Transit to Ljubljana (August 12, 2012)

Ralph here.  I woke up fairly early and ran from our hotel back to the Metronome.  In addition to serving as an ironic commentary on five-year plans, the Metronome is surrounded by a large park which is likely the only large, flat area in Prague.  I added a few miles in the paths of this tree-shaded park, along with a few Czech runners.  Upon my return, we ate breakfast, checked out of the hotel, and walked (downhill!) to the train station for our first European rail journey to Ljulbljana, the capital of Slovenia.

When we purchased the tickets a couple days earlier at the train station [from the angriest czech we met], we learned the difference between purchasing a ‘ticket’ and a ‘reservation.’  The former just allows you onto the train, the latter “reserves” (makes sense!) a seat.  If you do not purchase a reservation, then you just need to hope that not all the reservations are purchased, so you can then sit down in an actual chair rather than hanging out in the train passageway like a particularly committed panhandler.

We boarded the train and sat down at what we thought were our reserved seats.  We learned otherwise when the actual reservation-holders showed up.  Another traveler showed us on our ticket how we could find our reserved seats (they were in the next railcar) and we headed out of the compartment.

After jostling our way down the moving train passageway with our baggage, tripping over numerous non-reservation-holding Eurokids spending their summer backpacking across the Continent, we made it to our seats.  Unfortunately, they were in adjacent compartments.  Oh well, at least we had seats, unlike the free spirits in the hall.

Our first train was from Prague to Vienna, where we had a 45 minute layover and bought a pizza from a crowded train station restaurant.  We then boarded our second train, which was much less crowded, had more comfortable seats, and even had a power outlet in the compartment.  [Best train of the day – the seats reclined without taking up additional space and there were jump seats in the hallway in addition to things Ralph mentioned.]  Also, Lynnae and I were in the same compartment.  Lynnae was exhausted, and slept through some picture-perfect scenery as we wound through the Austrian mountains.  Unfortunately, I did not take any photos so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

We got off our second train at Maribor, Slovenia.  We had been concerned about the 7-minute layover before our last train departed Maribor, but no need to worry – our last train was already sitting just across the platform.

The last train took off for the approximately hour long trip to the Slovenian capital.  This train was by far the best of them all.  There were no compartments, but two sets of two seats faced each other with a table in between.  The train was nearly empty except for a large party of Indian people playing cards right behind us.

When the conductor came by to check our tickets, he asked for our reservation.  We did not have a reservation for this leg of the trip, and didn’t think it was an issue as the train was about 10% full.  The conductor’s English was very limited, and my Slovenian ability consists of me speaking English loudly and slowly, so it was not easy communication.  Still, we could understand that he was asking for money for two reservations.  We didn’t have enough cash for two reservations, so he just took what few euros we had and issued us one reservation.  In sum: we got shook down by a Slovenian Railways conductor.

We arrived in Ljubljana (pronounced lube-yana) around 9:40pm.  Thankfully the rail station information office closed at 10, so we headed there to get brochures and a city map.  Slovenia is a small country both physically and in population, with only 2 million people total.  As Slovenia’s largest city, Ljubljana only has a population of 272,000, about equivalent to Fort Wayne, Indiana, with a similarly-sized downtown.  As such, all we had to do was tell the clerk our hotel name and he was immediately able to point it out on the map.  We wandered the darkened streets for a bit and eventually stumbled our way onto the hotel.  [This also means that all hotels have their own directional signs]

[And some photos of beautiful Prague that we didn’t have reason to include earlier.]

Prague Day 5 (August 11, 2012)

Lynnae again – We slept in (on our twin beds – I felt like we were on a fifties sitcom) and went down to breakfast at our hotel.  We walked through Wenceslas Square [Ralph: not really a square, more like a long boulevard) to the Museum of Communism.  It’s located above a McDonald’s and next to a casino.  The admission prices were a little steep but the information was good.  It gave the history of communism in Prague and illustrated what life was like under communism.   It also included an exhibit about North Korea.

