A train back to London and then an evening spent eating chips and chocolate and drinking rum so cheap it came in a plastic bottle, with Bindy and Kiel, and then a crazily early trek out to Stansted, where I met two of the people from the Scotland tour, Stacy and Joy, and two of Stacy's friends, and we all flew to Prague.
We did a walking tour and lost all our fingers and toes to frostbite, when we first got there, but it was worth it though, to hear some Czech stories and be led around the snow-clogged sights. We walked across Charles Bridge to the castle, under a downpour of snow, and the river was coated in a frostbitten glow that made the cold seem not so intense. The castle is beautiful, and as is the way with castles, there was an amazing view from the top. Franz Kafka's house is inside the castle, which was a nice discovery, and I bought 'The Metamorphosis' there and tried to make sense of it.
We went to a Czech restaurant where the food was cheap and good, and a pub that had taps at each table so that you could pull your own pint, which I thought a very good idea. it was one of the girls' birthdays while we were there, and, in an Irish pub we got the band to play Happy Birthday. There is a cathedral there that has a decaying hand hanging from a rope on the ceiling, which is a little eery. I went in there and the doors clanged shut behind me, leaving me alone in this massive, dark cathedral where everything echoed and someones shrivelled, decapitated arm dangled threateningly, and this screech came from somewhere in the rafters and scared the hell out of me. I like to think it was the ghost of the hand-less person. You never know...

A couple of days in there was a heatwave and the temperature rose above freezing for the first time. This meant though, that all the snow that had piled itself on the roofs began to slide off dangerously, in great masses, and the icicles hanging from a very great height became potential killers. It was fun (in a slightly sinister way) to listen to the cries as people dodged falling snow and
The jewish cemetery and Synagogue was quieting. There is something like 7000 names of the dead written on the wall in there, and the cemetery is a jumbled mass of gravestones, thrown, higgledy piggledy together to accomodate the many many dead. reading the name of a nineteen year old, and seeing pictures drawn by children was somber, but I'm glad to have seen it.
I also saw a Salvador Dali exhibiton, some amazing architechture, the Astronomical clock, which puts on a little show on the hour, and I tried out my Czech, greeting people with 'Dobri Den', but they just looked at me strangely, so I gave up. I liked my Czech encounter, and was glad of the time that I got to spend there, and see a little beyond its tourist veneer.