Since I've pretty much failed at blogging on all accounts, with a week left, I'll try to salvage what I can.
My final days in Prague were blissful and bittersweet. Alysha came in town on the Monday before the Wednesday we were supposed to leave. We ended up staying until Friday morning as a result of airline-failure-to-deliver-baggage.
I spent a lot of time walking around embracing Czech culture.
I ate a lot of ice cream (zmrzlina), drank some cheap beer (pivo), tripped on some cobblestone. (those two aren't related)
I went to an Elle magazine photoshoot with Joshua and his wife Martina, that was pretty awesome.
I finished up the project with Joshua, and then he invited Alysha and I to a dinner party. It was a nice farewell.
Here's a link to the project if you're interested in what I spent four weeks doing in Prague. The sound is kind of choppy, but the pictures are nice. It's pretty clear which of the two I'm better at.
Link to Photo Story
Anyways, I also met with a guy who works at an ad agency in Prague and things went pretty swell, so who knows, this time next year I could be blogging (or not) from my permanent residence in Prague (sorry mom!). We'll see where the wind takes me, it's still a long way off.
So we went to some final museums, a couple more places where people have died, and then alysha and I did the whirlwind tour of Prague, so she could get a taste of its awesomeness. We ate some good and disgusting Czech food, drank some good beer, saw a couple monuments and then left for Germany.
Prague bid us a nice farewell - on our last night we were walking home from a bar and spotted two people having sex in an alley way! How's that for Czech PDA?! We decided that was probably our cue to leave, and then before we even made it home a man dropped his pants and started peeing in the street -- definitely time to go.
We packed up on Friday morning with all 150 lbs of luggage and headed to Berlin. The train was about 5 hours and not a bad ride. We made it all the way to our hostel, then rested for a minute, and went out to start exploring. We found a random monument, and then a random live music/craft festival. What we didn't find was German food, the ENTIRE time we were there -- and we looked! and googled!
I suppose Berlin is too multicultural to support such heritage as schnitzels and lederhosen. So we ate Indian food and Currywurst instead. We went to the Pride parade on Saturday and encountered Berlin's most outrageous and flamboyant gays -- it was fantastic and spectacular -- though really, how could you expect much less from Berlin and a pride parade. We went and saw "the wall", pretty much a nonevent. It was there. It was a wall. Ta-da! We then explored some more and found the Brandenberg gate, and probably some other famous things. I was more concerned with everything but the landmarks.
The people all spoke English, so there was very little pointing, air-drawing, or attempted sign language going on. Alysha tried to practice her four German words. Berlin appreciated it. We went to two different bars while we were there, both local and divey. The first greeted us with song, flying coasters and swinging chandeliers, the second with dim lights and good beer -- both were accepted and appreciated.
Sunday morning we got up, stuffed our faces at the free hostel breakfast and made our way to the train station -- two girls and at least 150 lbs of luggage. The Berlin men were very nice and carried my suitcase full of dead bodies and cement blocks up and down the fifty flights of stairs the city so graciously provided us with. Alysha was smart and carried a backpack -- I looked like a homeless baglady -- sweat pouring, disheveled hair and facial expressions of extreme exhaustion. -- nevertheless, we made it to the station and onto the train.
Our train ride to Paris was about nine hours total, 6 hours on one train and 3 on another. We were unaware you needed to book a reservation on the first train, so we got to ride the entire six hours on the floor, in the steps of the doorway, next to the bathroom. I can honestly say, it was unpleasant. Regardless of how young and agile we might be, our bones ached. We bumped and banged through six hours of train then transferred to the next one where we had seats. We were so kindly placed in the car with the worst representations of Americans on the entire planet. It was embarrassing to be associated with such disasters.
A family of four, two kids, from California. They had filled the entire compartment with their luggage, so that they could have plenty of leg room and no one else could store their luggage --rude and not allowed. They wore their passports on those neck things under their clothes so that 1) everyone could see them and 2) they looked like someone was going to mug them right there (someone would have been me or alysha because no one else could stand to sit near them). They were loud and obnoxious and the husband had his shoes off and propped his feet up on his wife. Trains are cramped - that's disgusting. It's hard to not side with Europeans who hate Americans abroad, when I can't even stand them!
Well whatever, so we rode three-ish hours with those four-ish goons from California and arrived safely in Paris. We lugged our luggage up and down and up and down fifty more flights of stairs and through the metros and arrived at Telegraphe - the metro stop I've been calling home for a couple weeks now. The directions from Tudy, my landlord, were a little cockeyed, so we had to walk around a bit to find the streets. After three more blocks of lugging luggage we made it! Tudy welcomed us and THANKFULLY carried my luggage up the three - or six - flights of stairs - depending on how you look at it.
We put our stuff down, met Christina - my awesome roommate I didn't know I was going to have - and like starving hyenas went to find food. We went to the local cafe around the corner, Le Telegraphe. It had a good vibe, outside seating, and we really weren't picky after having eaten nothing but complimentary yogurt pillows on the train. We ordered croque monsieurs - a grilled cheese with the cheese on the top and the ham in the middle. There's another variety (croque madame) with an egg and cheese on top. I picked out the ham, but it was quite good. Anything would have been as delicious, but it was a good choice nonetheless. While we were eating awkwardly close to other people, a older gentlemen started talking to us. The first thing he asked was why we ate so angrily -- like i said starving hyenas! hah!
After some really awkward conversation where he tried to call his wife, even though he was with his mistress, at midnight to ask her to tutor us in French, he ended up buying us some wine because he was appalled that we weren't drinking. He also told us that in Paris, everyone says "je t'aime" for everything. That means "I love you" which we then had to tell him for buying us wine, because that was the Parisian thing to do....I haven't heard anyone say that to anyone else except a six year old girl who was telling everyone that, so he might not have been the most reliable source.
Alysha only had a couple days in Paris before she went home, so we hit every famous thing in the city on the whirlwind tour. We saw gardens and tours and arcs, you know, the usual. There wasn't really enough time for museums, but plenty of time for espressos, croissants, and baguettes -- in my opinion, all much more exciting than the landmarks! lol Alysha disagrees.
On her last night here, we went to a Jazz bar down the street where we made a french friend and a french 'mommy' in the same night. There were only about 20 people there, so two young American girls were the main attractions -- and everyone wanted to talk to us. Our 'mommy' was wasted - and took it upon herself to warn us - in French - of the horrors of Paris. The pickpockets, the muggers, etc. She had apparently recently been mugged. I deduced this from her flailing gestures of choking and wrist grabbing. Then she gave us her phone number, told us it was an SOS number, she was our French mommy and that she would come and punch somebody that messed with us. All in French, all in gestures....the conversation was pretty long. Then Vivian, a young french girl, was called over to translate. When she realized we didn't know our french mom - she thought it was hysterical. She gave us her number and we became instant friends. Then she left town for the month, so I haven't seen her since...bummer.
Anyways, we had a splendid time at the jazz bar and drank standard Parisian beer with garden gnomes on the glass. Alysha left the next morning, bummed to be leaving, but excited to see her boyfriend. I went home and took a nap...something I'd been needing to do for ten days.
That covers a couple weeks. Until the next rainy day where I have enough time to blog, au revoir! bonne journee!
