Snow + Plzen

We had plans to go to Plzen, a city about an hour west of Prague, on Saturday to visit the Pilsner Urquell factory. There were about 14 of us going on the English tour but we split into smaller groups to make traveling there easier. On Saturday morning, after waking up to see it snowing outside, John, Danielle, Kyle, Paul and myself took our time leaving to get to the bus station since our tour did not start until 4:00pm and it only took an hour to get there. We got to the station at noon trying to catch the noon bus but it was sold out so we bought tickets for the 1:00pm bus, grabbed some lunch, and then jumped on the bus and were in Plzen by 2:00. We were dropped off at the opposite end of the city from the brewery which worked out because we had two hours to walk through town before the tour. We bought our tickets for the return journey to Prague and planned on leaving Plzen on the 6:00 bus at a station closer to the brewery.

The town was really pretty and it was nice to be outside because it was snowing on and off, even though it was really cold. We walked by the second biggest synagogue in Europe which was awesome because now I have now seen #1 and #2 after seeing the biggest one in Budapest! Of course it was Saturday so we could not check out the inside but the outside was pretty nice. From there we headed towards the brewery and came upon St. Bartholomew Cathedral which was in the middle of a really large square. We went into the church and also climbed the stairs up the church tower. From the top we could see all of Plzen with snow on the rooftops and we spotted the brewery where we were headed. After coming down, we headed to the brewery and arrived there to find the jubilee gate at the entrance, the symbol of the factory. We were a little early so we roamed around the gift shop and also got some hot chocolate at the huge restaurant that was downstairs; apparently it is the biggest restaurant in the Czech Republic.

The tour started at 4:15 and we were not allowed to take pictures unless we paid for a photo pass so I don't have any pictures from inside. Our tour guide took us to the bottling factory first where we saw several assembly lines that washed recycled bottles, moved bottle caps, examined bottles, filled bottles, and we also saw the workers down below making sure everything ran smoothly. From here we watched a video about the beginning of the Pilsner Urquell brewery and how the founder of the brewery invented the pilsner style of beer. We learned about the hops, barley, and malts that go into the beer and saw the old factory where the beer used to be made. At this factory they make Pilsner Urquell, Gambrinus, Kozel, and the non alcoholic beer Radegast. He then took us to the factory where they currently make the beer and we saw the huge copper vats where the beer is heated and stirred. From here we walked through part of a huge network of cellars that used to house the kegs of beer before they were ready to be sold. This is where we got to taste some of the Pilsner Urquell beer before it is filtered. The beer was pretty good and this concluded the tour. At this point we realized that it was 5:45 and our bus was picking us up at 6:05 at a bus stop that we weren't quite sure the location of and we still wanted to go to the gift shop. We quickly scanned the gift shop and picked some things out and gave ourselves about 10 minutes to run through the snow to find the bus stop. We are getting pretty good at frantically running to catch buses so John, Danielle, Kyle, Paul, and I ran through the streets for about 10 minutes in the direction we were pretty sure was right and finally arrived at the bus stop to see the bus coming our way. The ride home was just long enough to take a short nap and they also gave us hot chocolate.

We got back to Prague at 7:00 and decided to get some food at a Mexican place at St. Wenceslas Square. The food was really good and when we came out of the restaurant it was snowing pretty hard and there was a lot of snow on the ground, much more than I am used to in North Carolina. We threw snow balls all the way home to the pension.

Figure Drawing + Weekend in Prague

After missing Drawing class on Thursday afternoon to leave for Budapest I had to make it up and go to the Monday morning class. When I arrived at class I remembered that we were going to be doing figure drawing and our teacher had previously described the figure model that she was going to have come in as "old" and "quite fat." We quickly found out that these things were both true as class started and our model was a 67 year old lady who was pretty chubby. I had never done figure drawing before and it was actually a little easier than I expected. We had to draw the naked lady in several different poses for almost the whole three hours of the class. I then had to do this again for three hours in class on Thursday too. Needless to say by the end of it I was ready to get out of class.

On Monday night John and I really wanted to see a movie at the movie theater since we hadn't seen any new movies in about two and half months. Since the new James Bond movie Quantum of Solace had just come out and I had just seen the first one about a week before we found a theater that was playing it in English and after eating dinner at Café Slavia, we went to see it. The movie was good and was shown with Czech subtitles.

I don't think that I have mentioned at all where the pension that I live in and the building where I go to school are located in Prague. The pension is located in Prague 10 which is about three miles east of Old Town. Every morning I take a metro (line A, the green line) to go to school. I get on at the station Jiriho Z Podebrad and ride it only three stops to the station Mustek. This station puts me out right at the bottom of St. Wenceslas Square, in Prague 1, and then it is about a 5 minute walk to the Prague Institute. On the way to the Institute I pass a large market one street over from the Institute that sells fruit and souvenirs. The Institute is located on Michalska where I enter a nice little courtyard before going in, and studio is located on the second floor of a building that also has offices, a tea house, a gallery and apartments. The studio is a little cramped since there are about 25 of us and it is usually cold since they are always trying to save on heat but overall it is a nice space.

