The Longest Blog Post Ever...aka Prague and Kutna Hora

I'm slightly torn right now as to whether I should finally post about Prague and Kutna Hora, or if I should, instead, write about my trip to Amsterdam this past weekend. Because I am chronically indecisive, it is looking like I'm going to write about both. So get comfortable, it's going to be a long ride.

After spending 2 days in Berlin (at this point, I want to re-emphasize that Berlin is the best city ever), Michael, Jessica, and I moved on the Prague which is the capital of the Czech Republic and the gateway city between western and eastern Europe. On the way to Prague, we rode an EC train, which was super cool because it had individual compartments that seated six people each. Being the nerds that we are, we were very excited because the train made us think of the Hogwarts Express :-) It was about a four hour ride, but we were fully entertained by the gorgeous scenery--the terrain looked like someting out of the Lord of the Rings (once again, it satisfied our inner nerds). Once we finally made it to Prague, we learned that the subway system there is very user-friendly and despite the fact that we had to take two different trains, we had no trouble at all finding our stop. Once we got to the station, we were a little nervous because everything looked so foreign, and we really didn't recognize anything, but there were signs that led us straight to our hostel. After checking in to our hostel (which was a really good deal--about 15€ a night, including bedding and breakfast), we went and withdrew some money because they use crowns in the Czech Republic instead of Euros. We each withdrew 3000Kč (about 115€, 1€=25Kč), and went to a little restaurant that was recommended to us by the receptionist at the hostel (She told us it was a "traditional Czech meal at a traditional Czech price"). It was absolutely delicious, and extremely inexpensive--I think I might be happy if I could only eat Czech food the rest of my life :-)

This delicious shot of liquor that tasted like spearmint candy cost only 20Kč (less than 1€). I really, really loved that restaurant.

When we decided to go to Prague, all three of us wanted to go to the Kostnice Ossuary (also called the Sedlec Ossuary or the Bone Chruch), but we soon learned that it was not located in Prague but was instead in a small town called Kutna Hora which was about a an hour and a half bus ride from Prague. Figuring out the bus system and trying to buy a ticket was a huge adventure that took us well over an hour, but we were eventually (finally) in Kutna Hora. I absolutely loved this town--it was a picturesque European town full of churches and beautiful buildings, but it was not completely tainted and crowded with tourism. After arriving in Kutna Hora, we went on an adventure, walking around the entire town, checking every church to see if it was the Kostnice Ossuary. At one point, we were approached by a man advertising for his pizza place, and there was a little map of the town on the back of the flyer he gave us, so that helped a little. When we finally did find the Bone Church, we were not dissapointed. The Kosnice Ossuary is a small church that is decorated with the bones of 40,000 people who died in a plague, and in the middle of it, there is a chandelier that includes every bone of the human body. It was very cool, intriguing, bizarre, creepy, etc, and we were all very satisfied with our find :-) After our little adventure, we were all a little nervous about finding the way back, especially considering the fact that it took us over an hour to find a way to get there when we were in a big city that is used to stupid American tourists :-) Luckily, we found a very nice lady who spoke German (those were infinitely more common than ladies who spoke English), and she showed us which bus to take. That evening we revisited our favorite restaurant. Seriously, I want to take that restaurant home with me.

The first church of our adventure--Church of St. James

The second church that we investigated--St. Barbara's Cathedral

Beautiful view of Kutna Hora from St. Barbara's Cathedral

The Stone Fountain--as far as we could tell, it was more of a reservoir than a fountain.

The side of the fountain. That's right--built in 1097

The tourist map called it the "Stone House." I thought it looked pretty cool.

The Plague Column. Not positive which plague.

The next church--I don't know that name of this one...

Finally!

It was a little bizarre (ok, it was really bizarre) to see so much Christian symbolism in human bones


There was a tower of human bones (just like this one) in each of the four corners. They went all the way up to the ceiling!

Here I am with the chandelier

The next day we decided to actually check out Prague. First, we went to the Prague Castle, which was really cool and slightly intimidating. By some stroke of luck (we all called this our trip of happy accidents), we showed up right as they were changing the guard, and that was very interesting to observe. We also checked out many other main tourist spots, including the town square which was happily decorated for an Easter festival :-D Yay Easter! We each bought a trdlo, which they translated into a potato pancake, but I don't think that was a very good translation. It was absolutely delicious, and I'm a little glad that they don't have them at home because I would gain about 10 pounds eating them all the time! We also bought some yummy gingerbread that was decorated for Easter. On the hour, we watched the apostles come out on the astronomical clock. This clock was my favorite part of Prague. Seriously, it was one of the coolest things I've ever seen, and I took a ridiculously large amount of pictures.

Walking to Prague Castle--there were a lot of stairs

Prague Castle

The changing of the guard

I couldn't help myself, I'm such a tourist (hangs head in shame)

The cathedral inside the castle walls. So pretty--I wish we had stuff like this in the US

Delicious!!!!!

Yay Easter festivals!

"Our Lady" plus part of a really neat statue that was in the middle of the square

We got a couple of moonlight pictures--awesome, right?

The astronomical clock.

The best traveling group. Ever. Seriously.

The next day was the last day of our adventure. For a few days we thoroughly enjoyed the Czech Republic and the really cheap prices of everything there (I still had 800Kč leftover after three days, and that includes paying for three nights at the hostel), but we soon learned that although everything there is fairly cheap, it is not so cheap to leave the country. It cost around 50€ to get back to Berlin. Once we got to Berlin, we bought our tickets back to Dortmund (for those of you who are wondering: yes, the best way back to Dortmund was through Berlin) and boarded the train, expecting to be back around 19:00pm. About two hours into our train ride, a woman came to check our tickets, and freaked out when she saw our tickets, telling us that we had the wrong tickets. We tried to tell her that we had just bought the tickets and that they were valid tickets to Dortmund, but she kept freaking out and told us (in German--she spoke no English) that the train didn't go to Dortmund. I understood her perfectly, but I didn't understand the situation at all. As it turns out, the train before ours was running quite late and came at the same time ours was supposed to. The sign said that it was our train because it was timed, but it was not our train. In fact (as the English-speaking woman who was sitting next to us on the train pointed out to us), we were going to the completely wrong direction, and we almost made it to the Baltic Sea before the train lady checked our tickets. For those of you who, like me, are terrible with geography, I've included a map:

As you can see, it was the completely wrong direction

Needless to say, this put a little damper in our trip home. I thought it was funny because when we finally understood exactly what had happened and got off the train, we all went to our happy places: I called Kevin, Jesika bought a Kinder Egg, and Michael went to take some pictures of historical-looking stuff. In the end, we had to buy a ticket back to Berlin (the trainstop where we got off was in the middle of nowhere and couldn't take us straight back to Dortmund), and we had to pay more money to upgrade our ticket back to Dortmund from Berlin because only the expensive trains were running so late. So instead of getting back around 19:00 that evening, we ended up getting home at about 3:00 that morning, and we almost didn't even do that because we all fell alseep on the train! Luckily, Michael woke up and looked outside and recognized the city seconds before our stop. Overall, it was truly an adventure!

Ok. So now it's time to tell you about Amsterdam, but I've decided that I lied and I'm far too worn out to write anymore. Forgive me. I will catch you up later, promise.

Here are the links to my Facebook albums for more pictures: Kutna Hora Prague