I'm a big kid now
Ok, so this is long overdue. I have had several people ask my why I haven't been updating. I totally do not appologize, because I have been too busy. So no offence, but all of you can suck it up. All that aside though, I've been having a blast in Prague, which is where I'm at now. If any of you ever make it to Prague, I highly recommend a hostel called Sir Toby's, because it's easily the best hostel I've stayed at so far, and one guy I met here who's done a lot of travelling rates it in his top five ever hostels. Yeah they don't have free breakfasts, but they do have all you can eat breakfasts available for 100 czetch crowns, which is about five and a half dollars before the exchange rate, so say round up to eight bucks for breakfast to be safe. It's not the cheapest breakfast I can get, but they have stuff for making omlettes and pancakes, they have yogurt, buns, slices of bread, granola, and sandwich makings. They also have juice, tea, and coffee. All together not too shabby. The rooms here don't have numbers. I'm staying in Angel, but they also have room names like "Purple", "Opa's Girlfriend", etc. It's weird. There's a common area/pub in the basement which is also where breakfast is served, a big well supplied kitchen for cooking in if you want to make your own meals, and an outdoor patio. The staff is awesome, the other travellers are friendly, and I've had no problems with security. I've met a whole bunch of people here, and it's been a wholy awesome experience. Our little group of single travellers consisted of a guy from Austin Texas, me from Vancouver Canada, a girl from just outside of London England, a girl from Malaysia, a guy from Melbourne Austrailia, a guy from Brussles in Belgium, and a guy from somewhere in Germany.... I think Munich. Seven solo travellers from all over North America, Europe, and Asia. I've been hanging out with them for the last few days wandering the city and having a great time. We went up to the castle. We went to the monestary where they have this little micro brewery and still brew the beer the same way the monks used to and tried some of probably the best beer I've ever had. We got here at the end of summer too, so we got to try the wheat beer, which they only brew in the summer because of the temperature needed. We checked out the library there, which has a weird but kind of awesome collection of articles, like a ton of really old books all written in latin (which we couldn't touch of course), and then a weird mix of stuff from preserved sea life like turtles and a hammerhead shark to a bug collection all on pins to a narwhale horn to some kind of machine for doing static electricity experiments. They also had a preserved room full of all these amazing looking books with all these globes along the wall and absolutely georgious paintings on the ceiling.
They're having some kind of End of Summer festival in Prague now, and a few nights ago they were celebrating a "no cars in Europe" day or something, so there were no cars in the city center area, just trams, and people were wandering the streets with beers or pops and these little street vender pastries. I had to try one. They roll the pastry onto a big metal pole, which they then sugar somehow and butter up before putting the pole over a bed of coals to rotate until it all puffs up a bit and gets golden brown with the sugar caramelizing. THEN they roll it in some kind of mix that involved sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, toffee, almonds, and nuts. *drool* I had just eaten dinner and I still almost finished it.
Yesterday a few of us went to a botanical garden in the city, where I got a whole bunch of pictures and go my first coke since I left home. I've tried ordering coke before in resteraunts or at hostels, but the first time I got a pepsi, and the second I got something called RC Cola which apperantly is from the southern states somewhere. So I gave up until I saw the coke machine. Finally, something undeniably coke. It was so good. Coke aside though, the plants and flowers were super pretty. They had a geo-garden too, but despite the fact that these rocks were supposedly 500 million years old, they were pretty unexciting.
Today I'm not going out unfortunately. It's my last full day here, so I have to do laundry reall badly, and then pack. I also have to book my next hostel in Budapest, and figure out which train I want to catch tomorrow. I'm debating back and forth between an early morning train that will get me there sometime in the evening probably, or an overnight train that will get me there early in the morning. Ok.... there's no overnight, so it looks like I'll be catching the 08:39 train and getting there just before 17:00. Eight hours, but I'll still have time in the evening to wander around and explore a bit. I'm thinking of staying at a place called the Boomerang Hostel. It has really good reviews, so I'm hoping for good things. Plus it has free laundry if I'm there for more than three nights, which I am, so that means I get free clean laundry before I leave as well. The money there is going to freak me out again though. It's bad enough here in Prague. I went to the ATM at the train station when I arrived here, and the lowest denomination it would give me is 1,000 czech crowns. I opted for 2,000, and it gave me a 2,000 crown bill. I felt really nervous, even though that's barely more than 100 bucks canadian, it felt like a lot of money. The Canadian dollar is something like 18 crowns, but the Hungarian Forint conversion is way worse. One Canadian dollar is about equal to 108 forints. I'm a little nervous about what kind of currency I'm going to get over there. Plus I feel like I'm going to need a calculator to bring around with me everywhere so I can divide the price of what I want by 110 to figure out if I'm getting ripped off or not. Very confusing. Oh well.
So the next time I post, I will likely be in Budapest. See you guys on the flip side.
Days Scumcore: A bunch