Italia Adventures!!: Just a Little Eastern European Travelmania...

The story of our Eastern European leg of the travel week all started when we first decided to make Prague one of the stops on our second travel week. I was extremely excited about this but, when I began doing research on how we would get from Munich, Germany (where we started the week) to Prague, I got so frustrated that I legitimately considered taking it out of the trip completely - I couldn't find ANY feasible transportation between the two!

And then something wonderful (and so completely typical!) happened. Emily walks into my room and just says, "I got bored today and figured out all of our transportation for the second travel week." I nearly had a heart attack. I had spent hours on various German, Czech, and European train line websites searching for anything and she gets bored and just figures it all out!! It was so ridiculous that I just decided that I don't have enough patience to be an effective trip planner and she's much too good at it for me to need to get better at it! This conclusion has made me a much happier person for some reason...

The craziest part of this was that on the morning we were leaving Munich for Prague, we arrived at the station where our bus was going to pick us up and discovered we weren't just taking a bus to Prague, we were taking a two-level, luxury coach bus to Prague. Not only that, we just so happened to be perfectly assigned to the front row seats of the second level, seats that offered a perfect, panoramic view of the passing German countryside! Let me just say that this beautiful view definitely made the four and a half hour bus ride a much less painful process than usual! It also made the problems we had locating our hotel (turns out we were standing outside of it without realizing it for a good ten minutes...) a much lesser annoyance.

After getting checked in and settled in the room, we immediately left for Old Town Square where many of the most famous buildings of Prague are located. We had also decided that as we knew next to nothing about Prague, it might be a good idea to take one of the free city walking tours. Because we had such a good experience in Paris on the tour we took there, we decided to go with the same company and learn a little bit more about the history and culture of Prague. So, our afternoon was dominated by a three hour walking tour where we learned about all of the main attractions in Prague's most historic areas as well as much of the vibrant city's rich history. The tour included so many different areas, but my favorite by far was the time we spent in the old Jewish ghetto. It included some of the most interesting historic details of the oldest active synagogue in Europe and of the cemetery where people are buried as many as twelve deep because the people hadn't been allowed to bury their dead outside the specified area. This was definitely the most interesting part for me, but everywhere else we went was beautiful as well - it gave us a great idea of all of the places we still wanted to visit and especially what we wanted to come back and see.

Once we finished up the tour and walked around on our own for a bit, everyone was ready to just relax and grab some dinner. The place we ended up going (the name translated into "The Executioner") was one of my favorite experiences in the city. We spent the entire evening being entertained by the restaurant's "mascot" who was naturally dressed up as an executioner. He gave us advice on what to order, brought us medieval games to play while we waited for our food, and (the best part) took pictures with us and all of his executioner props. It was quite an experience and is definitely one of the most memorable parts of the trip!

The next day we did what I love the most about visiting places - strolling through the streets with absolutely NO schedule! We got to see the city's major memorials, found a cool open market, and walked through the castle. It was packed with seeing all of the main attractions in Prague but we did it in such a way that was also very relaxing. However, after we finally headed back to the hotel to pick up our bags and take our taxi to the airport, we were given yet another (and if you ask Abby, the best) transportation surprise - our cheap, hotel taxi just happened to be a brand new Audi sedan. After that extremely classy (and fast!) ride to the airport, it was clear that public transportation would forever be ruined for me after this trip! It was a great way to end our time and Prague and an even better way to begin the move on to London.

Here are some of my favorite pictures of the city as well as my first attempt at video - its of my favorite street performer who played various instruments, sang, and entertained the crowd. He was great :)