St. Patrick's Day and Prague

This past spring break was twelve days of the most intense, jam-packed travel experiences of my life. Even going to El Salvador last summer was not as tiring as these past two weeks were. In the end, I am happily home, along with many souvenirs and great memories.

I started off my break on the 17th with a little trip over to Dublin for St. Patrick's Day 2008. Jenny, a friend from BC, was visiting us in Galway, so Meg, Jenny, myself and my roommate Eugenie made up the original crew. We jumped on the 9am bus to Dublin and promptly fell asleep. Upon arrival, three and a half hours later, we dropped our stuff at the train station and grabbed a cab. Because the parade had already started we couldn't get too close to the city centre, but we got as close as we could and joined the hordes of people lining the streets. It was a beautiful day and there were families and people all over the place. The first few paraders we saw were a couple of acrobats on a rotating, spinning contraption, which was so cool. There were lots of dancers and bands, etc. as well as huge floats that resembled bugs and monsters, etc.

We wandered the streets looking for a more fun, less family-oriented place to stand but were turned away from making it down to the end of the main street by police who told us that there were riots and mayhem down there so it was unsafe to let anyone else past. Boo. After the parade we headed to a restaurant where we got a table with an forty-something Irish couple from County Mayo - Charlie and Joanne. They were the sweetest Irish people I have ever met, which may or may not have been influenced by the number of rounds we shared. We had a fabulous time chatting with them and enjoying the crazy people walking around the city. Charlie even bought us St. Patrick's Day hats. It was the best.

The next morning we checked out of the hostel and headed back into the city, since our flights didn't leave until 4pm. My new travel outfit plan was put into action as I picked up a five pack of men's white undershirts from Dunnes. I figured they were easy to pack and easy to leave behind if I ended up not having enough room on the way back. We got some bagels/smoothies and used the Internet, and then grabbed the bus to the airport. At this point, Jenny was already back in Spain and Meg, Eugenie and I were heading to Prague.

Little did I know, since I never check the weather, that my white tees and I were heading into a snowy Czech wonderland... Whatever. We landed in Prague around 7pm and got into a AAA yellow cab, the only safe, honest and English-speaking cab company in the area. The driver was around 65 and was hilarious. It took him about ten minutes to gain his confidence to speak to us in English, but when he did he let us know that we had to "attention! attention!" when we were taking money out of ATM's, only use them inside a bank, and watch our bags since pickpockets were rampant. He was such a sweetheart. He told us about the address number system in the area and pointed out the mini Eiffel Tower and the Prague Castle along our route.

He took us right to the door of our hostel, a five minute walk from the main square in the city, and made sure we were safely inside before departing. We had decided to start our trip off in Prague because the exchange rate is so good for us and we had heard everything was cheaper than in Ireland, etc. Ten USD translates to somewhere between one hundred and fifty and two hundred Czech crowns. It was sort of strange to be dealing with thousands of crowns at a time, and to have to pay for dinner with seemingly hundreds of a currency, but we got used to it. A beer, for example, all of which were huge, was somewhere around 20-30 crowns. That's about a dollar.

The first night after checking in and realizing that our hostel was amazing - four beds for the three of us, high ceilings, a great, clean bathroom and separate toilet, a full kitchen, big screen TV and free Internet all within our suite, we headed out to find some food. Since it was somewhat later than most people get dinner, we asked for advice and the sweet guy who was running the hostel pointed us in the right direction. It was quite cold and really dark, so it was sort of scary, but we watched out bags and soon happened upon a tiny little restaurant with a good number of people inside. I got a salad and some soup, and we all got beers. It was insanely cheap and decently good, but then I started to feel sick so we went back to the hostel and went to bed.

The next morning we awoke to snow, so we bundled up as much as we could and hit the streets. We started to walk in the direction of the main square and found a little market selling trinkets and weird foods. We wandered around for a while looking for a famous bagel place, but found ourselves at the foot of the Charles Bridge. It was something that we all wanted to walk across, but it started to rain, so we hurried inside for lunch at a nicer restaurant right nearby. We were basically treated like VIPs and got cappechinos and huge amounts of food. Meg got a chicken that was literally an entire chicken on a wooden platter - it was delish despite looking like something a pirate would eat...