Prague, Days One and Two

PRAUGE IS BEAUTIFUL! As far as cities that are just straight up gorgeous; I'd rate it close to Vienna. It's really strange, though, thinking about how both Budapest and Prague have both only recently broken out of Communism, yet Prague seems so much more... cheerful than Budapest. Budapest just seems very flat as soon as you get outside the tourist area.

We spent our first day in Prague traveling, so it was really more like a day and a half. That night, we just had dinner and watched the game in the bar beneath our hostel. We got up early the second day, and visited the Communism Museum, which was fascinating. It traced the rise and fall of Communism in the Czech Republic, including information on how, in the beginning, Communism came as a positive type of reform in the wake of Nazi devastation. Really fascinating stuff.

From there, we went across St. Christopher's Bridge to the Prague Castle, then to Lennon's wall. People have been writing there since the 1980s, and it is absolutely filled with graffiti. Erika and I both signed, though Erika called me a tool for correcting the person above me's spelling. :)

That night, we decided to go on a pub crawl, since we'd had so much fun on the one in Dublin. Nope. This one had over a hundred people, mostly under the age of eighteen. As I was ordering a drink, I heard a girl ask a guy to buy her cigarettes, because she was only sixteen, and couldn't yet legally buy them. It was just crowded, and overpriced, and really not our scene, so Erika and I went back to the hostel after the second stop.

A few minutes after we get back and get in bed, our Australian roommates return as well, blasted. Apparently, they had an interesting night. They left one of their friends to sleep in the park, and when he returned, he and his one friend got in a serious fight about who would go to sleep first. Basically, it went like this: "You go to sleep!" "No, YOU go to sleep!" "NO YOU!" ect. It was basically hilarious. Though we ended up getting to sleep late, it was definitely worth seeing the absurdity.