Found time! Gosh, it’s been a hectic week, and I am gonna write about my/our experience in an entirely new country we went last Saturday (4/6/16) -Czech Republic!
So, I am in Germany right now (Munich, to be precise: this will take up some posts, but I hope to compile them before I write), and last week I and my friends went to Prague (or Praha, as its called), in Czech Republic. This would be our (mine) first trip to a country outside Germany!
We left on a night bus to the city on Friday- and arrived on Saturday morning. 6:00 a.m, mist everywhere, and we wander around the city. It was simply awesome. No words can express that feeling. But, shit has to happen, right? So, when we exchange currency, we are given 500 Koruna (Google up!), as one bloody _note! And what do the train ticketing machine accept? That’s right, coins. We go to a supermarket, and buy ice-cream worth _19 freaking Korunas and give a 500 note for change. Lol.
With this, we finally get our tickets, and start roaming! We take an underground train and go to some place, where we find a road, with a HUGE footpath in the center! It was simply a feast to the eyes! This is the place:
We roam around for some time, and finally going through the spiralling streets, we reach the Old town square, which houses some Cathedrals and museums. We roam around, take pictures and wander our way across to the Charles Bridge.
This was awesome. The bridge has carvings and stuff related to Gothic christian era. We let the scenery sink in us, and again wander around to take our breakfast.
We find a park near the canal waters, and have our breakfast there- bread with some potato masala stuffed: Yum! - and walk down the lane to find a tram stop.
We decide to go to the castle, and take a tram up. We reach the castle “gardens” and keep wandering around. At one spot we find a small trek-kind of path downwards. We keep going off path, and find what was the moat of the castle! The view was just too awesome, this is how it looks:
As usual, KVR had to show off. Duh! He challenges us to a race, but I being the couch potato, and Karthik - being the selfie obsessed guy he is - take lite. Sudeep accepts, and as expected, KVR miserably looses. Too tired to continue, he proposes to sleep at a lawn at the moat. We just sit down to let the place sink in, and the feeling is ethereal~ just can’t be described in words- the smell of the grass, the gentle breeze grazing your face,the mild sunshine filtering through the canopy of trees- Wow!We next climb up our way to the castle, and into the cathedral. Here’s a pic of the cathedral:
We wander our way, and find steps which take us down back to main city. Almost everything covered! But wait, whats the time? 1 o’clock! We have 9 more hours to go, but no place to visit! What do we do? We are tired, and need some rest. Hmm… Let’s do some jugaad!
We have the pass, so we randomly board a tram and roam around, and we reach a random mall out of nowhere! We get down, and have our lunch (we packed it- some rice with vegetables and all) at some restaurant. We roam about the mall, and finally leave at around 3 o’clock. We keep walking and walking more, only to reach the Old Town Square again!
It was good we came in early, as now, it was crowded- almost at the level of Tirupati or any other place! We, again, walk around to go for a boating- 1 hr, 4 people, 250 Koruna: reasonable! One hour of chilling on the river, with me and KVR paddling the boat, the experience was awesome. Random people calling out and giving hi-fi’s, or seeing boat races, or swans taking off and landing- it was just awesome. We rowed till the dancing house, which is a building highly convoluted- heck, how did they even construct it? We land, and settle down on a a garden, and sleep- yeah, we sleep for one hour- till 6:30 or so. And what do we do? Yeah, roam around! And where do we go again? No, not the Old town square- we go back to the mall, only to find we are hungry! Now, KVR and Sudeep had seen an Indian restaurant somewhere, and we see the prices- 99 koruna, reasonable enough! We start for the shop, have a small chat with the guys working there, and eat Shahi Paneer with butter naan!
Don’t get excited, as the Shahi paneer is basically tomato soup with paneer :’( . Sad, but yeah, we were happy to eat paneer after many days! We finally get out to fill water (at Mc Donalds: You can fill free water on request. And remember, sparkling water is Soda water, and still water is normal water. We had two bottles of sparkling water to quench our thirst. Shit!), and go back to the mall. Again! It has free washrooms, and they are the need of the hour. We pass time till 10 o’clock or so, and leave for the bus stand.
Finally, we board the bus at 12:00 a.m to Munich, and fall asleep, dreaming about castles, gardens and a well cooked Shahi paneer!