I truly cannot believe how wonderful my experience in Prague was. On the first day I just did laundry and relaxed. On the second day I went to breakfast and met a guy from Scotland who was traveling with a friend. We went on a free walking tour together and then shopped. The first night I was in my hostel the bunk beds next to mine were occupied by two guys from the Netherlands. When I came back from the walking tour I assumed it was still those two guys who were incredibly lazy. When the boy on the top bunk popped up his head and said hi I realized they had been replaced by two boys from England. They eventually woke up and we started chatting. They were named Adam (Ads) and Nick, and they are the coolest people I’ve met on this trip so far. The first night was the England game where the score ended up being 0 – 0 but I still enjoyed it more than any other game I’ve watched. After the game we ended up walking around the city for a long time. I’m pretty sure we walked every single street at least twice. Occasionally we’d stop in a pub or bar for a drink. While we were drinking they managed to convince me to go on the walking tour with them again tomorrow. Unfortunately we didn’t exactly make it up in time for the early tour, so we went on the late one. While on the tour we decided to go on the pub crawl organized by the same company.
The pub crawl was amazingly fun. We started out in a bagel shop where there was unlimited Czech beer, wine and shots of rum vodka and absinth. Not surprisingly I didn’t drink after that stop. The second stop of the crawl was a church turned dance club. Brilliant music, environment, everything. When we were in the bagel shop there was a group of American boys who were stereotypically chanting ‘USA USA’. When we got to the church they, once again stereotypically, took off their shirts. So there was a large group of shirtless boys in the center of the dance floor. Ads and Nick dared me to go into the middle of them, just to see what would happen. So I did. Their reaction was priceless. At first the shock of a girl being in their presence was too much for them. It was almost like they were looking at each other going ‘It’s a girl! What do we do!?’. They figured it out pretty quickly though and closed in. Luckily I managed to extract myself. The third stop on the pub crawl was a club that was underground. While we were in the bagel shop a couple of Americans sat down with us named Patrick and Vanessa. They were instant hits with both me and the British boys. Earlier Nick, Ads and I were joking about how the US goes into anything, guns blazing while Britain is more likely to stand right behind America waving a fist going ‘yeah, take that!’. At one point in the evening Vanessa was joking with one of the shirtless guys and he got angry. Patrick immediately intervened and intimidated the shit out of the guy while Nick and Ads stood behind. The last stop of the crawl was a huge labyrinth of a club that I can barely even describe.
Around 4 am we decided it was time to head back to the hostel. Early on in my knowing him, Ads established himself as the ‘human compass’. Despite the fact that he had only been in the city one day, he could find his way almost anywhere without a map. It was truly amazing. This night, however, he was tipsier than either Nick or me. So we decided we should be the ones to guide the group home. After maybe 15 minutes of wandering Ads finally asked us if we wanted him to get us back to the hostel yet. He got us back in only a few minutes.
The next morning around 11 am Nick was shaking me awake. I sat bolt upright in my bed and Nick asked me if Ads had slept in the room last night. He wasn’t in his bed and the bed didn’t look slept in. The night before when we got back to our room both Nick and I were exhausted, but for some reason Ads was full of energy. So I gave him my headphones, he left and we went to sleep. The next morning, Nick and I realized he had never come back. We almost immediately started freaking out. We searched the entire hostel. Nick went down to reception with his camera and showed them a picture of Ads in hopes they had seen him, they hadn’t. We had horrible images of Ads walking the streets of Prague at 6am finding a door step to sleep on. I was looking up online what to do when someone goes missing when Ads walks into the room like nothing happened, smile on his face. Apparently he had met up with the Irish girls next door and crashed in their extra bed for the night.
Later that day we had to go to a castle tour we’d bought tickets for the day before. Unfortunately we were all still quite hung-over by the time we needed to be on our tour. It was the most pathetic sight you could have seen. The three of us lagged so far behind the group we missed most of the explanations. Every time we sat down Ads would fall asleep. At one point I went to the restroom and they waited for me in front of a cathedral. The line for the toilets was really long, so it took a while. When I came back they told me an American girl had approached them and told them the looked like models, and asked if she could she take their picture. I never heard the end of this, for the rest of the weekend.
Because we had been so slow getting started going for the tour we didn’t get to eat before hand. We all thought there would be a break for food during the tour and there wasn’t. By the end of it we were starving. For some reason we all had an immense craving for KFC. We took a tram to the KFC and got more food then I’ve eaten in a long time. We then proceeded to stuff our faces. It was amazing.
We went out drinking again that night and found a gem of a bar were no one spoke English but us and we got over 8 drinks between the three of us for less than $12.
This morning we woke up, packed and checked out of the hostel. We wandered the city one last time before Nick and Ads took me to the train station. They had a flight to catch later in the day. It was the saddest parting I’ve had so far. We hugged and cheek kissed (because they do that over here). I can’t believe how quickly we bonded over only three days but I hope we get to stay in touch and that they get the opportunity to visit me in the US.
Things that happened that didn’t get explained up there:
We were wandering at one point and came across old men dressed as sailors. They were singing. We found out it was Shanty fest 2010.
Periodically one of them would slip and use and American word instead of a British one. I would laugh. Examples are: Hamburger instead of beefburger, restroom instead of loo, z instead of zed.
Mindy skyped me at one point while I was with them. When I got off with her they were looking at me funny. Apparently my American accent got really strong while I was talking to her. I didn’t notice anything.
I would occasionally say something that meant something completely different in England. Example: We were about the leave for the day and I was wearing shorts. It looked gloomy outside and potentially cold, so I asked them if they thought I should put on pants. There was a really prolonged awkward pause. Finally Ads asked me if I wasn’t wearing pants, and I said no, I’m wearing shorts. They started laughing and told me they thought I meant underwear, which is pants, what I meant were trousers.
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