Prague

26th - 29th July 2010

After checking out of our very cute hostel we headed for Cesky Krumlov's main bus station. We'd booked tickets online, and had to wait about an hour for the bus to turn up. We were travelling on the "Student Agency" bus, which was pretty full. We were given free hot drinks, and had a couple a movie to watch on the trip; Mr Bean's Holiday. Even though it was dubbed into Czech, it was pretty easy to follow along, due to the lack of Mr. Bean's dialogue. The 3 hour trip passed pretty quickly.

We were dropped off at the Prague bus depot, which was so far out of town it wasn't even on my map in the Lonely Planet. We found the river and walked along it, until we got on the map, then map our way to our hotel. The whole walking experience took us just over an hour. I did suggest to Daniel that we just jump on a tram into the city centre, but he was sure that walking wouldn't take us too long. I was knackered after walking all that way with our very heavy packs on, and made Dan rest for a little bit when we got to the apartment.

The apartment was awesome; it overlooked Wenceslas Square in the 'new town', right in the heart of Prague. We did some washing and using dental floss, hung it up all over the place.

Once we'd gotten organised with grabbed a hearty McDonalds lunch, before seeking out the tourist info centre for maps and other necessities. We then proceeded up to the train station to purchase tickets for our overnight train onto Poland for a few days time. I had search high and low on the internet and had not been able to find any scrap of information regarding the price of the tickets, so we were a bit concerned that they were going to be really expensive. To our surprise they were only 45 Euros each for a ticket and a sleeper bed. Not too bad for an 8 hour trip.

We stopped in at the supermarket and managed to find all the ingredients to make some spaghetti carbonara for dinner (Try deciphering regular cream from sour cream in a foreign language - not easy).

What was left of the afternoon and evening was spent catching up with domestics at the hotel.

The next morning we were up bright and early, breakfasted and organised. We were down in the main square by 10:30 in time to catch the New Europe free walking tour. The tour was much like all the other ones we've done, taking in all the most important sights of the city. We saw the astronomical clock, churches, buildings of importance, the Jewish district and Synagogue's (Including the one with Gollum in it), and it finished at the bottom of the castle.The usual historical and quirky tales were told, and this time we were prepared to have some money ready to tip our guide.

After the tour was over, we went off for a stroll across the tourist infested, Charles Bridge. It was nice, but difficult to enjoy simply because of the crowds of people in your face.

We continued to just wander the gorgeous streets of Prague. We found a Russian Doll shop that sold dolls of all the different sports teams of the world. It even had all 16 AFL teams, with 5 different players stacked inside each other. I liked the St Kilda one, because nearly all of them had the traditional black hair, but for Nick Reiwoldt they had specked on bits of yellow on the top of his head. Dan was tempted to buy the Demon's one, but due to baggage restrictions, and a rather expensive price tag, he passed it up.

By the time we'd finished wandering it was just about dinnertime. We found a supermarket and stocked up on some frozen pizzas and headed back to the apartment for some cooking. Dan got a pizza that had instructions on the back written in 12 different languages, but none of them were English. Lucky it doesn't take many brains to put a pizza in the oven. It was also when we got home that Dan realised that he had been wearing his jocks inside out all day.

We were still a little peckish after our frozen pizza so we headed downstairs to the food van that was camped outside our door. Dan had a sausage while I tried a schnitzel. Delicious and it filled up the hunger holes! We spent the rest of the evening just watching some TV.

The next morning we were organised fairly early and out the door around 9am. We headed for the train station and jumped on the 10am train to Kutna Hora. The hour long train journey passed quite quickly and we were soon back on our feet.

After walking for about 10 minutes we found ourselves in the outskirts of Kutna Hora in a small town called Sedlec. There's not much in the town except for a nice looking cathedral, and just up the road the churches cemetery and ossuary, which was the reason for our visit. The Sedlec Ossuary is often known as the 'Bone Church' for the simple reason that there's the bones of about 40,000 people inside.

