13 August—Day 49

They certainly do like their drinks. This is a very normal drink store.

Castle wall!

The Art Nouveau painted glass window

So, this morning we woke up and headed out into the castle town. The Prague Castle, Pražský hrad, was the site of the Defenstration of Prague and probably a bunch of less notable things. It was actually not as interesting as the cathedral inside the same walls. It was absolutely stunning. I have to say, I didn’t like Prague as much as other places some times... while the sits were phenomenal, there were just SO many people there all the time. If you weren’t in a horde of tour groups, you were right about you run into one. Lots of fun though—lots of bustle.

Defenstration of Prague!

The cathedral was actually created a couple of centuries apart, and there’s one huge Gothic window that’s not stained glass, like the rest of the cathedral, but rather an Art Nouveau painted glass window.

In the city walls (you heard me right) there’s a tiny street called the Golden Lane—there there’s a bunch of tiny tiny houses, that have been turned into sort of mini-museums. Basically, you pay to enter the lane, and then you can take a peek into these tiny homes (more like a tenement room), and they’re decked out depending on what kind of profession the person who live there had. There was also an example of a Middle Ages prison, aka torture chamber, that we got to see. Gory. There were all these things that were iron and pointy and painful and were actually used.

Top of the cathedral, plus the teeming tourist masses.

The Art Nouveau painted glass window

A normal stained glass window in the church.

Some sort of medieval body cage.

Tiny house on Golden Lane.

Back of church!

Then we headed up the Petrin Hill, where there’s a house of mirrors (fun!) and a tiny replica of the Eiffel Tower. You can go up the tower though, so that’s fun.

There’s so much fun stuff to buy in prague—they make the little stacking dolls, like the Russians, and also the Swarovski components... so every other woman you saw had swarovski earrings, or something to that extent. There’s also a very super delicious baked good called a Trdlo, which is pretty much dough, wrapped around a stick, rolled in sugar, baked, and then rolled in more sugar and cinnamon and delicious. It’s a sort of street stand food or something, and it’s absolutely divine.

Trdlo.

The incline of the subway escalators is absolutely absurd. The first time I actually felt a little dizzy.

12 August – Day 48

After class on Friday, I decided to go rush to the Turkischer Markt really fast to see if I could get my hands on this food—taiyaki. It’s actually Japanese, some sort of fried food shaped like a fish, with filling inside. I’ve always wanted to try it, and there’s none apparently (or no good ones) in NYC, so when I heard there was a stand twice a week I got really excited. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find a place on the Markt that day, and therefore I wasn’t able to find them. Didn’t matter though—had some awesome Turkish food, and pretty much ran for the bus station, which was clear on the other side of the city.

We took a bus from Berlin to Prague with “Student Agency” or something like that. The service was amazing. It was actually better than my flight to Berlin (but that’s not saying much, cause I think that was the worst flight of my life). They gave us free hot drinks, played Harry Potter in both Czech and English, and then played episodes of the Big Bang Theory. SO excellent. I was the happiest person in the world on that bus ride. It was 5 or 6 hours or so, and we stopped for a moment in Dresden (but we were hidden behind the train station…) However, we did get to see the city as we drove through, so that was nice.

Anyway, we arrived in Prague…maybe around 8 or so? We to drop our stuff at our hostel, and then slowly made our way towards the old town, and got food. Prague has a couple of different districts (old town, new town, some town that I couldn’t pronounce with accent marks, and the castle town). They’re all along the River Vltava (Moldau), and there’s the Charles Bridge as the biggest bridge connecting them, though now there’s obviously a bunch of bridges.

One side of the Charles Bridge.

We got some traditional Czech food (or that’s what was advertised anyway), which for me, was Goulash and these delicious bread dumplings (and one bacon dumpling. But I digress). We felt super rich, because one euro converts to around 24 or so Czech crowns. So when we changed money, we got everything in hundreds, 500s, 1000s etc. So exciting. Only problem is that to judge how expensive stuff was, we had to divide it by 25, then if we didn’t know whether that as a good price in euros, divide that again to bring it to some semblance of a dollar worth. Now that I think about it, I probably could have just learned the crown to dollar conversion rate… but that would have been too much work.

Some Czech church in the town square... there's 3 others, and all their names were Czech...

Anyway, after our dinner, (by the way, dark beer is SO much better tasting than light beer) we decided to walk around the city a little bit. The Charles Bridge is clogged up like nobody’s business during the day, so we decided to try and go see it at night. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, we got lost and ended up walking alllll over the place.

