Prague Day Two

Our second day in Prague was much, much nicer than our first. We got a pretty late start, after deciding to let James and everyone sleep in until 9 if they wanted. Not all of us did, especially since the rooms were super bright in the morning, but we definitely had to wake James up. We had bought milk and cereal from a local market the night before, so we also had breakfast in our room before heading out.

We bought a day pass for the public transportation. It is a 24-hour pass and it worked out very well because we were able to use it the next morning when we needed to get to the train station for our train to Buapdest. Chris decided that instead of taking the trams into the main part of town, we'd take the metro. This meant that instead of catching one of the buses literally down the street, we walked up this bizarre hill full of mud and slugs before getting to the metro station. It was exhausting, but allowed us to continue our pattern of seeing all of Prague except for the parts that people rave about.

Fortunately, that didn't last long. The metro pretty much dropped us off in the Old Town area and we were finally greeted with the scenic views of Prague that you see on the postcards. We started our tour of Prague in the Old Town Square, where we were greeted with the aroma of all of the different foods cooking in the square. We were like the group of kids from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Even though it had been pretty much an hour since we had gotten our foods, our tails wagged with delight and we ended up having a mini feast in the middle of the square. It was great. We sampled everything from Czech goulash, to this delicious Slovenian gnocchi dish, to Slovankian honey wine (so so good). We were in our heaven.

In fact, we were so engrossed in our food that we missed clock show that happens on the hour. The area around the Astronomical Clock in the town square does this little routine every hour. It's a really short show, one of those blink and you miss it deals. By the time I was able to pry Mia away from her goulash, we had missed it :(

After we finished eating, we made our way to the Charles Bridge. On the way, we stopped through several of the touristy shops, and I had to drag Mia away from a few of the marionette stores that were selling Messi marionettes (along with the rest of Barca). Personally, I think it'd be fun to do my own reenactment of Nsync's Bye Bye Bye video with a set of Barca marionettes. Too bad they would be such a pain to bring back.

It took us a while, but we finally made it to the Charles Bridge. The Charles Bridge is this huge pedestrian bridge that crosses over the Vlatava River. While crossing the bridge, you get a fantastic view of the Prague Castle and the other areas surrounding it. There are giant bronze statues that line the bridge, including one of St. John of Nepomuk, a priest who the Queen at the time confided all of her secrets in. When he refused to tell the king her secrets, the king had him tortured and thrown into the river. They also have a small bronze marking showing where he was thrown into the river and you're supposed to touch it to get your once chance to make a wish. Shouldn't take you too long to figure out I wished for.

All in all, the bridge was pretty impressive (albeit incredibly packed), not just because of the epic views you got of the city and the river, but also because it was built in like the 1300s.

Once on the other side we bought some water and made our way up to the Prague Castle. It would have been a painful walk up, so we took a tram up. Once there, we watched the changing of the guard and watched Mia and Jimmy try to take jumpining pictures next to the guards.

We then made our way through the St. Vitus Cathedral, which was gorgeous both inside and out. We wandered aroudn the castle grounds for a little longer. There are some great views of the city from up there. We also tried Czech sweet bread (really good) before making our way back down to the Little Town area (the area under the castle)

We walked around the Little Town streets for a while to get to our next destination: the Lennon wall. When John Lennon died, locals in the city spontaneously started writing tributes to Lennon all over the wall. Each night, the police would try to remove the graffitti only to find that it would immediatley be redone. According to my Rick Steves book, it eventually became a bit of a symbol of freedom during the communist days and is still covered in Beatles-related graffitti today. It was fun trying to play spot the Beatles song with the lyrics scribbled all over the wall.

From there, we made our way back over the Charles Bridge and back to the Old Square. We were initially going to have dinner in the same style that we had our lunch and dine off of street food, but decided that our tired feet would better appreciate a sit down restaurant. It was some touristy hotel restaurant. There was good goulash so I was happy.

After dinner and dessert on some gelato, we made our way back to the hotel and got back around 6:30. That gave Chris and Jimmy a chance to clean up their stuff and have some down time before the taxi picked them up to take them to their airport hotel. Because they were leaving from Prague so early the next day, Umma thought it would be better for them to spend the night at a hotel by the airport, rather than our rather inconveniently located hotel. It worked out well for them and I think they were happy to be in a shower that was not so awkward.

Once they left, Umma Mia and I went on another laundry adventure. We went to an address given to us by the woman who worked at the reception. In her defense, when I looked up the place online, the address she gave us matched the one online. There are no conveniently located laundromats near where we were, so we took a tram up to the right area. We found what we were pretty sure was the street and got to the correct address. All we found was an old door covered in graffitti and no sign of any laundromat. We confirmed with several people walking by that we were indeed on the right street. There was a comic book store, which would have provided some solace to our failed laundry trip, but it was closed.

We got home and cleaned up our stuff, got some blogging in, and went to bed early in preparation for our early bus ride to Budapest.

Russia #1 (Cruise Day 5)

This day was our first day in St. Petersburg. We'd all been looking forward to this leg of the trip because, well, how cool is it to be in Russia. At the port, we were greeted by some pretty drab Soviet-style apartment buildings. As we were eating breakfast, Chabba complained that maybe Russia would not be as glamorous as everyone said it would be.

