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.