The rest of Prahahahahaha and the beginning of my Great Ash Adventure

The second day of our vacation in Prague was cloudy and cold.
We walked all around Prague for several hours, seeing many of the main tourist attractions like the Prague cathedral and castle on the hill overlooking the city.

Other high points including seeing a Czech street band...

with an awesomely moustached flute player.

The lines to get into the Cathedral and the castle were super, super long, and there were TONS of school groups. It took us 25 minutes to get into the Cathedral. I can't even imagine what it would be like in high-season (this was in April!).

It was all really beautiful, but unfortunately the weather made all of us just want to stay indoors, preferably in a warm bed drinking a hot beverage. Not so conducive to walking all around Prague.

Some of my friends went to Jewish cemetery, while my friend Shannon and I went to walk around and search for a coffee with Baileys (compromise!), which was a welcome relief.

We met up later and saw Prague's astronomical clock, which was quite a show. The maker of the clock was killed after making it so that he couldn't create any better ones that would trump Prague's.

I climbed the Prague tower with my friends Laure and Justine. It was a long way up (no elevator for us!), but the views were amazing.





Later that night, my friend Shannon and I got Indian food and met up with two more friends, Liam and Mackenzie, for a Prague pub crawl.

A big group went to three different bars before heading to a club in Prague with four or five floors, each of which play a different kind of music: pop/hits, electro, "black music" (I kid you not, this is what the sign actually said!)

...and our favorite, the Oldies floor. They played every song I had ever wanted to hear in a club, from MC Hammer to the Grease soundtrack to Backstreet Boys to the Beatles.
We met some hilarious guys from Wales that were on vacation together in Prague and my friend Shannon and I stayed until around 4 or 4:30 am, when the light-up dance floor was almost empty.

It was a really great night, and I slept in the next day, waking up to SUNSHINE in Prague!

We ate a a delicious vegetarian restaurant in Prague (even my friends were meated-out!)

At this point, the news of the volcanic ash cloud of doom had reached us. I had plans to catch a bus to Munich that night in order to catch a plane to Istanbul (then Athens, then Santorini). We were all becoming worried about our travel plans (all of my friends were going different directions after Prague). My friend Justine was supposed to leave that morning to go to Paris to meet her mom, but her flight was cancelled and her mom couldn't even get to Europe. My friends Matt and Laure bought a train ticket to Munich and left later that day. Prague is not an easy location to travel to when flights are not an option and trains are expensive. While we were all in a state of travel limbo, we decided to take advantage of the sunny day in Prague.

Shannon and I went to the Museum of Communism, which was really, really interesting, even if some of the translations were awful (and hilarious)

The communism museum focused mainly on Prague and the Czech Republic. It had tons of artifacts, photos, and pieces of propaganda. We watched a video on the Velvet Revolution, which almost brought me to tears (admittedly, that doesn't take much :). It was so sad seeing the democratic protesters being beaten during the Velvet Revolution right before the fall of the communist regime in the Czech Republic. Communism is such a foreign concept to me--I've been raised in the years of the triumph of the liberal democratic, capitalistic system. The museum was quite informative and I'm really glad I went.

I then went to a bikram yoga class in Prague. It was in Czech, but it was fabulous. I've really missed the bikram classes here. I go to a yoga class once a week or so in Angers, but there's nothing like doing yoga for an hour and a half in a HOT and really humid room. As a plus, it was fairly cheap. Ahhh!

After the yoga class, I made a red curry with lots of vegetables for my friends, and while it was delicious to me, it was much too spicy for two of my friends. You win some, you lose some.

That night I was up searching desperately for travel information and cancellations because of the volcano.

The next morning was sunny too.

I went to an early yoga class, and then we hiked up to the Prague Metronome, which symbolizes time lost during the communist regime.

The metronome replaced a HUGE statue of Stalin overlooking Prague.

The park by the metronome overlooking the city was really beautiful, and lots of people were out enjoying the sunshine...in many different ways :)

We stopped at a beergarten and soaked up some sun too.

Then came one of my favorite moments in Prague: we rented a paddle boat to go on the Vltava River.

We set out in our paddle boat right beneath the Charles Bridge. It was simply glorious. Two people pedaled and two people relaxed in the warm sun. The river current gently pushed us along, and the views were great.

There were lots of boats out on the river, and we waved at everyone we saw. Some other boaters tossed us an orange. Random, but delicious.

There were several fancy restaurants on the riverside, and we decided as a joke to pull up to one of the classier establishments and order four beers. The people dining there thought it was hilarious, and the waiter happily obliged, much to our surprise.

An hour later, we returned the boat and went to another traditional Prague style restaurant. My friends Liam and Mackenzie were dead-set on having rabbit for dinner.

Clearly they enjoyed it.

I had some sauerkraut and some French onion soup (ok, not really that Czech, but that's fine with me :)

Before I knew it, it was time for my overnight bus ride to Munich, leaving at 11 pm and arriving at 5 am.

My friends walked me to the bus station, and I said my goodbyes to them. And then my long volcanic ash adventure began. I had planned to take the bus with my friends Laure and Matt, but they had left Prague early by train, so I was all by myself. I got out my bus tickets and waited in the long line to get on the bus. When I finally got to the front of the line, the driver looked at my tickets and started to laugh. What was so funny? It turns out I had purchased the wrong tickets--they were for the next weekend. I felt so stupid...how could I have done that?! I needed to get on that bus in order to catch my flight to Istanbul the next day. I asked the bus driver if there were any empty seats. "No, sorry, full bus," he said briskly. Dejected, I sat back on the bench at the bus station.

I had to get on that bus. I again approached the bus driver with tears in my eyes and asked him if there was any possible way for me to get on that bus. I don't know if he felt sorry for me or if he just didn't want to deal with a young woman getting all emotional on him, but he softened a bit and said he would see what he could do, no promises though. I waited for a few more minutes and the bus was packed to the brim: no empty seats. I had to get on that bus. I again went up to the bus driver, a 20 euro note in my hand. I told him I just had to get on that bus, and flashed him the 20 euro note. He took it, and I sat in one of those pull-down makeshift seats on the very front of the bus overlooking the stairs for the 6 hour bus ride. That was the first time, and hopefully the last time, I'll ever have to bribe someone. But hey, I was on that bus.

We arrived in Munich at 5am. I was incredibly groggy and it was still dark out. We had also been dropped off at a train station that was on the very outskirts of the city, not the central station as I had planned. The train station didn't open for another hour and a half. My friend Laure and Matt, who had gotten to Munich a day earlier, had a hotel and I needed to crash there, if but for a few hours. I waited there for a few minutes, mentally weighing my options. I decided to take a cab to the hotel, even though I knew it would be expensive. Luckily, another girl got into the cab with me and agreed to split the cost. I didn't pay attention to where she said she wanted to go until the cab stopped at a place called something like Pandora's Box. As my scantily-clad taxi sharer got out of the cab, I realized it was one of the legal houses of prostitution in Germany, and that she was reporting for work. It kind of shocked me--she was about my age, and I felt a certain sadness come over me that she had to live like that in order to make money, while I was just vacationing in Europe.

I proceeded to have a conversation with my Serbian cab driver for the rest of the trip about the United States' involvement in the Kosovo conflict and Balkan politics since the 1980s.

All by 6 in the morning.

I got to the hotel, found out my plane the next day to Istanbul was cancelled, and passed out on the floor in the hotel room.

Welcome to Munich.