So much to tell!!
I guess we left off in Vienna. A lot has happened since then! We stayed in Vienna one night and then our first day in Prague we took it easy. It was rainy and ugly and we took a glorious nap :D. After that we went and had an amazing dinner at a typical Czech restaurant. It was so nice to have a whole meal (meat, potatoes, vegetables, a Coke and a beer) all for under 10 dollars!!! I love the Czech Republic and it's exchange rate!
The next day we actually got up and got out of the hostel. We went on a free walking tour of the c
ity that took us all over. We went all around the city and saw castles, gardens, the famous Charles Bridge, the Jewish ghetto, and lots more. Prague is one of the only European cities that was untouched by WWII, so the architecture was phenomenal and everything was so original and old!
After our walking tour we had a great lunch with people from the tour group. We all had goulash and big dumplings and beer and just too much food in general...it was a cool place with a bunch of locals, and even some ancient old man playing the accordion.
When we went to pay the bill we were trying in vain to decipher the check and had to call the waiter over. They had actually charged us a cover charge (to sit and eat) a service charge, AND they charged us about $1.50 (35 crowns) for the music!!! They actually CHARGED us to be in the same room with the accordion! Ridiculous, but pretty funny. Way to go Czech-ies, they are making up for lost time and taking advantage of us capitalists :D.
That night Alison and I had to go to this club we had heard about. It was 5 levels all together. The bottom level was like a tacky American club, with a dance floor and a stage to dance on, and then a balcony all around it to look down upon all the dancing fools.
The next level was a "techno" theme, with lots of flashing lights, fog, awful electronic music and a huge female robot hung on the wall with lasers that came from her eyes that looked around the crowd.
The third floor was an oldies level, with hilarious 80's music mixed with other songs like "Twist and Shout" and plenty of other funny music. And each of these levels had its own bar (but the 80;s floor had 2!!).
On the 4th f
loor was the hip-hop level, with every 13 year old Czech thug dancing in their baggy pants being tough. It was just too funny. The last level was a lounge type of bar, with big overstuffed black leather couches, bean bag chairs, and lots of candles on the low coffee tables. It was a nice place to chill out between dances, so we went up there a few times.
The rest of the night we spent running from floor to floor avoiding bad songs and making complete fools of ourselves. We got there around 10pm, and were definitely the oldest people until about 1am. I think the drinking age there must be 13, because there were middle school age kids dancing with us most of the time.
This club was the best people watching opportunity ever. We had dragged an Australian guy from the walking tour
with us to the club, and he and I never stopped laughing at the kids around us. It was a very interesting mix of people, to say the very least.
After that we went back to the
hostel, got a few hours of sleep and got on our train to Berlin....my last stop :'(
We got there and Carrie (Alison's fiance's sister) met us at the train. She was there studying abroad, which is why we were going to Berlin. We found a hostel and then grabbed lunch!! Brats and sauerkraut and beer!! It was a great German cure for the night before! After that we climbed to the top of the Reichstag (the Parliament building). It was an awesome view from the top of the dome on top, and we could see all of Berlin
.
We then decided to try to find a beac
h bar. These are apparently all the rage in Berlin right now, and are supposed to be fun. Most of them are just a regular bar with sand trucked in and dumped on the floor and lounge chairs instead of tables...and it sounded pretty good to me! WE never found the one we were looking for, and we walked waaaaay to long trying to find one, so I ended up parting from the girls and going home to bed.
The next morning the girls wanted to go to a museum, and I wasn't in the mood that early, so I stayed in bed. When I woke up and started chatting with the people in our room. They were 3 Norwegian kids, and they were absolutely hilarious. It was 2 guys and a girl, and I think they are some of my favo
rite people I have met on the trip. We wandered around the city for a while trying to find a Subway (because apparently Subway sandwiches are very expensive in Norway, and cheaper in the lower European Union). We never found that either, and ended up going to Dunkin Donuts instead, which are all over Berlin. After a good hearty breakfast of mysterious German cream cheese an
d bagels they decided they had to go to the museum I had tried to avoid earlier in the morning.
I reluctantly agreed, and we took a long leisurely walk toward the Pergamon Museum. This museum has the gates of Babylon INSIDE of it (they are huge!!!) and the Pergamon altar. They are huge ancient building/gates that were stolen from their original locations and pieced together inside this ginormous museum. It was
pretty cool.
I had to leave the awesome Norwegians and meet up with Carrie and Alison, and we did the free walking tour of Berlin. We had a very excited British girl as our tour guide, and learned a lot abo
ut the history of Berlin through WWII and the Cold War, and all the way through the fall of the Wall. It was actually fascinating, and I don't usually care too much about history. But everything in the city had been blown up, flattened, and rebuilt (some buildings 3 or 4 times) and so many significant events happened there.
