I'll leave my heart in Vienna

Well Ben and I just spent a lovely but quick weekend in Prague. We have been wanting to do a trip to Prague since before we arrived, and continually put it off until now and I’m really glad that we finally got to go.

We arrived in the Czech Republic late on Friday evening, found a cab and had them take us to our hotel. We stayed in a really nice, reasonable place with complimentary breakfast in the morning, and was (of course) walking distance from all the down town attractions. We quickly got to sleep and set our alarm for the next morning.

When we woke up the next morning we had a lovely breakfast and tried to fill ourselves up with the free food so we wouldn’t have to pay for much more food for the rest of the day, it is interesting how people’s characters come out when a free breakfast is involved too. There was one woman there (it wasn’t me I swear!) who took about 3-4 baguettes worth of bread to her table for her little family of 3. I understand that it’s a free breakfast but there’s’ no need to take THAT much bread for yourself! Geez! Anyways, after breakfast Ben and I headed downtown taking pictures the whole way of the lovely architecture. We walked through the old gate into the old part of town and walked around near all the souvenir and crystal shops. At the end of the road there was a huge town square of sorts with the big clock, and every hour everyone gathers around to see it chime and have the little robots dance around. Since we had some time before the clock would start chiming, we went to check out a church right near the town square. It was beautiful! It was definitely a “Bohemien” church with beautiful art and amazing architecture and statues. It was all very baroque so the church seemed much lighter than other churches we’ve seen. We then walked across the town square to the clock to see it chime. The chiming itself wasn’t super impressive, in the context of todays technology, but when thinking about how long this animatronic clock has been dancing around at the hour, it was really neat to think about!

When the clock was done chiming we decided to head over to the castle, and along the way found a Hard Rock Café! No, we didn’t eat there, but it was really neat to see, and I almost got something from it, but decided against it. We continued our journey to the castle and crossed the beautiful bridge where many jewelers and artists were selling their work. It was all very beautiful, but didn’t get to buy anything from them unfortunately. On the bridge we came across a sculpture of sorts that apparently is rubbed for luck. There’s two pictures, one of a woman and one of a dog, and apparently you rub the woman for good luck, and the dog is bad luck, but people were rubbing both, and I didn’t get to get close to either of them since there was such a huge line, so on we went with our journey to the castle. We trekked up a huge staircase to get to the castle and when we got to the top we had a beautiful view of the city. We took some pictures and enjoyed looking at the city before walking farther into the grounds of the castle. Apparently, we arrived there just in time for the “Changing of the Guard”. Since the castle is technically no longer a castle, it is currently a political building which is guarded, and we saw a little bit of the changing of the guards before moving on to the next part. We saw a tiny part of the garden then moved to the other side of the castle where we saw another church. This one was older than the other church we had previously checked out and was more of a neo-gothic style. Once again, another beautiful church.

We then left the castle area, tried to see Kaftka’s house on the way down, but apparently you can only get to it if you’re in a tour group, which is unfortunate. We walked down another set of stairs and crossed another bridge and made our way over to the Jewish Quarter of Prague. Since it was a Saturday the area was very quiet, but we still got to see the synagogue and the outside of the Jewish cemetery. Also, while we were there we did some crystal shopping! We had seen other stores, but Ben showed me the store where he bought crystal for his parents when he was there in 2003 so we went to that shop. Thankfully, they said they will ship our crystal for us, so we bought a few things 2 gifts and 1 thing for ourselves. All together, it was pretty expensive and would love to come back to buy more nice things, but for now I think we’re good. After some more shopping around we had a later lunch/early dinner at a restaurant had some local Czech beers and enjoyed our time there. We even met an older couple from Arizona who were on vacation there. So we talked to them for a little while before they had to leave. When we finished our meal we walked outside and, BAM! It was raining! The whole day the weather had been gorgeous, bright, sunny, and warm, and now it was raining. Thankfully, I had my umbrella so I busted it out on our walk back home, stopping a few times to get souvenirs. We got back to the hotel around 4 and spent the rest of the evening in our room watching hockey on TV, playing games on the internet and eating our snacks for “dinner”. It’s a good thing we got back when we did too, because not long after getting back the storm had hit and we could hear the pouring rain outside with thunder and lightning as well.

The next morning we had another filling breakfast then checked out of our hotel before walking around downtown again, looking for more gifts and other types of food. For lunch we got some foods that were being sold from booths in the town square. I had a yummy Langos which is basically a flat piece of fried dough and you can pick your “topping” they had Nutella, ketchup, or garlic. I chose garlic. Ben had some kraut, but got a little bamboozled with the price since the guy said you had to buy it by grams, so Ben wanted 100 g of it, and the guy pilled on a bunch more anyways. Oh well, he seemed to enjoy it even though it was overly expensive.

After our lunch we headed back to the train station and waited for our train to arrive then hopped on the train to start our 5 hour journey home. After we arrived back in Vienna, we met up with our friends at a Heurigen for some wine and food and of course just overall conversation. It’s been great to spend as much time with our friends as possible before heading back home.

It was interesting though, as we were riding the U-Bahn to meet up with our friends, I felt so peaceful. I felt like I was home after being in Prague where I didn’t know where anything was, and didn’t know the language that was being spoken. Riding the U-bahn once we got to Wien felt comfortable to me, and it made me feel relaxed because we were home. I will only be able to call this amazing city “home” for 2 more weeks, and then I leave. I got kind of teary eyed thinking about it. I have loved everything that has happened in the past 8 months for Ben and I. Yes, it’s been stressful at times and I thought to myself, “Why did I leave the States and a job to come here?” But I know it was all in God’s plan for us. I am so grateful for this opportunity, and when I leave I know I’ll be leaving a little of my heart in this city because it will always be special to me. I pray that Ben and I will get to come back often, and maybe (if we win the lottery or something) we could have a flat here to come to during the summers or during holidays. We will see what the future holds.