On Tuesday night we had our last official school outing and went to a jazz club on the other side of the river called U Maleho Glena. The jazz band had a female singer who had a nice voice and I don't know much about jazz but they sounded pretty good. The whole back room had been reserved for us so we all piled in and the only beer on draft was Bernard, which I hadn't seen before and it was pretty good.

Over the weekend my roommate Danielle was out of town visiting a friend in Florence and a few other students left to go to various places like Krakow and Brno. I stayed in Prague to visit some things around here and I was tired from going to Budapest the week before. On Friday I walked around Old Town Square and took some pictures and then John and I went around to see some things. Unfortunately things by the castle are starting to close because it is November and the tourist season is ending so I was not able to see a tunnel that I wanted to see but we did stop at the bottom of Petrin Hill to see the Memorial to the Victims of Communism. It is a series of long stairs with statues of men that wither away as you walk higher on the stair. The monument was dedicated to anyone whose life was ruined and changed by Communism. We then decided to visit the Communist Museum which had been something I had wanted to do since I came to Prague. The museum explained in writing and pictures how the Soviets helped free Czechoslovakia from Nazi rule after World War II and then slowly turned them into a Communist state before bluntly enforcing Communist rule by bringing in troops and tanks in 1968, taking control until 1989.

That night John and I met his friend Jennifer and about six of her friends who are studying abroad in Florence this semester and had come to Prague for the weekend. We went out to a bar with them and then the following night had dinner with them and went out again. It was nice to hang out with some new people for a little while and it was good they could come and see Prague.

It was nice to have a weekend in Prague again and I am looking forward to heading to Rome for Thanksgiving break on the 26th through the 30th.

Budapest, Hungary

On Thursday, November 6, I left with a group of 13 other students to get on a 7 hour train to Budapest. We left at 3:30pm and after the long ride of playing cards, sleeping, and listening to music we finally arrived around 11 at night. We arrived into a train station on the east end of the Pest side of the river. When we walked out of the train station to find an ATM and head to our hostel, we found that the street was literally a construction site, blocked off and filled with construction equipment, and the city looked a little less than friendly than we had become accustomed to. We quickly found some money (about 200 Hungarian Forints equals $1) and walked to the hostel, walked up to the second floor of this large building and found a guy sitting at a kitchen table or "the reception area". The hostel was three large rooms with beds, a kitchen, 2 bathrooms and 2 showers. The man who was the receptionist had his own living area where over the course of the weekend we heard him snoring many times and learned that he lived in the hostel, sleeping and eating there and checking people in and out as they came. We settled in our rooms and after walking around the city to see the river and then finding something to eat and drink, we were all tired so we headed back and went to sleep.

The next morning, Friday, everyone split up to go see different things and John and I set out from the hostel and walked across the white Elizabeth Bridge over the water to the Buda side of the city. There was a large monument over a waterfall just across the bridge with a statue of St. Gerard holding a cross out to the river in front of a semi circle colonnade. The monument was built into the side of the Gellert Hill because St. Gerard was thrown off this hill by rebels in 1046. We walked up the large set of stairs to get a better look at it up close and on the way up we started to get really good views across the river back to the Pest side and also to the Buda Castle to the left. After hanging out and taking some pictures we made our way higher until we reached the Citadel on the top of the hill. The Citadel was built by the Hapsburgs, the same family that built the Hofburg Palace where we had seen the treasury collection in Vienna. At the front of the Citadel looking out over the river there was a large Liberation Monument that can be seen from anywhere along the river. This monument was built in 1947 to commemorate the country being freed from Nazi rule by the Soviets after World War II. We walked along in front of the Citadel and looked at some of the things that the vendors where selling along the path and then headed down the hill to go to the Buda Castle.

We walked up to the Buda Castle and there was a small entrance with a tower to the left of it. We went through the gate and up a flight of stairs and it opened into a big open space surrounded by old castle walls on all sides. One wall was covered in really pretty red and green leaves and we spent some time there looking around. We made our way through an arch way and followed a path towards the river that brought us to the front of the Castle which now houses the Hungarian National Gallery and the Budapest History Museum. It was starting to get dark (around 4:30pm) and lights were starting to come on to light up the facades of the castle. After coming down from the castle we walked through the city underneath it for a little while (the streets on this side of the river were much nicer than on the Pest side) before coming to Matthias Church. The gothic church was covered in scaffolding but there was a series of small towers connected by a walkway that we walked through before heading down to the river to take the Chain Bridge back over to the other side. By this time we were hungry and looking for somewhere to eat dinner so we went back to the street where we had found food the night before and found a small restaurant that had a good menu. We had pitas with feta cheese and tomatoes for an appetizer and I had a chicken breast with cheese and bacon inside for my entree. The food was really good and after dinner we headed back to the hostel to meet up with everyone else before going out to a bar.

