I was so tired on Saturday morning that, even though the kids' screaming woke me up early, I was absolutely unable to get out of bed or even open my eyes until Gustav came to get me for breakfast. I got out of bed and went downstairs, still in my pajamas, to join the family at the table. Esther poured me some tea, I took half of a roll, cut it in half again, and spread some mett on it. Then I immediately had to put my head down in my hands because I thought I was going to pass out. I got so light headed, and everything started to get dark, and my ears were ringing, so it was no joke. When I felt stable enough to move my head, I got up to go lay on the sofa but decided on my room instead so that I wouldn't have to get up to move again. I was on my way up the stairs when I realized, nope, not gonna make it. I threw up in my hands on the stairs, and had to make it to the bathroom as soon as possible before I either vomited everywhere or passed out while trying to get there. Esther had said that while I was sitting at the table my face had turned green, and she was right. After I finished in the bathroom and was cleaning myself up, I looked in the mirror and my face was green and my lips were this weird, palish purply white color. I basically looked like death, or like Mischa Barton in The Sixth Sense. Either way, it wasn't good. I stayed in bed all day on Saturday and Sunday, and I slept for over 4 hours during the day yesterday, just trying to get rid of the fever/lightheadedness/diarrhea that I've had for 4 days now. I had to miss meeting some friends (the 2 guys from London that we met on the pub crawl) in Dusseldorf, as well as Fabio's 4th birthday party at the pony farm because of it. I haven't been this sick since I got salmonella from a chicken quesadilla at Rubio's a few years ago, and I hope it doesn't happen again any time soon.
Today Gustav peed on me when I went to pick him up at the Kindergarten. I got there just as they were about to sit down to read a story and Gustav wanted to stay, but we couldn't wait because it was already 4 and we had to pick up Pauline. So he started crying and I picked him up to comfort him a little bit, since he was obviously really tired. When I put my hand under his butt I felt that his pants were wet. I asked him if he did that earlier or if he just peed his pants (I asked in German because that's not exactly something he hears very often in English) and he said it just happened, that moment. Awesome. But I got to give the kids a bath for the first time tonight, so that was fun. It actually went really well, and they didn't fuss or fight with me at all. Esther was surprised when she came upstairs that we were already done and that nobody was screaming of crying.
So now that we're all caught up on the awesomeness of my weekend, let's get back to the vacation once again.
Sunday, Mar. 7
We got relatively early because we wanted to make sure we didn't miss breakfast, which ended at 9:30. It was a pretty typical European breakfast, mostly meat, cheese, rolls, croissants, butter and jam,
plus they had a few different types of sausages, some cooked potatoes, and hard boiled eggs. It was pretty good, and definitely enough to fill you up.After breakfast we braced ourselves for the cold and headed toward the old city. It was its own little mini adventure because, as I said before, we couldn't read or understand Czech, so we had to use our dictionary, careful listening skills, common sense and a map to make sure we took the right tram to the right location and didn't get completely lost. I'd say we did a pretty good job. We got off the tram right next to this really cool tower, the Powder Tower, and we just used our map to wander around.
There is really no way to describe how gorgeous the architecture is in this city, not to mention how ancient it is. I mean, really ancient. Countless drunk Americans have probably puked and/or pissed on lampposts that were erected before our country was even "discovered," and that's not a joke or exaggeration. Coming from a country that's so young, where you're hard-pressed to find anything older than 300 years old at most, it's almost impossible to fully comprehend what it means when you walk into a restaurant that was established in 1253. Seriously?! It's not only a portion of a wall, or a new building erected on the site of some ancient ruins, but actually an ancient restaurant. It's the most ridiculous and awesome feeling to be in a place like this.
Anyway, I could go on and on forever about how magical it all was, and how ancient all the buildings were without ever getting into any of the details of our trip, I be
tter stop before I really get going. Since it was Sunday and most places throughout Europe are closed on Sundays (although Prague wasn't nearly as dead as many other places I've been) most of what we did consisted of looking at cool buildings and sort of getting acquainted with the city a little bit. We made our way past the central train station and the National Museum toward the center of the old city, taking pictures of as many cool churches, statues, museums and other various buildings as we could. When we found a postcard that we really liked, we took it to the post office to buy a stamp and mail it to Sheryl back home. We promised her a postcard from every city we visited, and we mailed them from the same city so that she got a cool little postal stamp to go with it. The post office was definitely the most elaborately decorated post office I've ever seen. Lee took a picture of the wall/ceil
ing because it was magnificent, and then the security guard basically tried to kick us out for taking a picture inside. He didn't really kick us out, just made us put the camera away, but it was still weird, and security forces seem to be pretty hardcore in Prague (more on that later).We also stopped to buy Lee a Russian hat, because it was seriously cold and his ears were going to fall off. Even I wasn't prepared for how cold it was. The temperature was the same as it had been in Köln, but it felt like it had to be 5 degrees colder. I couldn't feel my toes (except for the occasional tingling feeling) and Lee was just warm enough to kno
w that he was freezing to death. The hat helped, but I think what we really needed was windproof goose-down jumpsuits wrapped in electric blankets. It was that cold. There were a couple times where we had to find someplace that we could go inside for a few minutes just so we could thaw out a little bit. Ideally we found a place that sold cocoa (delicious, European style hot cocoa) and sat there.On the way back to the hotel we stumbled upon something that looked like another shopping mall (I actually just looked it up on the internet and it's called the Palladium, and it's the Czech Republic's largest mall), so we went there both to find food and to get warm. We didn't eat crap American fast-f
