Eastern Europe - Dresden, Kraków, & Prague

Dresden

So, we made the spontaneous trip from Berlin to Dresden and got in around 9:30 at night. The city was completely dead, so after checking into the hostel (called Kangaroo Stop with lots of Australians there) we ended up just walking around the city and finding a random Greek restaurant to go in and chill at. On the way, we had a pretty heated snowball fight, but I mostly stayed clear of the guys’ shots. Monday morning, we got up really early so that we would have time to see the city before we had to leave. We walked from the new town to the old town, across the Elbe River, and saw some really impressive architecture. Dresden was the most destroyed/bombed city in the war, but the city was completely rebuilt (and is still being rebuilt) back to its original design. It’s quite a site. After walking around, we made our way to the train station to wait for our Mitfahrgelegenheit ride. Unfortunately, George’s phone was the only number the guy had, but George’s phone was lost after the snowball fight the night before. Therefore, we were slightly worried that no one was going to show up. After about 20 minutes of waiting, a guy finally showed up in a bright blue and green van, and we were off to Krakow.

Kraków,  Poland

Road Trip!

The ride to Krakow was awesome. The driver played what we called “Kenny G Techno” the entire way, meaning it was a smooth, mellow repetitive techno beat the entire time (7 ½ hours). We picked up a girl in some random city, and then dropped her off in Katowice, a big town outside of Krakow. Then we were dropped off in the city center, and made our way to a random hostel we found out about on the way to Poland.

Monday

Eating at Pod Wawelem

In Krakow, we got a 10 person dorm all to ourselves with just the 5 of us, in a completely separate building from the rest of the hostel. It was pretty much like we had an entire apartment floor to ourselves (kitchen, etc.). We put our stuff down and went immediately into the city to find something to eat. We decided to go to this traditional Polish restaurant the staff at our hostel recommended, called Pod Wawelem, which was a great idea. Liter beers for less than 2 Euro (after we did the conversion from Zloty to Euros)…. Yes please! We all ordered some kind of traditional Polish dish, including lamb sausage, honey ribs, huge meat platter, sauerkraut, potatoes, and red cabbage. Before our meal came, they served cut up pickles on a plate of sauerkraut. You know I didn’t touch that…. But I DID try everyone else’s main dishes, and it was delicious.

Monday night, we went out with the staff from our hostel to an Erasmus party (I explained what Erasmus is in an earlier post) at a bar, met some cool Polish people, and danced. Apparently in Krakow, they have the largest concentration of bars and clubs in one area in the world. I would agree with that…

Tuesday

Tuesday morning, we woke up early to catch the free walking tour of the city. We had a crazy tour guide. He was very energetic and sounded like he knew what he was talking about (always a good thing for tour guides), but he was EXTREMELY proud of his country… to the point that he asked if there was any Russians in the group (which there was), and he yelled to them “haha! We burned Moscow to the ground!” (among some other things that I won’t type). It was slightly awkward. Besides that, he gave a pretty good tour, but it was SOOO cold and he talked FOREVER, so once we got to the famous castle in Krakow, we split off from the tour group and went off on our own. And guess what was right next to the castle? The traditional Polish restaurant! Woohoo! We went back for another taste, this time ordering all different things, and also invited some Australian friends that we met on the tour. We found out they were actually staying at our same hostel, and so we made plans to hang out with them later that night.

 

On the way back to the hostel from the restaurant, we saw two little kids sliding down a hill on some ice and snow. We decided to join in, which ended up being 20 minutes of pure laughing and falling. Half the time I couldn’t even get up to the top of the hill because I kept sliding. Hilarious. After we got soaked in ice and snow in the freezing cold, we thought it would be a good idea to get cleaned up and get ready for the night. The guys got some Polish beer, and I got this special Polish vodka called Bison Grass, where they put an actual blade of grass from the Bialowieza forest in the bottle. Pretty interesting. To kill some time, the guys started arm wrestling, and this ended up in one rematch after another, to where George deservedly gained the title of champion… but not until he was red in the face to the point of suffocation. Oh, boys.

Tuesday night, we met up with our new Australian friends and went down to the Jewish Quarter to a relaxing bar. There we played “Guess Who?” where somebody writes the name of a famous person on a piece of paper, you put it on your forehead, and then you have to guess who you are by asking the others questions. I figured out mine first, but only because they gave me George Bush (go figure). Russell got pretty aggravated with his, since he was Shrek, and couldn’t understand that he was alive, but not real… hahaha…. Good times. 

Wednesday

Wednesday, Russell and Drew had to head back to Mainz, while Tyler, George, and I headed to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Our two new friends from the hostel, Marc from London, and Yume from Australia, joined us. Our train was really slow getting there, due to snow and ice on the tracks, so we missed the last English tour of the day. We decided to just get a written guidebook and walk around, but we only had about an hour and a half to do so. Well, that was enough. When I went to Dachau in December, I wasn’t quite sure how to react, as I saw tons of people taking pictures and talking and such. Well, there was a whole different atmosphere at Auschwitz. Most of the original buildings were still there, and they even had prisoners’ original belongings on display. I couldn’t even imagine taking pictures at this place. I took just one, the entrance to the camp, to remember where I had been.

Afterwards, we headed back to Krakow and rested for awhile at the hostel. Tyler, George, and I grabbed some dinner at a very, very small Polish restaurant, famous for their Polish dumplings. DELICIOUS! Then we made our way to the train station to grab a night train to Prague.

Polish dumplings... yummm

Prague, Czech Republic

Marc and Yume were on our overnight train, but they made reservations for sleeper compartments (we didn’t), so we met back up with them once we were off the train. Even though we didn’t have beds to sleep on, the train wasn’t that full and the seat arms went up, so we were able to all lay down and sleep actually pretty comfortably (for a train)… definitely beats my night train experience to Munich. In our compartment, we met a guy from Valencia, Spain, who had pretty much lived all over the world as a language teacher and was applying to live in the US. He was really cool and we answered a lot of his questions about America (Yes, you really DO need a car!).

