More about Prague

It’s amazing how quickly I’ve adapted to life in Prague. That may sound sort of cheesy, but it’s true. Yesterday I started out completely lost. By the time I got back to the hostel twenty minutes ago, I felt fairly confident in my ability to find my way around.

After I updated the blog yesterday, I grabbed a sandwich from one of the train station vendors, had a bottle of water, then went back upstairs to my bed and slept. A lot. But I felt a lot better when I woke up this morning. I got up around 6.30 and took a shower – the first in couple of days – and quietly got ready to move out. I found a brochure for a company that does all kinds of walking tours in English and it turns out that it’s the same company that runs the Old Town Pub Walk I’m scheduled to be on this evening. I joined their “All-in-One” Tour this morning. It was excellent. I think we walked about 20 km in 4 hours, but the guide covered a lot of the history of the different towns that make up Prague. I got some great shots of the gargoyles in the Prague Castle area (which is actually more of a group of history buildings rather than one big castle).

One of the other people on the tour was a girl named Evelyn from NY. She goes to Norte Dame but is studying in Innsbruck this year. It turns out she is also going on the Pub Walk tonight. So I’ll know at least one person there :-D. Now I have to go to Innsbruck (I wanted to anyway), since I now have someone to show me around.

Incidently, there are a couple of interesting things I’ve observed about my current location (in the Hostel Vesta above the Hlavni Nadrazi train station). 1) The issue of noisy trains is not an issue at all – I can’t even hear them. The birds are louder in the morning than the traffic. Of course, we are on the fifth floor (thank God for elevators). 2) The little chime that plays in the station before announcements sounds an awful lot like the first few bars of the Inspector Gadget theme song. I keep finding myself singing it every time there is an announcement (If only I spoke enough Czech to know what the announcement was about).

Anyway, I haven’t eaten a real lunch yet – we had a coffee break on the tour, but the food in the restaurant was a bit pricy – so I’m going to grab something light to tide me over until the “traditional Czech meal” I’m getting with the tour tonight.

Here are some of the pictures - http://www.utdallas.edu/~hef042000/Prague/FrameSet.htm