Dark beer tastes so much better.

Statue on one bridge. I think it was the Charles...?

It was good though, cause the next day we were like “Okay, we’re at the castle! Wait…. We were actually here yesterday night. Huh.” We wandered around for a while, but then it started raining, so we decided to head back for the hostel. Then we got lost for another hour or so before finally finding the right train. Still fun though. I think.

Czech subway advertisement... for advertisements.

10 August-- Day 47

Okeydokie. So. Altes Nationalgalerie. This one I liked a lot lot more than the Bode-Museum. Actually, I originally wasn’t planning on visiting this one (at least not that day), but me and MC had a little bit of a failure to communicate. We both said that we wanted to go to the Nationalgalerie. I meant the Neue Nationalgalerie, with 20^th and 21^st century artwork. She meant the Alte Nationalgalerie,with stuff outta the 19^th or so century. We ended up going ot the Alte one though, if only because I made it a goal to visit all of the Museums-Insel museums before I leave (actually not sure if that’s possible hahaha)

Anyway, so there's some beautiful 19th century paintings here-- Monet, Manet, Friedrich, etc. The usual goodies. Here's some highlights (cause let's face it, I'm not an art historian)

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Queen Semiramis.
Apparently she got startled, and grabbed for her awesomely jewel-encrusted sword.

Manet, naturally.

This one I really liked- it's called "The English Tourists" or something to that effect.
If you look closely, the tour guide is showing something, there's two attentive people, one yawning, and one drawing a picture.

I forgot the name, but it's one of the most famous statues in the museum.
It's a sculpture of two sisters (princesses or something to that effect) who pretty much lived their lives together.

Marriage Proposal on Helgoland
Apparently the story behind this one is that there's a fisherman (in the middle), who's trying to find a proper wife for a young boy who works on his ship. He spied this little fisher-woman, and he's presenting the boy to her, grabbing his chin like "Ahhh look at this fine strapping young lad... why don't you marry him?" and of course she's trying to play the demure lady, looking down, fiddling with the strings on her skirt.

9 August- Day 46

Neues Museum today! First of, I’d like to say, that that day I had my first bubble tea of the summer. And let me tell you …. It was excellent. Anyway, so after class, we were supposed to meet up at the Museum about 2 hours later, so we decided to get some food. In the end, half got food, and the other half wandered around the Hackescher Markt area. The Hackesher Höfe is really interesting- it’s a bunch of (I think, apartments or offices) and between them are about 8 or so connected courtyards, and a bunch of sort of hip stores on the first floors of the courtyard. There was a chocolatier, designer clothing, some urban artists display thing, Ampelmannchen store, etc. Then we headed towards the Neues Museum for our tour.

One courtyard in the Hofe

Alleyway near the Hofe.

More Berliner Graffiti. I love it

It was half destroyed in war. Now this is what the main staircase looks like.

Most likely a half completed bust of one of maybe Nefertiti's daughter or something?

The Neues museum is one of the 5 Museums-Insel museums, and it houses an amazing Egyptian collection, along with some ehhhh not so amazing collections of Stone, Bronze, and Iron age goodies. The highlight of the museum (they say they have a bunch of highlights, but I’ve seen tour books that are just like “well this museum has this and nothing else) is Nefertiti’s bust. It’s super famous, she’s super gorgeous, and one-eyed.”

All of which are true.

I was a total fail and didn't take a photo of it. Or maybe no photos were allowed? I forgot.

After going to the Neues Museum, I went to visit something really really fun. Turkish bath! The Hamam was deep in the center of Kreuzberg (also known as Turkish town), and ahhh so much fun!

So basically, you could pay for a couple hours (up to a day) and if you wanted to spend the whole day there a la spa, you could buy massages, treatments, etc., otherwise you can just used their sauna, washroom, etc. First time I could really really relax the entire trip. After you sit around in the sauna, cold shower, sauna, etc. Then there’s a room with little washbasins and smack in the middle was this big heated tile platform, and you could stick your towel on top of it and just lay down. Almost like laying out in the sun, except the other side gets heated haha.

The way it was explained it to a guy in the group: “I’ve seen more naked women than you’ll probably see in your entire life”

Unfortunately, thankfully, and obviously, no photos were allowed. But it was so pretty. Google it!