(Wenceslas Square)

(Posters advertising the Museum of Communism)

Next we walked through Old Town and the Jewish Quarter.  We were planning to go the Jewish Museum.  We were surprised to find it closed until we realized it was Saturday.  Oops!  We did peek into the old Jewish Cemetery where thousands possibly a hundred thousand Jews were buried.  They were not allotted any additional space so they added more soil and layered the graves.  (That’s why the gravestones are so close together.)

(In Jewish Quarter. Note the ‘normal’ clock on top, and the Hebrew lettering clock below it.  The Hebrew clock hands move “counterclockwise” and the long hand is the hour hand, not the minute hand.)

(Synagogue)

(Statue of Kafka)

We looked at other sightseeing options but weren’t feeling very enthused about any of them.  So instead, we wandered through Old Town.  I bought a delicious pastry and we enjoyed the people and the sights.

We decided to eat back at Matylda’s again; cheap, convenient and completely delicious.  We headed back to the hotel and packed up.

Prague Day 4 (August 10 2012)

Lynnae here – We woke up early Friday morning and ran down to the Charles Bridge.  The run there was easy because of course we were running entirely downhill.  The Bridge was pretty neat early in the morning.  It was mostly deserted so we had unblocked views of all the statues along the bridge. [The Charles Bridge during the main part of the day is jam-packed with tourists, street vendors, and pickpockets.  But in the morning it’s pretty nice.  If you go to Prague I recommend getting to the Charles Bridge by 8am to beat the crowds – by 8:45am it was really starting to fill up.]  We don’t have any photos of this because we didn’t want to take the camera on our run.  We ran back along the river to a park where Ralph did some exercises and I stretched.  Then we made our way back up the hill.  We got back to our hotel ate breakfast and packed up our belongings.  We moved two doors down.  It was too early to check-in so we left our luggage with the hotel and walked back downtown to Old Town.

We bought lunch at street stands – bread and raspberries for about three bucks.  Yum!  Then we met up with Marek, owner/operator of the World War II in Prague walking tour.  The tour was fantastic.  We saw key locations during the occupation of Prague and walked through the Jewish Quarter (Although the Jewish people never really returned to Prague, the quarter has been preserved to commemorate  the Jewish people that lived there.).  Marek took us underneath the city to the Old City where the rebels were headquartered and told us the details of the Prague Assassination of the “Butcher of Prague”, Reinhard Heydrich.  He also touched on Prague under communism.  It was an excellent tour.  Marek was full of great information and he presented it well.  He was a little hard to understand at first but he spoke English very well, including colloquialisms, no doubt due to his year in Milwaukee. [By “very well,” Lynnae means that his syntax and vocabulary were extensive.  However, I think his accent was hard to understand at first and he did not have a lot of English voice inflection, which made it harder for me to understand him.]   It was fascinating to hear some of the same stories told from a different perspective.

(We walked through that door behind the happy couple to get to the old underground city.  We saw a huge number of brides and grooms getting photos taken throughout the city.)

(Down in the old city)

After the tour, we paid Marek and walked across the river and up to the Metronome. [On his website, he says “pay only if you like the tour,” which is true; he didn’t ask for the fee until the end of the tour.  I hope he doesn’t get stiffed on the tour fees often.]  It’s a very large functional metronome that was erected in 1991 on the slab that used to hold an enormous statue of Stalin.  The Metronome itself was not that impressive but it was a very impressive view of the city.  The immediate surrounding area has become a skate park.  After taking in the view for a while – we climbed down and then up to our new hotel and checked in.   It felt like we were continually climbing stairs or walking steep streets while in the city.

(Metronome from a distance)

(Closer view)

(The ‘Before’ Photo, stolen from the Internet)

(Ralph figuring out which buildings were which)

(The views)

After settling in we walked a few blocks to the restaurant Mlsnej Kocour, where we enjoyed a delicious meal and lingered over our food.  I absolutely loved eating in Prague; the food was so good and so inexpensive.  We ordered Czech Brie as an appetizer (spiced Brie with peppers and onions), Ralph had wild boar with dumplings and I had veal and we had dessert pancakes with cream and strawberries all for less than $35 including tip.  It was something I could have gotten used to very easily.  After our long dinner we went back to the hotel and turned in for the night.