The next day John and I left the hostel with the intent to explore the Pest side of the river. John had a list of some thrift stores that he wanted to go to so we checked them out before getting some lunch and walking by the Great Synagogue. Since it was Saturday we were not allowed to go inside so the closest we could get was the small courtyard in the front. This synagogue is the largest in Europe and the second largest in the world. Not being able to do much there we headed to St. Stephen's Basilica where we were able to get in. There was a really large courtyard in front of the entrance and the interior was very ornately decorated with gold and stone. Stephen was the first King of Hungary and one of the most interesting parts of the Basilica was that they had his mummified hand on display. It was in a small glass shrine that was very dark but when a tourist paid 200 forints (about $1) the box lit up and you could see the small mummified hand clenched in a fist inside.

From there we took the metro out to the very large City Park. We came out of the metro in front of Heroes Square, a large square where the Millennium Monument sits that has statues of important people in Hungary's history. The square is framed by two art museums and the main street through the park starts just behind it. We walked up the street and found the Vajdahunyad Castle on our right. We walked over the moat on the bridge and through the main gate. The castle complex housed a little church inside and there were several vendors along the path. The path lead us out into a large open area of the park where there were people throwing a frisbee and also playing ping pong on the permanent ping pong tables. We spent a little while outside enjoying the daylight while we could before heading across the main street to the Szechenyi Baths.

We had heard from several people that the baths were something that you should definitely do while in Budapest. We didn't really know what to expect and the list of different tickets you could buy was pretty long so we decided to just buy the basic all day ticket for the steam bath. We got the tickets, went through the entrance and were led to locker rooms to change into our bathing suits. John and I met up again ready to go and followed the path to the baths. We walked into a long hallway that had what looked like a series of small swimming pools. The pools are all at different temperatures, some at 30, 34, 36, and 38 degrees Celsius, and some even colder or warmer than that. The water from the baths comes from two thermal springs underneath the park. We walked through the hall, spending about 10 minutes or so in each bath before coming to the door that led us to the outside baths. There was a long pool in the center where some people were swimming laps and two semi circle pools on the ends. We went in one on the end and the water felt really good since it was cold outside and there were fountains spraying water into the bath with a lot of pressure that felt really good when sprayed on my back. The bath was very crowded and there were older men playing chess on a section that jutted out into the water. We spent a lot of time in there before checking out the bath on the other side which had a large whirlpool in the center where tons of kids were jumping on top of each other and getting carried around in circles. We spent about 2 hours going in and out of different baths before using a sauna, which I had never done before, and seeing how long we could stand the heat before jumping into a cold shower to wash off the sweat. We changed back into our clothes and they had free hair dryers for us to use. The baths were definitely my favorite part of Budapest and one of the coolest things I have been able to do so far while in Europe.

That night we ate at a Hungarian restaurant called Fatal where they gave us huge portions of food, I had chicken with potatoes and John had schnitzel. When we came out of the restaurant it was raining so we quickly headed back to the hostel to meet up with everyone else and hang out for the night. The next morning we woke up, packed up our things, and left the hostel to grab something to eat before getting on the train to go back to Prague. Budapest was very different from any of the other cities I had been to so far, and even with its not so nice parts it was definitely a city worth experiencing.

Halloween week + Project Review

After going out of town for three weekends in a row it was nice to finally spend a weekend in Prague. The due date for our first project was coming up in a week so it was also good to finally have some time to focus on school work. We have finally been in Prague long enough to find some really good restaurants around the pension and around school that we go to a lot. Around the pension we found a great place called Café Sudicka that has a really good vegetable tortilla that I have had many times and thick garlic soup with cheese that comes with baguettes. There is also a Chinese place called Fenix that has pretty good chinese food with large portions for pretty cheap prices. Around school I have been going to a lunch place called Paneria a lot where I can get a sandwich and iced coffee for about $4. The typical Czech food is heavy on meat and potatoes so it was nice to find good places with a different menu.

The weather here is not always the best, usually rainy in the morning and then overcast for most of the day, so last week everyone was happy when we had three days where it was sunny all day. I finally was able to go on some runs, which I have been missing a lot lately since it is usually rainy in the morning and by the time I get out of class and back to the pension it is already getting dark.

Last weekend was also Halloween, which we later found out that people in Prague do not celebrate. We all got dressed up, I was a leprechaun and John borrowed some clothes from me and my roommate Danielle and dressed up as a girl. My friend Julie was a hot dog, some of the other girls were party animals, and one of the guys was a ninja. We had the receptionist at the pension take a picture of the group before we left and then we all headed to the go-go dancer club where we again had some mojitos. We saw some other groups of Americans also dressed up for the holiday in the metro but for the most part people just looked confused when they saw us. That night we also headed to a really packed bar called Chapeau Rogue right near Old Town Square.

The rest of the weekend was spent working on projects and catching up on sleep. We had the review for our second project all day on Tuesday and Wednesday. My review went pretty well; my project was a wellness center on Narodni Street, one of the busiest streets in Prague. I had plans, diagrams and a model of the façade that fit in with the neighboring buildings while marking its place on the site. It was nice to be done with the project and look forward to the trip to Budapest on Thursday.