff is putrid but somehow I gulped it down thinking of all the healing that was happening, yeah right. So we left, feeling young again, you know from the water. We decided to go to the top of the mountain. I set out thinking we would take the hike but as we got to the cable car I thought that the ride up looked a lot better. At the top we hiked the million steps to the top of the bell tower, which also serves as a lookout point and just chilled for a very long time.

After our last day in Vienna we boarded a train to Prague, Czech Rebpublic. We were really excited to get here as we have heard nothing but great things about the country. We when we arrived at the station that night we were approached by an elderly lady who offered us a cheap place to stay. I am not really into the people picking us up but she just kept coming back. Since it was late at night we decided to go for it and took her up on her offer, it really was a good price. In the train station I tried to exchange some Slovenian Tolars that I had been carrying around with me for a while as no one would take them. This guy said he could and handed over some Czech money, luckily we had printed off some conversion cheat sheets ahead of time and it took me about a minute to realize this greasy-haired dude was ripping me off. I hurried back and he said "fine dont take it" and threw my money back. This exciting little adventure is probably the worst of anything that happened to us, yes we have had a smooth ride. So we headed on some trains with the lady and came to our station where we walked up some stairs and arrived out in the centre of Prague. This was quite the entrance. We were standing in the famours West.... something square where in 1990 the citizens of Prague demostrated until their leader declared that the communist state was over. It is a huge tree-lined boulevard lined with lots of city life, instantly I loved the place. So we headed to our new home which was quite close by. We new we were headed somewhere good when we saw the signs" Czechs largest Irish pub this way!". Our place was in an old apartment building as most are, where the doors are all 12 feet tall. It had the smell of cats but it was cheap and spacious with breakfast, but most importantly we were on top of a bar and down the street from the Irish one as well as others. We went to the bar under us that night. There was a football game on so we had to have some of the beer that I heard about. I am not a beer drinker but like they say Czech beer is really pure and is quite ok to drink, I definitly thought so that night! Anyways the beer is literally cheaper than water, about 1.20 CAD for a large pint, wonderful.. The next day we went exploring slowly through Prague. It is a wonderful ancient city, when I look back it was my top 3 for the most beautiful. Every single building was like a ancient castle or palace, and has that old ugly character look that I like. We werent feeling so great so we decided to take it easy and do what we like best, souvineer shopping!!! Later we saw the Da Vinci Code, a day before all you North Americans did. Only problem was that all the french and latin was written in Czech subtitles. By walking around we found out that we were staying in the old town as we like to. The only problem is that you are warned not to due to heavy traffic of Stag parties and lots of hustlers, its alright we like the excitement. Like I have said before we have really great luck, this day we happened to be walking through a wonderful square surronded by hundreds of people staring at one of those really weird clocks that turns in every direction. We stayed and watched, as soon as it hit whatever time some old puppets came out danced and then spit, an event which everyone thought was hilarious. We werent the most impressed, but glad we got to see it.

The place we were staying also had a underground mall under it where we found out that a awesome reggae artist was going to be coming tongight. So later that night we went for supper and beer at the place we went to the night before then headed to the show. It was a fantastic live preformance that lasted many hours. A great thing about Prague is that everyone speaks english so we had tons'o fun. The major attraction of Prague is the Prague castle, I think which is the largest in Europe. Let me tell you it is nothing special. It is a quite modern looking building that is just a million years long. Thats all we heard about so we took a tour that began with a van ride. The tour guide had to speak a few languages and by the time she got to English, whatever she had been talking about we had passed minutes ago. The driver was too fast so the tour guide would yell at him and we would miss the attraction. When we got to the castle it was easy to see she really didnt care too much. Anyways the castle sucked but the cathedral inside was amzing. Prague castle no thanks. Next we went to the Communism museum. It was one of the best museums we have been to. It was very real and really hit home. We watched a documentary that was absolutly horrible to see plain clothes policemen beating on their own people during demonstrations and the hardest part to believe is that it was only in 1990 that this ended. That night we had a chill night and just went to our regular pub for supper after much exploring. The next day we signed up for a Jewish Quarter tour. The Jewish quarter is an area of town where most jews lived during many years when the city was seperated. It was a long and really enjoyable tour. Prague is just so beautiful and filled with some many stories. This was my new favorite city. Afterwards we finish our day we some important shopping for real Absinth, the stuff that makes you hallucinate. Only in Czech are you supposed to find the real stuff and even here it is a hunt. The really good stuff is kept behind the counters and sometimes they wont offer it to you. So Josh found one small bottle, all other stores were sold out, and bought a sample size one for 25dollars. The mikey size bottles go for two hundred dollars if you can find them. The next step would be getting the illegal substance across the US border..