Prague Day 1

Monday, April 20, 2009
So today was our first official day in Prague. We had a lot of errands to do, and since we didn’t arrive at our hostel until 4:30am we needed to sleep in a bit, so we spent most of the day playing catch up. We woke up about noon, grabbed some food from the supermarket and then headed off to a Laundromat to wash our clothes. We both had our daypacks full of clothes as well as the Romanian sack Justin bought me for Valentine’s Day and we were wearing our pajamas so I’m sure we looked fairly ridiculous, especially poor Justin with his basketball shorts and long socks. We had to take the tram and then walk a fairly good distance to the Laundromat so by the time we got there it was about 2:30pm. We didn’t finish washing our clothes until a little after 5pm and then we headed back to our hostel to put everything away. We took a quick shower and then headed out to get some food.
We thought that we would try one of the local restaurants near the hostel so we ended up eating at a place called Rustica. We knew it was authentic and not a place where tourists usually go because they only had menus in Czech (most of the restaurants have both Czech and English, even the non-touristy restaurants) and the fact that none of the waiters spoke English. It was quite a challenge trying to order food, especially when you don’t speak a single word of Czech. Justin and I both scanned the menu for any word that looked familiar and just ordered, hoping that we hadn’t ordered liver or something equally scary. When we got our food mine was a big steak of sorts and Justin had ordered some chicken skewers. I’m still not sure what kind of steak it was that I ate; I think it may have been pork? It didn’t taste bad, but it was pretty hard to chew. I also got a side dish with my food that was definitely interesting. It was potatoes, onion and small pieces of bacon fat. It actually tasted pretty good, but I couldn’t eat all the bacon fat pieces. Justin’s skewers had chicken, sausage and very large pieces of bacon fat. His fat was about 1 inch tall and 2 inches wide, it was sick, but he ate them. He said they tasted pretty good, but that the texture was really hard to handle. It was definitely an experience to order something and not have any idea of what type of food you ordered.
After dinner we took a tram to town and took a bridge walk. Because there is a large river that runs directly through Prague there are tons of bridges throughout the city, there is one crossing the river at every major road. It’s not like in the states where there is usually only one bridge. We got off the tram at the first bridge we crossed and walked a mile or so down crossing back and forth between over the bridges. It was really beautiful. The city was all lit up, as were the bridges. We even made it to the famous Charles Bridge, for those of you who have seen Mission Impossible it is the bridge the guy falls over when he gets shot, as Justin keeps reminding me. The day started off fairly boring, but ended beautifully. Welcome to Prague.