Prague Day 3 (August 9 2012)

Ralph again.  This morning I was feeling somewhat less sick, so I went for a five-mile run up to the base of Prague Castle and back.  After we ate breakfast, we headed toward the Franz Kafka Museum on the banks of the Vtalva River.  But first we stopped at the McDonald’s “McCafe” across the street from the hotel, which was more high-class than any coffee shop I’ve seen:

While Kafka wrote in German, he was a Czech Jew who had a deep, if somewhat unrequited, affinity for Prague.  After his death and the rise of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, academic study of Kafka literature was prohibited, presumably because the tone of mistrust of authority and of the absurdity of bureaucratic systems – two topics that were not well received in Eastern Bloc countries.  Of course, now that Prague is capitalist and a tourist destination as well, there is a minor industry around Kafka tourism.

The museum is fairly small but does a good job of explaining Kafka’s life circumstances and work.  The museum is mostly dark, with exhibits lit in a manner that throws shadows across the floor and wall.  The basement partly consists of a long corridor with false file cabinet drawers from floor to ceiling, each with a cabinet label of one of Kafka’s family, associates, or characters (admittedly, the names are re-used several times over).  A few of the “drawers” are open and are part of the exhibit.

Photography was prohibited inside the museum, so this is the outside.

After completing the Kafka Museum, we headed back to Prague Castle to see the rest of the exhibits that we missed the previous day (When you buy a combo ticket at Prague Castle, you can see each exhibit on the ticket only once, but you get two days for them all) [making the audioguides even more ridiculously priced.  They know you can’t go through it all in three hours.]  First came the Old Palace:

Then the Gentlewoman’s Building:

The last museum on the combo ticket was the Castle Gallery, which mostly consisted of portraits.  Again, no photography allowed, but we went through it pretty quickly anyways.

After lunch we went into Prague’s Old Town square.  We knew we were nearing Old Town when the combined gravitational pull of all the other tourists made it impossible for us to resist.  The square is just about what you might guess: a large square with old-city pavers, a big Gothic cathedral, an indistinguishable statue, and a police van with a sign that says “DO NOT CHANGE MONEY WITH PEOPLE ON THE STREET.”  The sign was in several languages but only in big print in English.  I suppose it’s especially a problem with American and British tourists getting ripped off on the exchange rate.  Curiously, the police van also had a water bowl inside for people to water their dogs.

The biggest draw of the Old Town square was the Astronomical Clock which is the oldest of its kind in Europe and the only one still functioning.  Legend is that the creator was blinded after making it to prevent him making another.  Who knows.

At this point, we had one remaining night in our Prague hotel, but we wanted to stay some more in Prague.  Two more days, we decided.  The current hotel did not have any availability for us (the next day we saw a very large tour group checking in, so it makes sense) so we made arrangements to move about 100 feet down the street to new lodgings for two days.

For dinner, we celebrated cultural hegemony by eating dinner at the McDonald’s we had patronized earlier in the day for coffee.  Even though most restaurant meals are much less expensive in Prague than a comparable meal in the US, fast food is an exception.  The price of our meal was very close to what you would find in the US and, because of language issues, we ended up ordering more than we expected.  [Eating at McDonald’s made us appreciate even more all the inexpensive, delicious Czech food we’ve been eating.]  With another European cultural experience in the bag, we finished the day.

Final note: From looking at our blog statistics, we have had readers from several countries, not just the US – including Qatar and India.  Please leave a comment to let us know who you are and how you found this website.  Thanks!

Prague Day 2 (August 8 2012)

Ralph again.  We slept in and ate breakfast at the hotel – the spread was very similar to what was available in our Munich hotel, and was more than enough to last us past lunch.  We walked downhill to the Vtalva River, along its banks for a bit, then crossed one of the several bridges to begin the long climb up to Prague Castle.

