Czech, please!

 

 

 Without a doubt, Prague was one of the most beautiful cities we've visited thus far (excluding all Swiss cities, of course). Castles, towers, and other forms of ridiculous architecture cover appear in almost every part of the city. The Bohemian flag is flown everywhere in addition to the modern Czech Republic flag, testifying the country's strong connection to it's cultural history. There is even a good story behind the Czech people's perverse adoration of their absurdly difficult language, but I won't get into that here except to say that their language is truly one of the most ridiculous Western languages I've ever seen.

This turned into quite a relaxing city, even though I don't think we meant it to be. We arrived on Saturday and meant to go out to a really good club, but ended up all falling asleep instead. I blame the ridiculously good pasta we made with vegetable sauce and sour cream. It was quite heavy and coma-inducing. Finding the ingredient was quite the adventure, too. We must have spent 20 minutes staring at a case full of cream cheese and wandering around the yogurt sections in the grocery store before finding what we hoped, and what turned out to be, sour cream. We sure bought that tub on a gamble! Gotta love languages with almost no English cognates.

Most of our three days in Prague were spent wandering through all the different quarters, touristy and not, taking in the amazing views at ever corner. The Jewish quarter here is home to the oldest synagogue in Europe, dating back to the 13th century AD. It was quite the sight, and if I'm not mistaken it still functions as a synagogue as well.

Since the Czech Republic is famous for its beer, we decided to try to sample some of it in a few different local bars. Unfortunately we were not all too successful in finding any local brews outside of Pilsner Urquell, which is basically like the Budweiser of Czech: very light and not too flavorful. The bars themselves were always a cool experience, and it only cost us about 30Kč—or $1.50—for 0.5L, but I was a little disappointed at the lack of variety we found. Perhaps we just weren't looking in the right places. I did, however, discover a new favorite liquor! It is called Becherovka, and basically tastes like Christmas in a glass. Has anyone heard of it before? It's also really good with tonic water. Hopefully it's sold in the US, otherwise I may find myself importing bottles from a distributor's web site that hopefully already exists.