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From Abroad

Hello blog viewers! My apologies for the delay in posting blogs, life has been happening so fast lately!

This past weekend, myself and 5 friends: 3 ladies from Australia and 2 ladies from France, made our journey to Prague, “Mother of cities”. It was a most pleasurable weekend trip! We embarked from the bus terminal in Wien at 5pm and arrived in Prague at 9pm or so. After some anticipation waiting for our friends to arrive to meet us at the station, we were trekking to our hostel, called the Czech Inn. It was quite a quaint little joint, newly renovated with an older exterior and a contemporary interior complete with an IKEA branded room (EVERYTHING was from IKEA, thus we were happy and functional!). A quick shot of our lovely accomodations for 2 nights:

The first night ended early after a brief trip to a cold, empty basement disco, barely accessible by 3 foot stairs! I was awake for much of the night because one of the Aussies had a cold, and she was cutting wood all night ;-0 Breakfast was quite nice, since a few of them came earlier in the day than us, they went to the grocery store and bought breakfastables (like lunchables, but for breakfast). Check out the breakfast goof troop!

After breakfast, we made our way to the Old Town, a 20 minute walk from the hostel. We stopped to take lots of photos like tourists and even ventured into a Botanical Garden (I get lost in them all the time, on purpose :-) of course!). We eventually made it to the Old Town Square, where I was able to squeeze in a photo of the Old Town City Hall Tower, note the famous astronomical clock near the base:

Quick note, around the astronomical clock, there are 365 common Czech names, one for each day, I could not find mine :-( As a group we split up for a bit and I managed to get some well-earned time to myself while I wandered the streets of Old Town Square, to give an idea of it’s magnificence, check this out:

Since Easter is near, the annual Easter market was underway, providing for some elegant stall-shopping where I coped some white tea and Czech chocolate for cheap! As the day was getting late quick, some of us ventured up to Prague Castle, the biggest ancient castle in the world! We made a beeline for St. Vitus Church, where all the Kings were crowned and such, you have to see it to believe it, it has quite a presence!

Our near-perfect first touring day ended watching the sky grow dark from Charles Bridge and witnessing the illumesence of Prague castle at night, all the while listening to smooth jazz and watching the tourists being silly.

Our last day we took a tour that was excellent. Let me just put in a quick plug: Free Prague Towers is what it is called, our tour guide spoke perfect English (not always common) and she really had an insight to take us to the cool spots around town (she can operate independently). I was most impressed with her professionalism on the tour, she made numerous recommendations for places to come back and see later, plus the prices! I think all of us in the group we wishing we had done the tour our first day, then come back to see special sights the next day. Oh well, its an excuse to come back to Prague again!

Well, I have to run to Forest Pathology class, I look forward to hearing from you!

Bye!