They picked a good site for this castle.  It is by far the highest point in Prague.  From the riverbank, it is about a mile up at about a 4-5% grade, including a very long staircase.  At the top is a square with the Castle Guards at the entry.  They were poor examples of military bearing (constantly shifting their weight, looking around, etc) but at least they are topped by statues of Czechs stabbing and clubbing their enemies to death:

Prague Castle is actually a complex of several buildings, including a Gothic cathedral and the residence of the Czech president.  [This is pretty typical of castles.  The president asked to live in the castle.  Previously, the royal family lived there.]  You can get into the Castle courtyard for free, but to get into any of the buildings or museums within you need to pay a fairly steep admission fee.  However, as a tourist, you’ve already spent 30 minutes climbing uphill to get to the place, so you are going to pay whatever the good Czechs charge (around $25/person to see nearly all the museums).  We did, however, pass up on the audioguide, which was the right call – nearly all the museum signs were in English, and the audioguide was pretty expensive to boot.  [Understatement – the audioguide was more than the cost of admission for three hours, more if you wanted it longer.  You also had to pay a high deposit.]

First we saw St. Vitus’ Cathedral.  It is, of course, gigantic.  It is the burial site of St. Wenceslas (Vaclav in Czech), who is considered to be the patron saint and eternal ruler of Bohemia. (Yes, the Wenceslas from the Christmas carol).

Next we went through the museum on the history of Prague Castle.  Honestly I expected this to be really boring but it turned out to be the most interesting part of the Castle complex.  It wasn’t just about the Castle, but also about the history of Bohemia from prehistory until the Velvet Revolution against Czechoslovakia’s Communist rulers. [This is what I was most looking forward to.  I was not disappointed.  It’s interesting to hear some of the same stories from different viewpoints.]

Next we went to the Basilica of St George, a small basilica on the grounds:

[The St. George of St. George and the dragon.]

We also went to Golden Lane, a series of small two-room houses that were purchased from their modern owners and “reconstructed” to resemble medieval times.  [The houses had been built into the niches of the outside wall.  Originally for the castle guards, eventually they were bought and sold to anyone.  The homes were one by one made to look “more medieval” by their owners who could then charge visitors admission to look around.]  One of them was where Franz Kafka wrote A Country Doctor.  That house, of course, is now a gift shop.

The upstairs of the houses contained many suits of medieval armor and a carnival game where you could shoot a crossbow at a target about thirty feet away.  I thought I did pretty well until Lynnae tried her hand at it and landed two of three in the bullseye.  [We have video of us shooting the crossbow but we can’t post videos here.]

For lunch we ate on the castle grounds.  We had goulash in a bread bowl, a traditional Czech meal.  Not too long after that we were kicked out of the palace grounds as it was closing for the day, so we sat on a wall on the edge of the castle grounds for a while enjoying the view:

Then walked through St. Wenceslas’ vineyard, which have been around for a long time and are the oldest in Prague. [Also the oldest in the Czech republic.  It’s been around since 906 AD.  It’s next to the castle grounds at the top of the hill so it also has great city views.]

We walked back to the hotel and ate leftover pizza for dinner (thankfully it had a minibar fridge).

Munich Day 5 and Transit to Prague (7 August 2012)

Ralph here.  We woke up pretty early and took the subway to the Englischer Garten, a very large urban park on the east side of Munich.  It is the second-largest urban park in the world, right behind London’s Richmond Park and ahead of Central Park in New York.  It is not very wide – maybe a half-mile – but stretches for about four miles along the edge of the city.

En route to the Englischer Garten, we stopped at the Munich central train station’s Deutsche Bahn (German national railroad) information desk to print out our tickets to Prague.  I ordered them on the Internet but you have to have a printout of the ticket before you board (the tickets are sent as a PDF file in a confirmation email).  We haven’t been lugging a computer printer around with us, so I figured we could just go to the railroad’s information desk and they could print it for us.

No dice, when they looked up our confirmation code they had no record of us purchasing any tickets.  Obviously, I had, but it meant nothing to these heartless German bureaucrats.  It seemed appropriate that I faced Kafkaesque bureaucracy en route to Kafka’s home city, so we resolved to print out the tickets at an Internet café in the train station.  The Internet café wouldn’t open for another hour, so we continued onto the Englischer Garten and decided we would print out our tickets at the Internet café on our way back to the hotel.  Easy enough.

