I'm here!

Here I am! I arrived into Prague at 8:30 am on sunday after a surprisingly smooth series of flights. During my layover in Amsterdam, there were some little mini riots going on in the airport by some turkish people who apparently had been stranded for 3 days and found out their flight had been cancelled again. It was a pretty unbelievable scene, people screaming and yelling all over the place. I just went down to my gate and waiting, kind of in a daze from being tired. Then I saw a guy walk by that looked familiar, with good reason, cause it was Shekar, one of the supervisors from my department at work! How funny to run into him there. He was on his way to Geneva with his family and his plane left from the gate next to mine. Anyway, I got into Prague, and took a cab to my friend Rob's apartment. I met Rob a few years ago in Africa during my big Pangaea trip. He is originally from London, but he's been in Prague for the last year working for Tesco as a buyer for womens swimsuits. Every guys dream job, eh? We went for breakfast and part way through Ondrej met up with us. We walked around Prague a little bit and then went back to Rob's to pick up my stuff, said goodbye to Rob and went to check into our hotel. The hotel was really nice, right next to the Charles Bridge. We dropped off our stuff and went to walk around some more. Prague is a really pretty city, with a lot of cobblestone streets, shops and nice squares with fountains. We walked around some fancy buildings, that I can't remember the names of cause I was so tired. But I was trying to stay awake for as long as possible to battle the jet lag.
In front of one of the buildings there was a guard standing there with his fancy uniform and rifle. Ondrej said they actually go to training to learn to keep a straight face when people are trying to taunt them. There were people taking pictures posed next to them so I did the same. I tried to give him bunny ears once, but he didn't like it, which was evident by him pounding the end of his rifle into the ground to startled me. It worked.

Ondrej wanted to take me to this observation tower for a view of the city. It was probably around 8 pm by now, and I had been up since 6:30 am the previous day, so I was exhausted. I started complaining that I wanted to sleep, so this was going to be the last thing we were going to do. We got to the tower after walking through the woods and climbing up a bunch of stairs. I was shocked to see about 20 stories of spiral stairs to climb to get to the viewpoint. We stopped at the snack stand and I got 3 Capri Suns to drink to hopefully give me some energy. I think finally getting to the tower and then seeing the stairs did my head in, cause I started crying during the 2nd Capri Sun. I needed to sleep. So we didn't climb up, we just went back and I got to sleep. Yay. Lucky for you all, Ondrej took lots of pictures of me during the evolution of my breakdown.

Anyway, so we woke up monday morning at about 5:30am all rested and went for a walk around the city again. It was nice walking around while everyone was still sleeping! We could get pictures on the Charles Bridge without a gazillion people in the background. And I could act like an idiot without anyone seeing me. After breakfast, we packed up and started driving down to Bohemia, about 3 hours south of Prague. We stopped at a castle on the way, but it was closed on mondays so we just walked around the outside and went to find some food. The food here seems to be a lot of meat, potatoes, and cabbage. For lunch I had potato dumplings filled with ham, served with cabbage, and Ondrej had potato dumplings with ham on the side, served with cabbage. Pretty creative, huh?

We spent the rest of the day driving to a town called Cesky Krumlov, stopping at a few places along the way so he could show me some of the places where he has family and where he used to spend his summers growing up. We found some cherry trees and he climbed one of them to get us some cherries... It probably didn't look as weird when he was a little boy climbing these trees, now it just made him look like a giant. HA. But the cherries were good.

We spent the evening in Cesky Krumlov, a really pretty city that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Just walked around and took some photos and had some good food!

This morning, we drove from Cesky Krumlov to Projestov, where Ondrej's family lives now. He's watching the Formula One race while I'm here blogging. I think we'll spend the next few days here visiting and then probably friday or saturday the official mouse hunt will begin!