After our walking tour, Brett (Alison's fiance) and his parents arrived from the US and we met them at the hotel we were all staying at together. The whole family was going to go have dinner
together, but I really wanted to do a Pub Crawl I had been told about by everyone who visited Berlin. I left the group and bravely went to the pub crawl alone :D.
It was a really great group of people, and we hopped from bar to bar all night, and ended up at a whacky German dance clu
b. I had a blast and was really glad I decided to do it, even if I did have to start it off by myself. By the end we were all very friendly, and I crashed in a hostel near the last bar with a group of Australian girls (since the metro wasn't running back to the hotel by the time we ended the night!!)
In the morning I met back up with the family and went on a bike tour of Berlin with the whole gang. It was the same tour company that ran the tour we did in Paris, and we rode around everywhere! We had lunch at a cute German biergarden and then saw even more places.
In the two days of tours we saw the site of Hitler's bunker, Checkpoint Charlie where you could cross from East to West Berlin (and into American territory), the Brandenburg gate, and my favorite Holocaust monument. It is this maze of 2711 giant concrete b
locks. They are arranged in straight lines, but they are all different heights and widths, and they are on different gradients....so when you walk through even though they are in straight lines sometimes you feel really lost. I'll have to put up pictures for you to get a real idea, but it was really moving for me.
Anyway, after the bike tour we had dinner with Carrie's German teacher (who had been teaching her the language for the last 6 weeks during her study abroad). This woman had lived through the entire drama of the Berlin Wall and had a lot of interesting things to tell us. She was like living history!! She was so patient with all of our questions and took the time to explain everything we asked. She was a really nice old lady, and told me to come back and live with her in Berlin and study at Humboldt University (where Einstein and Karl Marx studied!!). I considered it....
It was my last night in Europe :'( I packed up everything after din
ner and made arrangements to get to the airport. I was flying out of Tempelhof, a tiny little airport in the heart of Berlin that is being closed down next year. It is the world's oldest commercial airports. In my infinite wisd
om I left for the airport at 4am for my 6:55 am flight. I arrived there at about 4:40am...and the airport was definitely closed. I had to go all the way back to the hotel, went back to sleep for an hour and then tried again.
I was successful on my second try (and got rid of ALL my "extra" Euros on the way to and from the hotel). I hopped onto the plane to Brussels. I got to Brussels, went back through security, and got on the transatlantic leg of the flight (delayed by 2 hours of course).
I got to NY NY, and my aunts and uncles were nice enough to hire me a car from JFK into Jersey so I didn't have to deal with the buses after 14 hours of being in a plane.
And here I am, back in the US. It is pretty surreal, and it hasn't set in that I was gone for over 5 weeks. It w
ent in the blink of an eye....
I will be uploading pictures as soon as I can, so keep checking back!!
Tell me what you guys thought of the blog as a whole! I hope you liked it, because we probably spent a ton of US dollars trying to find the internet to keep you guys updated ;)
I wish it wasn't over, but there are a lot of other adventures ahead, and maybe we'll fire this back up one day for Europe round 2!
Be back to FL on July 7th!!
Cheers, Auf Weidersehen, Aur revior, Ciao, and Zbohem....
Kristyn
on a Monday. After a short wait we boarded our moving National Historic Monument and rode over Nob Hill and Russian Hill down to the Embarcadero and Fisherman's Wharf. At the wharf we made our way to the Alcatraz ferry only to find out that the next available ferry was on Friday. The guide books had said call in advance but had not said call a week in advance and again this is a Monday. I guess a lot of places are on Spring Break.
and began a tour of the mouth of the bay. The ferry went out and under the Golden Gate bridge and around Alcatraz and Angel Island, the Ellis Island of the West. It was a good cruise, a little windy on the way out, and hit all the highlights of the bay. Most of the fog had burned off but the Golden Gate Bridge was still partially wrapped in it.
site on our list involved us hiking up Nob Hill. While strenuous it was more impressive that they were actually able to build a city on these steep hills and while you may hear it talked about you must walk to the top of one the hills to truly appreciate how hilly the city is. Once at the top we stopped at Lombard street which is the world's crookedest street. This strange street consists of 10 switchbacks which were built to help the first automobiles ascend the steep incline. After watching some cars navigate down and a number of tourists almost get run over by standing for photos in the middle of the road we boarded another cable car and headed to Chinatown.
store of "tourist souvenirs." We walked down the main road for a number of blocks and then headed into the North Beach area which is the Little Italy of San Francisco. We stopped in Washington Square Park for a quick break and then tackled Telegraph Hill. At the top we rode a further 210 ft. to the top of the Coit Tower which provides
an awesome panorama of the whole city and surrounding Bay. After coming down form Telegraph Hill we tried to in vain to hail a cable car, it was rush hour and they were all crowded, and ended up hiking back over Russian Hill and Nob Hill back to out hostel and some well deserved rest.
