“Naaa…”

“The street is called ‘Na?’”

“Ummm, no…but we (Irene and I) don’t know how to pronounce the rest of it.”

I’m not entirely sure when this little exchange happened, but it most definitely occurred during our stay in Praha. Not only could we not pronounce the street names, we didn’t have a clue on how the little accents above some vowels would change the pronunciation. C’est la vie as the French say!

First stop…grocery store for some bagels, cheese, salami and recognizable fruits and veggies. Michelle was the adventurous one of us, tofu spread…interesting hummus in a can and chips that we couldn’t figure out how to tell the flavour; the bags were just different colours. And of course, good old Nutella…a staple item in any travel diet:) We tried to eat in an open space, but waves…and I’m not even exaggerating this…and waves of pigeons (otherwise known as flying rats) swarmed us. Bye, bye park bench…hello hostel room!

As I mentioned before, our room overlooked a cobble stone courtyard and we were looking out of this as we gnawed away on our food. There was quite a large crowd below with a couple of people playing music and also much chatter and laughter. For whatever reason we had an impulse to wave, thinking they were tourists like us. What do you know…they waved back! There was much laughter amongst the group as everyone turned and looked up at us and some gestured for us to go downstairs to join them! Bizarro…instead we just waved, smiled and continued on with snacking, hoping that they would still be there when we were done. Unfortunately, the whole lot of them were gone by the time we meandered downstairs again…but that was an amusing few minutes.

So, on the menu for the day…Charles Bridge (steps from Shopping Centre No. 10), St Vitus Cathedral, Prague Castle, general meandering and The Franz Kafka museum to end the day. One thing that I really loved about Praha was the really colourful buildings, rooftops and cobble stone streets to meander on. It’s always lovely to see colour in any form. One thing about Praha…it was packed with tourists…unbelievably so. English could be heard near and far and as such, I still have no idea what Czech actually sounds like…everyone speaks English here. Michelle was telling us that the tourist to local ratio here was about 9:1…crikey! Another thing I really, really loved…almost everything was within walking distance…if not, it was a short ride on one of 3 metro lines that were dirt simple to figure out.

It was a fairly uneventful day…no wacky food stories to talk about, just lots of walking, chatting and had a fantastic time at the Kafka museum and a really cool restaurant to end the day. I really recommend the Kafka museum…I profess to have minimal knowledge of Kafka or his stories. But this definitely piqued my interest, as he was a lawyer by training but pursued his love of writing. It was a really fascinating look into his life, loves and literature and this was such a well laid out museum. For a seemingly small space, it was jam packed with information and incredibly creative on how it was organized. To end it all, we went to a restaurant in Michelle’s guidebook…no more random sampling here…the previous evening was enough to last many lifetimes! It ended up being this really awesome little restaurant in a cellar with a super cool architecture bookstore on the main level. Food was good, price was decent (if I did my conversion correctly) and atmosphere was fabulous! Sooo I will just let my photos and short captions do more of the story-telling…cheerio for now;)

Tagged: praha charlesbrdige stvituscathedral peeingstatues