Vienna via Prague

I think we found the magic travel formula. 3 days/2 nights per city, leave on an afternoon train to try and arrive between 5-7pm, which is perfect time to check-in, fire up the laptop and pray for an unsecured wifi connection, eat dinner, and explore the immediate surroundings. The next day is your touring day, get up early, do everything that needs doing, and hit the bar/show/etc that night. Sleep in the following day, and catch one or two of the things you missed the day prior, then catch the train to the next destination.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

Anyways, this post begins with our touring day in Prague. Unsatisfied with our current hostel situation, we follow the advice of some Californians we met the night prior, and call for a room in the extra-cheap, laundromat / hotel, unfortunately they were booked, but their sister hotel had a room for us, same price but closer to the city..woot!

We catch the tram over and check-in. This is a super nice place with a cavernous room with a queen bed(this is nice, usually we end up with 2 twins that are separated). We hand over all of are dirty clothes and head out.

Firsts things first, we catch the U-bahn (subway/metro) to the other side of the river, and climb up to see Prague Castle and the surrounding palace and gardens. Some really old shit here, one of the churches inside was build in the 10th century. That's the oldest building we've been in. They had a little section of the castle area with a bunch of midget houses lined up in a row, inside was a collection of weaponry and armor, my favorite was this Axe gun, yes...and Axe with a gun attached to it. At the top of one of these houses was a place where you could shoot a crossbow about 10 meters at a target. Eli and I both shot, unfortunately we ended up with the same score (this thing was not very accurate). On a side note Franz Kafka lived briefly in one these little houses.

Ok, castles done with, while we were on top the hill where the castle grounds were, we noticed an interesting looking wall, so once we climbed back down, we wandered around the city for an hour or so looking for it. We failed, but it was fun wandering aimlessly around through parks and extremely narrow winding cobblestone streets. We walked back over the Charles bridge to "old town" to get dinner, then head out for some of that burcak or "early wine." It was much too sweet.

Somehow, Eli talked me into going on an hour long "ghost walk". This was pretty much the lamest tourist trap I think I've ever seen. The "walk" which is basically all we did, consisted of 6 stops where the guide "talked"(he was a walking tape recorder) for 2 minutes. Most are the stories were pretty bad, the climax of it all was when we walked about a corner, this guy dressed in really bad costume tried to scare us with a plastic sword. I almost asked for my money back.

Tired of typing... so condensing the rest of the events leading up to now into a bulleted list.

* Ice Cream
* Drinks
* Sleep
* Get lost in Prague Old town again
* Almost miss train
* Arrive in Vienna
* Get Lost
* Get Unlost
* Praying for Wi-fi has proven fruitful, I am posting this message.