Prague, Czech Republic

After quite a wait, we got a new train and were finally off. It had already been a long day of traveling, but we still had a couple hours left. Fortunately, there were a lot of neat sights while driving through Eastern Germany and the Czech Republic. There were all kinds of little villagers built alongside hills and rivers, and the view was enough to at least keep us awake.

We finally arrived at the Prague train station. Unfortunately, it was a couple of hours later than expected, so Chris and Al had already headed to the hostel. We got directions to the hostel, and took the subway to the stop nearby. We managed to get to the hostel no problem, signed in, and put our luggage in our room, where we learned that we missed the others by 20 minutes. So, we got a map and went out exploring.

First, we headed to Wenceslas Square, where we saw the Czech National Museum and the King Wenceslas Monument. We walked around for a while, before stopping for a great dinner and a couple of drinks.

It was still pretty early, so we headed towards the Old Town Square, where we heard that a pub crawl met up near the Astronomical Clock. We waited for others to show up for a while, but only one other guy did. So, instead of paying to go on the crawl with just a few people, we went out for drinks instead. We stopped at a nearby pub for a few hours with the other kid, who was from Dublin, Ireland, and went to a small club afterwards for a short time. Around 1:00 am, we decided to call it quits for the night and head back to the hostel, as we planned to get up early the next day. We met Chris and Al back there, and we made plans to get up early to see the rest of the city.

We woke up very early the next morning, had a quick breakfast at the hostel, and went out to explore. First, we headed back to Wenceslas Square, where we could see much more in the light. From there, we went back through the Old Town Square, where we saw the Old Town Hall Tower, the Old Town Market, where we got fried dough, the Astronomical Clock, the St. Nicholas Church, the Týn Cathedral, the Prague Opera House, and numerous other clock towers and churches.

From the Old Town, we walked along the Vltava River, across the famous Charles Bridge. We passed under the Old Town Bridge Tower, from where we could see the Petřínská Rozhledna up on the nearby hillside. Along the bridge, we stopped for a minute to rub the statue of St. John of Nepomuk, which is considered to be good luck.

Then, we made our way through the other bridge tower, and began our trek up the many steps to the Prague Castle, the largest ancient castle in the world. Luckily, we made it to the castle entrance just in time to see the changing of the guards, which was a pretty neat ceremony. While the location of the castle offered a terrific view and some great sights, we were forced to head back to the hostel to pick up our bags, so that we could catch our train back to Braunschweig.

Once again, we hit a bit of trouble getting home. Our first train showed up 45 minutes late, so we missed each of our trains from there on out. We made it to Hannover no problem, but had to wait another couple of hours for the next train to Braunschweig. It was another long day, but we got to see a lot. Prague turned out to be an amazing city.