ood this time, we actually went to a Lebanese restaurant in the mall. Still not Czech food, but delicious and satisfying nonetheless. It was a pretty interesting mall, too. They had an escalator which went up 2 floors and completely skipped over the one in the middle, and there a bar waiting to serve you booze at the top of it. And, I'm still shocked by this, there was a freaking archaeological site inside the mall! Apparently before they built it they conducted an excavation and discovered the foundations of 12th century buildings that had been constructed even before the city walls. So they marked off a small area to show off some cool archaeological remains and then built the mall around it. Sure, why not?Monday, Mar. 8
This was a really fun, but unbearably cold day. We took a tram up to the high part of the city where the Prague Castle is and basically spent the whole day there. We got tickets to go into certain parts
of the castle grounds (though, unfortunately, a few things that would have been cool to see where closed that day due to "technical reasons," whatever that means) and we paid for an audio tour so that we could learn all kinds of cool stuff while we were there. Unfortunately nobody told us that we had to turn in our audio tour things by 4 pm, which we learned ourselves by reading a map at about 3 pm, so we had to hurry through a few things, but all in all I think it was a good investment.To start the day off, I got yelled at by a Prague police officer who was on guard duty at the castle. It was kinda scary, but mostly startling. I suppose it was my own fault, really. There were these really
ginormous flagpoles outside of the castle and Lee wanted to take a picture of me next to one as sort of a size comparison. There was a square marble base around it, not quite up to my knees, that kept me about a meter away from the pole itself. So, wanting to get closer to the flagpole, I simply stepped up onto the marble base. Ooops. This guy immediately came charging out of nowhere (he was behind the giant pole and we didn't know he was there until he started yelling) and we were slightly surprised that he didn't have his gun drawn, mostly because he was just so serious. So it wasn't quite a Matt-Salmi-moment, but I definitely pissed off a Czech guard.Moving on, we headed first to the massive cathedral (St. Vitus's Cathedral) once we actually went in to where the castle was. This church was amazing. In addition to being just absolutely massive (though I don't think it's as big as the Kölner Dom) at was extremely intricate and ornate inside. Along the walls were over 30 nooks, almost all of which were chapels dedicated to different saints and at least 2 of which had actual skeletal remains on display in glass tombs. Lee and I were so e
nthralled by everything that we actually toured the cathedral twice, once to listen to the audio and a second time to take pictures of everything. This proved to be unusually difficult for 2 reasons: we were so cold that we couldn't hold a camera still to save our lives; and we ran out of memory on the SD card that was in our camera. Son of a... Lee even had a 32 GB drive in his suitcase to put in my camera so that I basically could never run out of memory if I tried, and we forgot to switch them. So once that happened we spent the next half hour or so standing inside this inexplicably cold church deleting any and all photos that were either blurry/not really worth keeping, or that were of things we could take more pictures of later, after we switched out the memory cards. I think we ended up deleting over 100 pictures, most of which we would have deleted anyway when we actually took the time to go through all of them. Then, since we didn't have time to get the other memory card, we spent the rest of the day making sure we got one good picture of everything.When we were finished with the cathedral (and after we ducked into a cafe to defrost with another cocoa) we headed to the royal quarters of the castle grounds. Once again we were overwhelmed with the amount of history behind everything we were seeing. We got to walk through a great enterta
inment hall where they once had jousting tournaments (inside!) and where they occasionally still hold royal/official celebrations, the room where the Defenestration of Prague occurred in 1618 (leading to the 30 Years' War), and the private royal church (as if they needed another one when they had a private covered bridge leading directly to their royal seating in the cathedral).After visiting the royal quarters we continued through the rest of the grounds to see the Golden Lane, which consists
of the 24 smallest houses in all of Prague (one of which was formerly inhabited by Kafka) as well as the torture dungeon. We really wanted to see the armory because they have all kinds of cool medieval weapons and stuff there, but either we missed it somehow or they had already closed the entrance when we got there, because we never found the place to go in. Kind of a bummer, but the torture dungeon was really cool.Once we were done at the castle we headed back toward city center to find a traditional Czech restaurant where we could have dinner. We decided to go to a place that was noted on the map we picked up at our hotel, and I think it was a good choice. I got this goulash dish with dumplings and Lee got chicken in a yummy cream sauce with potatoes. We also tried some of their beer, since it was also a brewery and Prague is supposed to have really amazing beer. It was pretty good. And, either we were there during happy hour (not likely) or the waitress added up our total wrong because they only ended up charging us a little more than half of what we had calculated it to be. So it was delicious and cheap, and delicious.
After dinner we headed over to the Astronomical Clock to waste some time because we were going to be taking a Ghost Tour of the city that night. It sounded creepy and fun, so we thought
it would be a good idea. Luckily we got there just as a tour (not the one we were going to take, but a different ghost tour) was about to start. We went with them because we wanted to go back to the hotel and get warm, and it didn't make sense to wait another hour and half for no real reason. The tour was a lot of fun. It was more about history and architecture than about ghosts, which was cool, and our guide was really funny. He told us about some of the interesting tour groups he's had before, like the Spanish girl who knew perfect English but refused to speak it until she pointed out to him that "the lion has balls," referring to a painting of the lion on the crest of the city. It's totally true, by the way. Everywhere you see a painting or statue or anything depicting this lion, it has balls. The guy was really cool, and since the cost of his tour was 100 CZK less than the one we were planning to take, we gave that to him as a tip instead. Then it was straight back to the hotel and into bed before we lost body parts due to frostbite.To be continued. . .
