Prague Part I

Darcy and I inside our room at the boathouse hostel.
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On my February break, I went with two friends to Prague (the capital of the Czech Republic). We left on Saturday morning, and after a long day of lots of airplanes, buses, trains, and searching for ATMS, we finally made it to our hostel, which was located south of the city center, in a more residential area.

Because we were exhausted and still recovering from a crazy Friday night, we ventured into the city just to get dinner and then came back and crashed. The hostel (called Boathouse Hostel) was right on the river that runs through Prague and is run by these amazingly nice women who give you a little free gift of postcards and maps when you get there- it had a really great atmosphere and we met some other American students who are studying in Rome for the semester but were also on break and staying at the boathouse.

On top of the astronomical clock in old town- looking down on the city.
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Sunday morning, after a delicious and HUGE breakfast at the hostel, we started walking through the city to try and get our bearings. Highlights were the Municipal House (with parts of the art nouveau interior designed by Mucha and several concert halls inside), the church of our Lady of Tyn, and the Astronomical Clock in the middle of old town that has moving parts that act out a little story each hour. We climbed the astronomical tower and got to see some amazing views, and were unduly confused by the fact that there's something called the "powder gate" in old town, and something else across town called the "powder tower". Lexy and Darcy's tour books provided lots of funny and random information in badly translated Czech, and mine insisted they were the same building. they aren't.

View at night of the Vltava River and the Charles Bridge.
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Once we figured out the confusion, we kept walking west across the famous Charles bridge and up towards the Prague castle, where we stopped for some tea on the road leading up the castle. We also stopped at St. Nicholas church, my favorite stop of the day; it doesn't look like much on the inside but is INSANELY baroque and awesome on the inside. One of the things I really loved about Prague was that at one time, they didn't number any of the buildings so there are door signs above a lot of the older buildings that identify who lived inside/what store was located there. (A lion for someone royal, a fish for the fish seller, etc). There are some famous door signs on the road we walked on to get up near the castle.

The Church of our Lady of Tyn.
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We ended our second day with dinner at our hostel (delicious and huge and homemade) and spent the evening in, mostly planning the remainder of our time in Prague and getting information about possible day trips.