The Englischer Garten is pretty much one gigantic lawn with paths and trees through it, as well as a couple random monuments.  [We saw many cyclists and people walking their dogs.  We also so a few people on horseback.]  We stayed there for about a half hour, watching the early-morning bike commuters.  We headed back to the central station, printed out our tickets, and returned to the hotel to pack up.

When we arrived back at the central station to await our rail journey to Prague, I discovered that the word “BUS” printed on our tickets did not mean “Business class” but instead meant “you will ride a bus to Prague.”  Apparently, the German national railway also operates a bus line.  It was all for the best though; the bus was clean and comfortable and got us to Prague faster than any of the rail options – and far less expensive as well.  Plus we did not have to drive.  [The bus had a drive attendant to distribute snacks we paid for.  No one wanted any so her job seemed pretty easy.  More importantly, each set of seats had a power outlet so we were able to keep our electronics charged throughout the journey.]  Surprisingly both the people to our immediate left and immediately behind us on the bus were Minnesotans.

After five hours on the bus through the German and Czech countryside (think Wisconsin without the drought and with more metric system) the driver snaked us through the evening rush hour traffic into the center of Prague and dumped us unceremoniously at the main train station.  I had read on the Internet that it is one of the most architecturally impressive train stations in the world.  This is kind of a lie.  The atrium of the old Prague train station is impressive but has fallen into disrepair:

But the actual train station is beyond it and looks as indistinguishable as every modern train station or airport.  [It was kind of jarring to step down from the old station into the new, modern and very red station.]

Thankfully that bland conformity means that most signage being in English as well as Czech.  In fact, this is something I did not expect at all in Prague – nearly all signage, especially in tourist areas, is in English, even more so than we saw in Germany.  This is odd because British and American tourists seemed to be the minority of tourists.  Lynnae thinks there may be a resistance to German signage because of the German occupation during World War II (more in a future post).  Maybe it has to do with the close relationship the US has had with the Czech Republic since Czechoslovakia rejected Communism in 1989.  But who knows.  At any rate, it was very easy to get around Prague without knowing the local language.

Before leaving the train station we went to the “Bankomat” (ATM) and withdrew the local currency, the Czech crown – while part of the European Union, the Czech Republic does not use the Euro ($1 is approximately equal to 20 crowns).  The relatively simple exchange rate made it easier to do currency conversion in my head while looking at a bill or credit card slip, but it did feel like we were using Monopoly money.  I felt wealthy handing a 500-crown bill to a store clerk – then remembering it was $25.

The site for Prague was originally chosen because it was on a steep promontory jutting into the Vtalva River, which cuts through the middle of the current city.  While the location was suitable for building Prague Castle, it means that the entire city is on a slant leading down to the riverbank.  That also means that we were hauling our baggage uphill for a mile, trying to find the Clarion Hotel Prague City.  We eventually navigated our way through the heavily graffitied streets (Seriously – someone should call Sherlock Holmes, right now there is a loose Vandal in Bohemia).

After consulting Tripadvisor we ate dinner at Matylda’s, a Czech restaurant almost adjacent to the hotel.  The food was really good and restaurant prices in Prague are very cheap compared to the US (but not for fast food, surprisingly).  [“Really good” does not do justice to the wonderfully sumptuous food.  Ralph ordered a pizza that was in fact “really good.”  However, I ordered roast duck with red cabbage and dumplngs.  It was absolutely delicious.  My mouth is watering as I think about it and I’m not even hungry.  The roast duck was perfect, crispy on the outside and tender on the inside.  The dumplings were good and the red cabbage was the best I have ever eaten anywhere.  Plus, our meal including tip was under $25. Pretty unbeatable.]  Lynnae bought a 20-crown ice cream cone from the KFC (featuring the Kentucky Meal) on the corner, we walked in the immediate vicinity for a while and turned in.