Thursday

Jewish Quarter

We got to Prague around 7:30am and all 5 of us went to the hostel to check in. We couldn’t check in until around 12:00pm, so we went to their lounge/movie room, and we all passed out immediately while watching some random horrible movie with Matthew McConaughey in it. We finally got to check in, got ready, and then headed into the city for a Sandemann’s free walking tour. Our tour guide was AWESOME… I think we all agreed it was the best tour guide we ever had. He was just completely sarcastic, and told the history of Prague, of the Czech Republic, and of the buildings that surrounded us in a funny, easy to understand, interactive way. Halfway through the tour, the guide’s friends came with his dog, which was a complete Samson lookalike! Huge, friendly, chocolate lab. We learned that the St. Charles Bridge is made with half organic products (egg shells, people!) and walked into a beautiful church with a dead man’s arm hanging above us (a relic). It’s kind of ironic in the Czech Republic, because they have a ton of churches, but most of the population is Atheist, so the churches are just there as a historical reminder I assume.

Marc, Yume, Me, & Tyler at the Pub Crawl

Thursday night, we ate at a pizza place by our hostel (and had our first taste of the infamous Czech beer), then headed off to the Sandemann’s Pub Crawl. Yeah, I know. I said I would NEVER do these again, but I was persuaded to go by the other people in my group. Well, it turned out that all the promises this pub crawl made, they actually lived up to them! We started out in a bar in the basement of an old church (another reminder that churches aren’t really used here), where for 2 hours, we had unlimited beer, sangria, and shots (Absinthe included… which is HUGE in Prague). There was also beer pong and flip cup. It turns out that the night we went, the pub was overloaded with Americans and Australians, which made it easy to make new friends. There was even a military guy there from San Antonio who had been in Prague for awhile, so he was really happy about meeting George and I since we’re both from Texas. We went to a couple of other bars, but decided to call it a night when one of the girls threw up all over mine, Tyler’s, and George’s jackets. Ugh.

Friday

Friday, we slept until about 12:30pm (whoops), and so we tried to make it to the Jewish Museum before it closed (FAIL – too long of a line with only 1 hour to spare), then we made the long trek up to the Prague castle (largest medieval castle in the world), only to find out that it just closed. So then we just walked around St. Charles Bridge (the sun was already gone by this point) and got some pretty night views of the city and the castle. We wanted to go on the Prague Beer Challenge (where you go to different Czech pubs and learn all about Czech beer and why it’s so awesome), but the tour guide told us he was only going to do the tour in Spanish that day. So…FAIL of a day. We decided to cheer ourselves up by partaking in the pub crawl for yet another night (there was a discount for second timers! Woo!), which once again, was a ton of fun… in the beginning. But this time around, the people weren’t as fun, so we split off from the group kind of early and just walked around the city. 

Saturday

Saturday, we made sure to get up in time to see the Prague Castle. We made the long trek again (who know how many steps??) and purchased the “short tour”. Short tour, it was. I’m not quite sure if things would have made a lot more sense or have a lot more significance if we had a guided tour, but things were really not that interesting inside. The outside however, and all around the courtyards, was gorgeous. Prague was barely touched by the war, and you can definitely tell in the city. Everywhere you walk, there is some cool looking building that you know is older than you can imagine.

Then we walked over to the Lennon Wall, which is a wall honoring John Lennon’s philosophy of peace after some university students held an uprising against the Prague police in the 1980s. It was essentially a huge wall of graffiti that had been written on over and over again, with Beatles quotes and signatures of people who had previously been there, among other things. I thought it was such a cool idea.

Saturday night, we thought we’d give the Prague Beer Challenge another chance, but this time the guy told us he wasn’t going to give the tour at all. However, he did take us to a local bar and wrote a bunch of places on my map for us to check stuff out and why. There, we tried some kind of blackberry beer. Very interesting. There were also some Germans there that we talked with. We mapped out our own “beer challenge” for the night. First stop, a traditional Czech restaurant for some Czech cuisine, where we could also try the original Budweiser beer. The place was pretty cool, but the service was really slow and I couldn’t even finish the beer. Not my cup of tea I suppose.

Taste Testers

Next stop, The Prague Beer Museum… except it was just a bar, not a museum. Here, they had over 30 different kinds of Czech beer on tap, all with detailed (English… woo) descriptions and tasters that you could get for really cheap. I tried 5 different kinds: 2 that won 1^st and 2^nd prize at the annual Czech beer competition; a raspberry beer; an unfiltered beer; and finally, a “cappuccino” beer, that yes, tasted EXACTLY like a thick cappuccino milkshake. 

Next stop, a really popular bar/club that Czechs like to hang out at (apparently), where the guys played some foosball with some Czechs, and then we called it a night. 

Sunday

Time you enjoy wasting was not wasted.

Sunday, we checked out of the hostel, and then went to straight to the train station to figure out how to get back to Mainz. We were originally going to take another Mitfahrgelegenheit, but a driver we found only had 2 seats and didn’t leave until late that night. We decided to just take the next train back, which actually ended up being a coach bus all the way to Nuernberg, and then a train on to Mainz. So, overall, a crazy, adventurous, spontaneous trip that I know I will never forget. I have definitely fallen in love with Eastern Europe, not only because of its amazing exchange rates, but also because of its beautiful buildings and historical remnants. Also, the local people we met were all extremely friendly and willing to help us with anything we needed. Hungary is up next!

Check out pictures from my entire trip on Picassa here!