Following my previous Europe post, it's now time to get into the stuff I didn't get around to emailing my parents (i.e. the last week or so of the trip). Without the constrants of "writing an email on my Kindle" (which, is, by the way, a massive pain in the ass. Gmail in the browser, once the message gets long enough to need to scroll, it has a tendency to jump all the way to the top if you ever try to move the cursor and be needlessly difficult to get your cursor back down to the bottom. In the email app, it's just impossible to find drafts or anything other than the Inbox), organizing those thoughts (i.e. converting bullet points to paragraphs) is a tricky thing to care about, so, I'm just gonna sorta transcribe my bullet points, throwing in some context here, turning fragments into sentences there, et cetera.
This post is where I discovered that it's a good thing my Blogger is my writing blog, and my art blog is WordPress. Trying to wrangle pictures into the position I want them in is a real hassle on Blogger. Apologies about the lack of visual aid, though, if its any consolation, most of my pictures were things your average person finds boring, like walls, or tile floors, or the one I really regret not getting: The dirt in Munich that was full of discarded bottle caps. Nothing says "Here's me in Prague," like a nearly-orthographic view of a cobblestone sidewalk...
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9/24/12
- Made it to Oktoberfest for real. Hung out at the Paulaner tent all day and most of the evening.
- Reason #672 that I didn't fit in with the group I was traveling with: They were all about grabbing steins; if I were going to steal anything it would've been the badass soup bowl with the lions on it.
- After a couple liters of beer, I decided I needed to go home, something about not being able to walk straight or stay awake or not feel nauseous. I grabbed one of our spare U-bahn tickets and, after making sure I knew exactly how to get home, left the tent. After a lap around the festival grounds, I staggered back to the tent, so, the good news is, I was safe and sound, and the search team could be called off. The bad news, though, is that it's a lot harder to claim I have a good sense of direction.
- So, to summarize our only real trip to Oktoberfest while I was in Europe:
- 1 almost-lost tourist
- 1 almost-fight
- 1 severe laceration
- 1 expectoration that night (at least one the next morning as well...)
- And, I'm going to take a wild guess and say 9 serious hangovers...
- We headed home in shifts, watched one of the last NFL games to be ruined by scab refs, and packed for our Czech Republic trip.
9/25/12
- Train ride from Munich to Prague, via a very short stop in Pilsen.
- Spent most of the Munich-Pilsen leg sleeping.
- The Czech countryside's kinda funny. It's full of quaint little villages, aside from the ubiquitous solar panels and satellite dishes.
- The ride from Pilsen to Prague was full of beautiful views; occasionally, I had to look out the window for them...
- After a short walking tour of Prague, I quickly came to the conclusion that my statements about how sexy Salzburg was were premature. Prague was easily my favorite city of the trip. It had all (or most) of the traditional beauty and history of Salzburg with the history and architecture and whatnot, but Prague had that extra layer of grunge —graffiti, crumbling façades, scary-looking back alleys— that all those years of environment art training taught me to find so sexy. Nothing quite like a city that shows its age, and Prague shows a lot of it...
- We grabbed dinner at U Vejvodu, goulash and dumplings.
- Then we went bar-hopping.
- First to the Blue Light, this dingy, little, poorly-lit jazz bar in which I spent what probably looked like a suspicious amount of time taking reference photos of its awesome, dingy bathroom.
- Second, to Hany Bany, which drew a lot of inspiration from the '50's and covered itself with Pulp Fiction memorabilia.
9/26/12
- Our only full day in Prague, we did some of the touristy stuff, specifically Prague Castle & St. Virtus Cathedral. We also walked through the Jewish Quarter, but everything was closed for Yom Kippur, so we couldn't really be touristy there, just creepily shove our cameras through gaps in the fences.
- Unfortunately, my camera was dying during the self-guided tours of St. Virtus & Prague Castle, so I got about half the pictures I wanted (also, it didn't make it into the original email, but after the return trip from Salzburg, my camera leaped out of its holster at the Munich train station, so it was in a bad state even with a full battery). Then it died completely the whole time we were in the Jewish Quarter.
- We grabbed lunch at U Vejvodu's sister restaurant U Vltavy. The food was great, but the service was very, very slow. Here, where our group split up to conquer three of the five outside tables, we noticed that we were a large enough group we could easily take over a small restaurant.
- At our table, there was a plate of Wiener Schnitzel, one of Chicken Souvlaki, Smoked Ham & Bread Dumplings, and, in front of me, a giant pile of honey-glazed ribs. Probably the best meal that I payed for in Europe.
- Accross the street from us (and, all over Prague, especially the Jewish Quarter, it seemed) the buildings were all supported by these excellent reliefs, like Atlas-esque figures holding up balconies or animal-shaped buttresses. It was really cool and made me regret the death of my camera and the atrophy of my drawing skills. Then again, if I'd known the service was going to be as slow as it was, I might have started drawing knowing that I'd probably have filled up six freaking pages, while learning how to cross-hatch to boot, in the time it took them to raise the pig from a piglet, butcher it, and prepare it specially for us or whatever it was that was taking so dang long...
- After that, we headed back to the hotel to charge our cameras and whatnot while waiting for our newest party-member's plane to land. Then we did what any rational group of heavy-drinking tourists would do in a place where the alcohol is so cheap: Got a bunch of cans of beer and serving-size bottles of wine from a nearby convenience store and had a little party in the living room of the couple who popped for the nice suite.
- Once our... eleventh party member showed up, we finished our convenience store libations and went out in search of dinner, but not before picking up one more follower. We tried Hany Bany again, but found them way too crowded for a twelve-person table, so we headed back to U Vejvodu and pushed three or four tables together. By this point, our party contained two native Czechs, who put out the call and got us joined by another two...
- Since it was getting late, and since it was to be our last night in Prague, I went for something I haven't had since before my grandma died: Fruit dumplings (knedliky). I was offended to have had to order them off the dessert menu —seriously, potato dumplings full of fruit and covered in sugar. Who, in their right mind would put that on the dessert menu?— as, for this American of Czech ancestry, that had always been a main course, which I made abundantly clear, and was, thankfully, vindicated by every Czech at the table agreeing with me that it's not just a quirk of Wisconsin Czechs: Czech Czechs apparently eat them as entrees too.
- After everyone needed a break from U Vejvodu (and round after round of Pilsner Urquell, a fine beer, but it can't be all that you drink, especially when you're used to nursing IPAs, not slamming pilsners...), we lost probably half the party to sleep, and the rest of us moved on to find another bar.
- And we found Kozicka, thanks to our Prague-native guide. A cute little bar with a goat theme and a deceptively tiny upper floor. The basement is kinda massive. There's a noisy, cramped area near the bar for people who want to dance or shout their conversations or whatever. Or there's a couple quieter 'wings' where you can grab a table and drink in relative peace (depending on the relative peacefulness of your party...). After a couple more rounds of Krusovice, we called it a night.
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Okay, well, this is getting kinda long. Guess I'll stick Ostrava, Innsbruck, and Brixen in Part 3...
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