Sunday, June 29, 2008

Day 14 - Prague/Kutna Hora

A quick note... please read the blog right before this one.  I have posted 2 at the same time.  So, read Day 12 before Day 13...



If you aren't careful, it's easy to just spend your time in the city everywhere you go.  I think my favorite thing about traveling to new places is getting outside the city and exploring the culture and landscape a little more...  Which is exactly what we decided to do on this day.  After a quick check with the front desk of Sir Toby's Hostel, we decided to go to a little town about an hour south of Prague called Kutna Hora.  The main reason we decided to go there is because it houses a very unique and totally random Bone Church.  What is a bone church, you might ask.  Well, I haven't ever been to any others, but this one is a church surrounded by a graveyard, which houses bones of 40,000 different human beings.  Everything in this church that isn't wall is human bones.  For example, the center of the church has a chandelier which is made up of every bone in the human body.  Obviously, the fixture uses multiple bones of the same type, but the cool part is that it uses every bone in the human body... and it's a chandelier.  Pretty interesting stuff.  I would recommend it to anyone traveling to Prague for a few days.  


I would not, however, recommend spending a lot of time in the town.  We walked around for a few hours, thinking we might stumble upon something cool and we ended up just getting tired and bored.  For example, we sat on this bench for about 30 minutes or so, throwing rocks at a dead bird.  Then, when that got old, we noticed that there was an ice cream cone next to the bird.  Josh decided that the bird would look much cooler with a waffle cone on it's head, so he made sure that happened.  Then we threw a few more rocks at it....


We got back to the train station just in time to jump on the train before it took off back to Prague.  Just in the nick in fact.... anyway, we must have boarded the wrong train, because we stopped every 5 minutes or so.  It took an hour to get to Kutna Hora, and about 2 1/2 to get back to Prague.  Not sure what we did but that tested my patience a little bit.  Luckily the iPod was charged enough to get me all the way back... that reminds me.  One thing I have been doing on this trip is just listening to my iPod randomly.  Right now I have 2416 songs on it, and I just am hitting random whenever I get on a train.  Obviously I will skip songs, but it's been really nice to just have anything pop up.  I may sound super dorky right now talking about this, but it's something I have been doing a lot and I really like it.  I think I will keep it up.  Right now I am listening to "Lovers Side of Town" by Joe Purdy.  Another quick note.  If you haven't ever listened to Joe Purdy, do it as quickly as possible.  My friend Laurel introduced me to him a little over a year ago, and I have been hooked ever since.  Great chill music.


Ok, what a rambler I am...  After we got back, I grabbed a quick shower and we headed over for a late dinner at the pizzeria next door.  Turns out that we had one of the best pizzas I have ever had.  Since Josh is veg these days, we split a cheese pizza.  It had mozzarella, gorgonzola, parmesan, and one other.  It was really incredible.  Top 5 pizzas I have ever had.  Maybe top 3.


After dinner, we headed back and talked with some friends we made a few days earlier in the hostel kitchen.  They are from Santa Barbara.  The connection there is my sister who goes to Westmont.  Turns out, this guy is the son of the chaplain at Westmont.  Once I get around a phone, I am going to call Emily and tell her about it.  Another Santa Barbara connection is my dear friend Cara Sanders.  They didn't know her, but I thought I would give her a shout out... we talked to them and another random Aussie named Dan for a while, then headed down the the little downstairs pub with Dan to grab a bedtime brew.  We sat down and then were joined soon by a group of other cool people.  Some from Australia, some from the UK, and then a few others from the States.  I talked to a girl from Kentucky for a while named Christina.  She was a very naturally pretty girl.  She graduated from St. Louis University, and now lives in Austin in the Winter, Chicago in the Summer, and takes a month off during Christmas.  How great is that?  Anyway, we talked for a while and then I headed off to bed without getting any of her info.  Mistake?  Possibly...  

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Just in the nick huh?