We paid the very small entrance fee and made our way into the tiny chapel. The bones were used as decorations in the church, but the main reason they're all inside is because during the Hittite wars and the plague the cemetery got so crowded they didn't know what to do with all the remains. The highlights are the magnificent chandelier and a big coat of arms. It didn't take long to see everything inside, so we made our way out.

We walked into the town of Kutna Hora, which took about 30 minutes. It was beginning to rain when we got there so we sought out a place to have lunch. We found a nice sheltered beer garden and ordered a beer. (First one since Munich). I feel like coke drinkers are punished in Prague where the cost of a beer is almost half that of a soft drink, so I felt obliged to have a beer. I enjoyed a dish with lots of chicken, pork and beef all cooked up in a stew type dish, while Dan tried a steak of three different meats, pork, beef and chicken, with a sauce on top. Both served with a stack of potatoes.

After lunch we just explored the rest of Kutna Hora, the churches, the cute little streets before jumping on a bus (It cost 10 Koruna each - about 30p!) back to the train station, and jumping on a train back to Prague.

We got back into Prague around 5pm and checked out the front of the impressive looking museum. We had a brief rest in the apartment before heading out for dinner. We went to a restaurant, which our tour guide recommended; it was a bit of a walk from our place but was definitely worth it. We believe that it was a bit of a chain restaurant, but again I was forced to have a beer (Still about half the price of coke), but it went down pretty easily. I had a yummy goulash with potato cakes and bread dumplings; Dan had "Moravian Sparrow" which was a fancy name for a pork dish.

After dinner we strolled around a bit before calling it a night and packing up our bags before going to sleep.

We had to be out of the apartment by 11, so at 2 minutes to we strolled downstairs and stored our luggage in their storage room. We headed straight up to the impressive Prague Castle, perched high up above the city. We wandered through the beautiful complex of mismatched buildings; all created during different Kings reigns, and from many different architectural styles. We didn't go inside any of the buildings; we just appreciated them from the outside. We made our way back down through the beautiful gardens and found ourselves down at the river again. Just as we'd made our way down it started to rain. With a whole afternoon and evening to fill in, whilst raining we thought the best way was at the cinemas.

Our tickets to Pocatek, commonly known in English as Inception, were pretty cheap, and for 5pm on a weekday the cinema was quite crowded. There were mixed reviews of the film, but I loved it. Highly recommended. By the time the movie finished it was no longer raining thankfully. We were running a little short on time so we grabbed some KFC for dinner, and some drinks and snacks from the supermarket for our overnight train journey. We picked up our bags and were at the train station at about 9pm, with about half an hour before our train was due to depart.

We paid a little bit extra to have a 4 bed compartment instead of 6, and we were quite thankful when we saw the size of them. We waited for the other 2 people to join us, but no one did. When the conductor came down he told us that there would be another 2 people getting on at a later stop at around 11pm. We read books and played the DS for the first hour, but around 10.30 we decided to fold down our beds and try to get some sleep. It was a nice thought but it didn't happen. I was a littlebit concerned about trying to go to sleep with the door unlocked (For the other people getting on) for safety reasons, plus the beds were like planks of woods. 11pm came and went and no one joined us, so I eventually locked the door and again tried for more sleep. Still didn't happen. Around 1am I was just closing my eyes and there was a loud rap on our door and the conductor was showing two Russian girls into our compartment. They were shown the two middle beds, above each of our heads, but they began to argue with the conductor. The wanted some peace and quiet out of their 6 bed compartment, but they couldn't sleep on beds up high. They would have to have our beds on the bottom. We refused to give them up, and they left walking down the corridor still arguing with the conductor. I think it was around 4am I finally got some sleep.

The train was due to arrive into Krakow around 6.30am, but for some reason it was delayed by an hour and a half, so we finally got off the train at around 8am, some 11 hours after we got on it!