Our first impressions with the Russian customs people weren't much better. Visas into Russia are fairly hard to come by. Unlike many of hte other ports of call, we actually couldn't just jump out into Russia and needed vias to get in. These were easier to procure if we were being hosted by a tour group, which is what we ended up doing. We didn't do it through the ship, but through Red October, which is a local tour company. This worked well for us and I don't think we would have gotten as much out of our two day stay in Russia without an awesome tour guide.

In any case, as I was saying, we did not have a good first impression with the Russian customs officials. From the documents we got from the tour group, we thought for some reason that we needed to all go through customs together with the one letter we got from the company. It made sense to do it that way anyway because every other family in front of us had gone through as a group.

We waited in two lines to see who could get through the line faster. A group of old ladies kept on trying to cut in front of us in line. When one group finally did get through to the front and we all tried to go through customs together, several people all pitched massive fits. It didn't help that Oppa escalated the battle by arguing with them. One lady especially was going insane because she would have to wait several minutes more to get through. Needless to say, we couldn't go by as a group. Mia and I managed to slip through customs earlier than everyone else and watched as Oppa continued to argue with the lady and Chris looked horrified.

We were also several minutes late in meetring our guide, who had been waiting for us for quite some time as we sat through this ordeal. It seemed like it was okay anyway because we made it to our first major stop on time, but we were still like twenty or thirty minutes late.

Anyway, before doing any of our major stops, Helen, our tour guide, took us around to some major photo ops. Both days of our tour, she was very good at having us stop at some very picturesque locations to get pictures early in the day before the stops became unbearably crowded. This time, our stops at some spots along the river that gave us great views of St. Petersburg. The drab apartment buildings we had seen at the port were less frequent, and along the river and throughout the city were more European-style buildings in bright colors. They paint the buildings in bright colors to contrast with the gray skies. It's very pretty. The first stop along the river also involved some statues from Egypt that we had to make wishes next to. Three guesses what mine was.

After a few more similar stops, including one in front of the statue of Peter the Great, and a restroom stop, we were on our way to the Hermitage Museum for early admission. The Hermitage (or at least parts of it) was at some point the Winter Palace and is now an enormous art museum that was started back in the days of Catherine the Great. There is a LOT of artwork in there, including artwork from some major artists (da Vinci, Boticelli, Ruben, Titian, etc.) and  some temporary exhibits with Van Gogh and Renoir paintings. (A lot of those temporary exhibit paintings were looted artwork from WWII era). In general, the museum was quite impressive. There were also some exhibits from the palace, including some incredibly ornate rooms decorated with gold. Our tour guide was entertaining. She was a very blunt and tough woman, and would kick some people out or tell them they were looking at a painting for too long if they were in our way.

Early admission into the museum was also amazing. We managed to dodge many of the crowds and were looking at some paintings by some very great artists in some relatively empty rooms. It was fantastic.

Although it didn't feel like we had spent much time in the museum, it was past twelve when we got out of the Hermitage and was therefore lunch time. Our guide took us to this place in the hotel where they served some authentic Russian food. It was pretty good, even if they messed up some of our orders. We all ended up getting the soup. It was not borst (that was for the second day), but it was oniony and delicious. Most of us also got the goulash. It wasn't as soupy as the stuff I've had in Budapest, but I still liked it.

We drove around a little more throughout the city, but the next major destination was Peterhof, which was the summer palace. The trip was a 45 minute drive out into the suberbs, and most of us passed out during the trip. Peterhof was also quite gorgeous. We spent the first portion of the visit wandering aroud the garden, which is full of all sorts of very ornate fountains. The most amazing was the one with Samson right outside of the palace. It was truly impressive. They also had "trick" fountains, that would spray people with water as they passed by. Another cool thing about the fountains of Peterhof is that none of them employed pumps. They all functioned using gravity. Go science.

We then went through the palace itself, where you could see the divergence in the tastes between Catherine the Great and her mother in law Elizabeth "the Spender." Because they did not want us to damage the wooden floors, we were also required to wear "museum slippers" inside. They were basically blue covers that we put over our shoes. They were kind of awkward to wear and made everything a lot more slippery.

All in all, Peterhof, just like the rest of St. Petersburg that we had seen so far was incredibly impressive. Far from the sketchy and dark Russia that I had expected to see, the city was actually quite beautiful. There is an elegant atmosphere there that you cannot get even in cities like Paris. St. Petersburg definitely exceeded my expectations by far.

We drove back to the main part of hte city andd did a long souvenier shopping stop. The store we stopped at gave free vodka samples. A lot of them. Oh Russia.

We got back on the ship around 6 and it was relaxing to not have to deal with Oppa stressing that the boat was going to leave us. We ate dinner and then went to an evening trivia game called Who Am I. There were not many people participating in this game, and Team Justice League (consisting of me, Umma, Chabba, and sleeping Chris) won...finally. We beat Team Trivia Answer Sheet (Mia, James, Jimmy) and some woman.  A win is a win nevertheless.

After that, we didn't really do much else because we were pretty exhausted from all of the walking and touring from the day. We also wanted to get to bed early for the super early start the next day. The only other notable event from teh evening is when Mia flooded our room while trying to wash her clothes in the bathroom. That was fun.