Prague

I had a pretty bad day when I first got here. The train ride was fine. Being a Saturday, though, I was worried about finding a hostel. I got into the train station, bought a phone card, and starting calling hostels. I was referred to a hostel by a guy I met in Bratislava, but it was full... as was the first few and closest to the city center hostels from my guidebook. Finally, the fourth hostel I called had a single room open, which they would reserve for me for the next few minutes until I walked there from the train station. I walked outside trying to match up the streets with those around the train station on my map. This was further complicated by the fact that Prague sparsely labels its streets. After walking around for fifteen minutes without finding any streets that matched up, a man finally came up to me to help, who informed me that I was, in fact, at a different train station and that I needed to get on the subway to get into the center of town. I got the hostel about an hour after I had called them to find that my room had been given away. And this is about the time it started raining...

Expecting to be forced to sleep at the train station, I walked back to the station at which I thought I had arrived. I found a accomodation booking office, who luckily was able to book me a room at a hostel fairly close to the city center. I've stayed at worse hostels, but I wasn't a huge fan of the communal showers they had there. It was fairly late when I finally arrived, and, since it didn't seem like I would really meet anyone at the hostel, I went to a pub crawl that had an advertisement there. The rain and an apparent Hell's Angels gathering in the city were the apparent causes for the reason that I was the only person on the crawl. In spite of that, I still had a good time on the crawl with my two guides. I met more locals than I would have if there had been other backpackers there.

I woke up the next morning to find that it was raining again (still). So for the first time on my whole trip, I used my raincoat. The cloud cover gave the city a very Eastern European feel, which, combined with the cobble stone streets and old buildings everywhere, made for a great experience despite getting all wet. I abstained from visiting any museums here because they seemed too much like tourist traps. The city itself is a open museum, though. It was great just walking through it all.

I went back to my hostel after finishing my meandering, self-guided Mission: Impossible tour to change rooms (they switched everyone around everyday or something). They put me in a room with four girls (how lucky for them) who had just got there that day. They asked me to join them for a different pub crawl they were going on, which I did since I had nothing better to do. We only visited three bars (the more historical ones) but got dinner with it too. It was geared more for older people (who were on the tour with us), meaning it finished early. So the younger ones of us went to a few more bars after. But, of course, I had the grudging responsibility of walking the four girls home at the end of the night... haha.