Traditional Prague

Pictures from my first day wandering around:

Very brutal statues flanking the entrance to Prague Castle. I think they're gods, or something

The view from Prague Castle, which sits at the top of a hill. I felt lazy and took the tram up to the top of said hill.

More very traditional architecture:

It's hard to see in the picture, but the streets are all cobblestone. EVERYWHERE. Which is very picturesque, but a little hard on the feet when walking 4+ hours at a time. Glad I brought comfortable shoes! My colleague Lucy from the UK was wearing heels and they kept getting caught in the cracks between the stones. Yikes!

That's berry weird...

Fruit kiosk in the mall. Selling strawberries and raspberries at the moment, apparently has other fruit available in other seasons. Strange place to buy your fruit...

Also had an "Aha!" moment at the grocery store (actual grocery store, not kiosk). I just realized that they don't have any "pennies". Eg, if your bill comes to 57.90 koruna (like mine did), you hand over 58 koruna and call it square. I was getting very mixed up at the cash register, since smaller koruna (50 koruna or less) are in coin form, which seemed like it should be like our coinage and equivalent to whatever comes after the decimal. I'd taken to just holding out my money to the cashier and letting them pick out the appropriate coinage.

Now that I finally get it, I aspire to come across as less of an idiot when I purchase things. Key word there is probably "aspire".

Whirlwind Prague

I'm in Prague! I think this wins hand down for my worst flight experience ever. SFO to JFK leg I was stuck in the middle of a pack of about 8 under five-year-old kids - I think they were doing some sort of ill conceived multi-family trip to Germany. One little girl industriously colored for the entire six hours, but there were a few screamers and kickers in the bunch.

JFK to PRG was looking like a nice reasonable adult group. BUT, then I made the mistake of trying to be nice and switch seats with a man who was sitting 10 rows behind his wife. Which put me two seats away from the mother-of-all-screaming-kids. The four year-old little terror wouldn't stop kicking the seats, jumping up and down, and full-blown-tantrum screaming. I tried to slip in a couple of hours of sleep in between his tantrums, but it was mighty difficult.

All in all, I landed in Prague after 20 hours of traveling with about three hours of sleep. No rest for the weary though (or those that want to get on Central European Time ASAP), so I hit the streets of Prague for the next 9 hours. In the 85 degree humid heat.

Top-line summary of Prague: beautiful architecture, too many tourists. It's like being in Disneyland! Nothing looks real. (See below for evidence)

I hit up all the major Prague highlights my first day: Prague Castle, Charles Bridge, Old Town, New Town, Mucha Museum, Museum of Communism. Maybe it was my jet lag, maybe it was the tourists and the heat, but I didn't actually enjoy it very much. I felt like I was just going through the motions of being a tourist. Well, that's not exactly true. I really liked the two museums, probably because I escaped the hordes of tourists for a little while.