Castle Beautiful

Ooo beautiful structure... this was really exciting and beautiful.... architecture.... ooo... . 

Gothic Turret

Fun steps up, beautiful stained glass.... off to a movie now though.... so i'll continue the story later.... 

A Real Castle!

Crossing the bridge was to get over to the Prague Castle, a landmark visible all across the town... spent some time wandering the suroundings, excellent coffee in the sun, meant to meet friends at a set of stairs i thought were the main ones from the map, but missed them when they were at the other end of the huge complex... ran up and down the steps a bunch of time working off the dumplings, but went in and got to experience it - lots of heavy turrets, a street of fifteenth century almost doll-houses.... 5'6 doorways, just all miniture authentic, armour museum hallway to run through creepily, old churches, present-day soldiers still marching around in formations like back in the day.... 

Prague Day Solo

Woke up as I usually do, with an obscene amount of energy to start the day. It usually serves me pretty well, especially in Paris the days start out sunny and cloud over by 9 or 10. A little afraid of this, I set out without waking everyone up (it was before 7), leaving a note I hoped would allow us to meet. Unfortunatly it wasn't clear enough, but I had a pretty great time wandering by myself too. Walk down to the river, just happened to chance by Gehry's Tom and Ginger building, a cool post-modern building (whoa did i just say that?) but it fit in really well among the decorated flat houses along the river. impressive. The walk was really fun, in the sun and spring it was easy to see this had been the Bohemian playground of rich europeans - highly decorative buildings, Gothic and Baroque and Rococo... walking by myself along the very high river, barely anyone keeping me company on the streets. Crossing the Karlsbridge in the morning was a far different experience then later, beautiful morning light and mist and not crowded at all.... nice pictures with the streetlights still on 

Prague Evening 1

Got in pretty late, easy trip to the hostel, quite a lot of confusion getting new currency and then trying to break the rediculously large bills coming out of the atm.... hard to take out more then 1000 units of currency, even when you know it's only $40.... we went on a walk with our hostel roommates, college boys from Stuttgart, they promised to show us a fairly cool restaurant, they were totally lost too though.... we stopped at a place for really delicious food mmm. we were told dumplings and pork were the specialties, and they were.... mmm.... dumplings were breadish, and sliced as such, with lots of gravy and greasy-good meat. Served with Budwiser! don't gasp at the sacriledge, it was real Czech Budvar, not american water-berr, and i had the Budvar Dark... almost black, a little molassesy and absolutely great. the german Weissbier was good with a lot of things, but this meal called for thicker stuff. Fun wander past tinker-bell palace and through Wenceslas Square (whores and western commercialism) back to the hostel and a good night. 

Travels through Soviet Lands

Haha.... really running joke for me was that we were in Russia.... the Czech Republic was communist until more recently then anywhere else i've been, and it still showed it a little. Def. in their trains and train stations - rocking the 70s colors when it wasn't army-drab. Train all afternoon through pretty beautiful scenery, transfer at Cheb across the border, got a chance to walk around a little in the town, then on a very dirty-windowed train for more sunset, passing some pretty drab towns and housing tracts, grey roofs rather then red (had to do with the stone rather then politics, but same effect), but still pretty country. 

Nuremburg Fri 7 Apr 2006

woo several times trying to write this foiled by not knowing how to spell nurnburg and then getting distracted while looking it up. anyway. friday morning we drove across more lovely german territory to get to the 'most german city in the world' chosen to be the head of Nazi Germany. We spent a while audio-touring through a pretty good exhibit (i don't care if people would sound like chipmunks, there needs to be a way to speed talking up to as fast as i can read, otherwise there's no point), then a tour of the parade grounds... pretty incredible the juxtaposition of the old war videos and the actual sites of the rallys - very scary, everyone there was so normal.... hmm have you looked at our president lately? coughanyway.... kober gave us some more insight gathered from hanging out with old germans in dinkelsbuhl and readings i think, pretty cool. very stressful ticket-buying in the train station (i ended up buying for 3 others) and 4 of us ran to catch the train to Prague for the weekend. Pic is from the steps on the front pedestal of the nuremburg field.