Prague

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Trip Start Apr 13, 2006 Previous
Entry Trip End Jun 13, 2006

  Prague, Czech Republic
Sunday, May 21, 2006

We left Berlin last Sunday, and took the train to Prague, where we spent three nights. There was a crazy old retired professor (he was actually crazy, which we discovered as the days went on) who offered "off-the-beaten-track" walking tours of the city, so we followed him around on the first day. Although he had a lot of interesting tidbits about lesser-known places, as the tour went on we found his attitude, and his "facts" to be more and more suspicious, until Chris was outright arguing with him about the dates of pretty well-known historical events. By the end of the tour, we were joking that the "professor" (as everyone called him) would claim that the Czechs had invented water. It was a bit ridiculous. And he wasn't even Czech..he was from a Scottish family, raised German. It was definitely an experience to be remembered.

Prague was a nice city architecturally of course, but we found it to be somewhat lacking in character, which may surprise those of you who have been there. The place was just so full of tourists (though we were there mostly on weekdays), and crystal and other souvenir shops, that it was difficult to really enjoy. The Charles Bridge was nice, of course, the castle was quite impressive, and we took a nice little boat tour that didn't cost too much, but none of it really seemed to beat anything we'd seen in Spain. There was also a sort of pretension that seemed to permeate the downtown which was difficult to swallow. Even our off-the-beaten-track-crazy-professor-tour didn't really spice it up for me. I guess it's pretty hard to top the Islamic architecture and relaxed atmosphere of Andalusia though :) One interesting experience we DID have was watching the World Championship of hockey (Czech Republic vs. Sweden) on a big screen with thousands of people in the main square, all cheering and waving flags. Of course, the cheering pretty much stopped after the first period (for those who don't follow hockey, Sweden won 4-0), but it was still pretty amazing.

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