Thursday 21 June 2012

I Czech-ed out what Prague has to offer...

Okay, so forgive me for the really bad pun used in the title of this post. I couldn't resist. Very recently, I spent 3 days in Prague, Czech Republic with 3 friends as a celebration of the end of second year. The first thing, I would suggest if you're thinking of going there, is stay for longer than 3 days. We managed to fit in a lot of sight-seeing and opportunities to take very touristy photos. The biggest positive, apart from chilling and having fun, is that I now feel slightly more prepared for my year in France. That said, however, it has highlighted a few things that I should be aware of. I'd like to think that most of these won't happen though, because unlike, Czech, I speak French, even if I'm not confident with it. 


The first point, I was in two minds whether to mention it or not, but I decided I will. What makes this worse, is that all four of us hadn't realised the mistake we had made. In our defence, it was Monday morning and clearly not thinking straight, we saw a sign saying Kouřeni zakázáno. We immediately presumed that this was the name of the tram stop and preceded to try and find it on the map. Many confusing minutes later, a man approached us asking if we spoke Spanish. Having done a beginners' course 2 years ago, we attempted to explain where we wanted to go. Upon understanding '18' we guessed that was the number of the tram we needed, so off we went. To our surprise the next tram stop had the same sign. It was the no smoking sign. It even had the, what appears to be at least Europe-wide, red circle sign.


But that's enough of fails. As I don't want this post to go on forever, I'm just going to pick one significant things from each day to talk about. Sunday, I'm going to skip; we flew out there and had a meal. Tis all. Monday, as above, but also, we went on a free tour, starting off in Old Town Square. The square itself was probably the best bit, even though we did also visit the Jewish Quarter, we didn't get to see too much as it required tickets for about 400 crowns, maybe more. This is the Astronomical Clock from 1410, roughly. The detail on it is amazing considering when it was built. Every hour, there was some animation which basically reminded the people that they had one hour less to live. Cheerful.

Tuesday, we were very cultural and went to plenty of museums and stuff, so it's really difficult to choose just one picture. So I won't. I know what happened, my friends do too, but you'll just have to live with not knowing. Ha. Wednesday, we took a relaxing boat ride to the zoo. This was my favourite day because some of the animals were just so damn cute. There were hungry polar bears which almost broke down the metal door where their food arrived, meerkats who refused to stand on two paws (I presume they have paws...) and giraffes that charged up and down their enclosure because something startled them.






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