Prague

So we are on the final leg of our journey. Tomorrow we leave the mainland of Europe and end our "Jessie and Jacob traveling alone" time to meet my family in London. It is a little bittersweet. We have missed you all back home and are ready to settle into a routine of work and study again, but it is hard to end our carefree and celebratory journey all the same. But it is not over yet, and you all haven't heard the stories from the last three places we've visited. I've got some story telling to do.

The past week or so has been a whirlwind of quick stops. After leaving Vienna we arrived in Prague. We had originally wanted to travel straight to Poland (way back when we were buying train tickets and setting up accommodation and whatnot), but it was really hard and expensive to find a train or bus that went from Austria to Poland because they had to travel all the way through the Czech Republic and most transport wanted to stop somewhere in the Czech Republic instead. So we decided Prague might be a nice place to spend a day or two. 

We were not disappointed. It is really a beautiful city with quite a bit of interesting history. The architecture is very old and ornate. The city was only bombed once during WWII. It was an accident that occurred when a fleet of airplanes got lost on their way to bomb Dresden and ended up just dropping a strip of bombs into Prague instead. Luckily though, nothing was destroyed. Because of this luck many old masterpieces of architecture have survived from the time they were built, unlike in Germany and Austria where many things had to be rebuilt. 

The Czech Republic also has a very interesting political history and has disappeared from the European map more than once in its history. It used to be part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire before WWI. Between the two wars it was Czechoslovakia. Part of Czechoslovakia was given to Germany as part of the Munich Agreement before WWII in an attempt to avoid war. But of course war happened anyway and Czechoslovakia again disappeared to become part of the German Empire. After WWII, it became part of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union dissolved it became Czechoslovakia again before the Czechs and Slovaks decided that they couldn't live together anymore and thus the Czech Republic was born. (Forgive me if this is not accurate, I'm going off information that I can remember from the walking tour we took in Prague). The poor Czech Republic, they really couldn't get a break. They were pretty much held hostage during two wars, experience fascism followed directly by communism, then civil unrest before it finally stabilized. But it has now been one place for over 20 years which has been a record since the beginning of the 20th century.

How about some pictures from Prague?

Living the high life (actually only worth about 8 US dollars, but we felt rich every time we went to the ATM)

Charles Bridge 

A cool street band with awesome curly toed shoes and a rockin' set of bag pipes.

Astronomical clock that according to the tour guide in Munich was the #1 most overrated tourist attraction, but according to the tour guide in Prague, it is still less overrated than the Mona Lisa (who knows who is right).

A delicious cinnamon twisty pastry thing (traditional in Hungry not Czech Republic, but sugary bread is sugary bread right?)

Angel holding what looks like above mentioned pastry, but it probably isn't.

I started this post with the intention of writing about Poland and Berlin as well, but Prague took longer than I thought and now I'm tired and cranky and need to go to bed before I drive Jacob crazy (if his is crazy then who will I get to do everything for me?). So Jacob will touch on Poland and Berlin in another post. Hopefully it will come soon since we are going to meet my family tomorrow. My mom isn't as cheap as we are and I'm sure we will have better wifi connection.

TTFN (ta ta for now)

Jessie and Jacob