Prague

We woke up at 4 fucking AM to catch our first bus in series of 2 bus, 2 trains and 1 plane from London to Prague (actually we ended up skipping on the last train and bus and just took a cab instead). Sometimes these cheap bus/train/plain tickets I'm finding online are 1/4-1/2 price for a really good reason: 5AM departure times and four transfers might not be worth the €/$/£ I'm saving. Actually it totally is worth it because all the money we save on traveling we can spend on eating out and buying cashmere scarves.

Anyway, after another expensive cab ride from the airport to our hostel we arrived at Hotel Sunshine, where we would be staying for super cheap in a (comparatively) massive private room for five days. This was the first time on our trip we were in a country that was not primarily English speaking and it is actually pretty stressful. Czech is also a relatively challenging language (for me at least) so even learning to say things like please and thank you is a difficult. After zero sleep the night before, a long day of traveling and a really bad (and lingering) cold everything felt weirdly surreal and dream-like. And fucking stressful.

Ok so I mentioned before that I had this cold for a few days. It must have been the lack of sleep and long day combined with the cigarette smoke (people smoke everywhere in Prague and our hotel was no exception) but by the time we got to our room I was so fucking sick. Like wanted to die, seriously considering just going back home to Portland and ending this god-forsaken trip, miserably sick. We ventured out our first night to hunt down food and cold medicine. We ate some mediocre pizza and went to the only store we could find where no one spoke English to I coughed until they handed me some Halls cough drops? Then I slept off and on for the next 40 hours and essentially wasted my first two days in Prague. But it was definitely the right choice because I woke up yesterday feeling immensely better and ready to take on this weird city.

We spent all day Sunday just walking around and taking a million pictures and laughing about how incredibly uncomfortable it is not being able to communicate with everyone. Being foreign is hard, guys! I almost wish we had eased into it by going to Spain where we would be able to speak at least a tiny fraction of the language. But whatever, it has been interesting. And actually a lot of people here speak at least a little English and those who don't seem happy to point and gesture and repeat the same unfamiliar words until you finally figure out what they are telling you.

During a walk we saw this floating in the river. Is it a body or a mannequin? We decided it was a mannequin and continued on our way. But then the next day we were really worried that maybe it actually was a dead body and we had just left it there. I hope it was a mannequin...