one fine day in prague

dan and i woke up early after our first extaordinarily uneventful night in prague. because our train did not get into the station until 10:45 pm the night before we ended up staying in a hotel WAY outside the city. After gettting completely ripped off for a taxi to our hotel, we made our way out onto the streets to have a look at the city. note: residential prague is not all that exciting. we never did find a place to go have a drink, so we eneded up buying a bottle of wine and drinking about half a glass in our room.

however, yesteday we did make the most of the city. we are still located on the outskirts which means our daily walk into the the old part of Prague is about 30 minutes, it is not so bad going in (as it is all down-hill) but coming back is another story. After a day of walking around and taking in the sites, we decided to take a tour in conjunction with a boat tour down the vltava. my original thought was it would be terribly romantic, a lovely dinner down the river complete with drinks.

however,it did not exactly work that way. first there were too many people on the tour, so there was not enough room on the bus. So we were moved to a regular van in the back seat for our initial tour of the city. the problem with this scenario was that you could not see anything which the guide was talking about! after about 20 minutes of this, i fell asleep on dan's shoulder. finally we get to the boat and embarked down the river. we missed all of the really beautiful parts right in the beginning becuase the guide was making us pay for the tour. Our romantic meal was a bit spoiled by the fact that our wacky vidal sasoon haired guide came to sit with us. He reminded me of prince charming from shrek.....he was quite taken with himself and his flowing blond locks. Dan had a complete laughing break down watching him eat a banana. the entire situtation was ridiculous.

so, to paint the scene, we are in a fairly small boat no longer than 24 feet long to 12 feet wide. we dock and this old man with an accordion gets on. he sits directly across from us and starts playing. immediately, we lose all ability to hear each other and all we can hear is the accordion. so we made a brief appearance on top of the ship, where it was about 30 degrees until I could not take the cold and we went back down. the rest of the boat ride consisted of us moving up and down until we could no longer stand it. i was so ready for the boat to dock at the end, i considered jumping off and swimming to shore!

all in all prague was wonderful and we have another day in front of us. funny stories like this one make the memories hilarious to remember.