The following pictures summarize my trip with Erin Melwing to Prague, Budapest, Krakow, and Warsaw!
Prague, Budapest, Krakow, and Warsaw you say? But why? Well good question, I barely planned the thing! So you'd better talk to Mastermind Melwing for some reasoning other than the fact that all of the cities we went to were really great and Central Europe is crazy cheap! Erin organized everything and I read the maps and got us lost, a regular dynamic duo.
1. AWESOME FOOD! This is venison goulash with bacon dumplings. Bacon dizzumplings?! Yes, this was my first reaction, followed by "holyshitthisissogood" with my mouth full. It was our goal to only find local food things while on the trip and I think we accomplished this goal about 80% of the time (our failuress: one day we had thai food in Prague and a Chipotle knockoff in Budapest). When we got to Prague we asked the hostel for the Czechiest Czech stuff around and they told us to go to Zlata somethingsomething I forget the rest of the name, but usually when you walk into a restaurant in a seemingly international city (Prague) and the waiters have a hard time communicating, you know you're in the right place! This was our standard practice for the rest of the trip. We would get to a new hostel and be like "umm can you please point us in the direction of a restaurant with no english menus and a barely bilingual staff? great, thanks!"
Other food highlights of the trip included Langos (above), a kind of fried doughy thing with sour cream and cheese on it. I also had a piping hot glass of hot wine with this, as was my almost daily *COUGHhourlyCOUGH* practice (I'm my mother's son, c'mon), pierogi (very Polish, very good), potato pancake with creamy mushroom sauce, baked chicken (with blue cheese, pineapple, and spicy peppers), and freshly cooked turkey breast full of strong cheese. I am so down with Central European food.
2. Churches, Churches! I have never seen so many churches in my life (other than my trip through Europe last year). I think Poland had the best churches for the sheer fact that the outsides looked very bricky and one might blasphemously proclaim "boring" (said person being me), but then you go inside and they turn out to be outrageously ornate and beautiful. We probably averaged about 2.74 basilicas a day, rough estimate.
3. Long Distances. Notice the towerlike structure on the left side of this picture. Now look at what I've circled in the middle of the next picture. Erin and I made that walk in only about thirty or forty minutes. The second picture is taken from atop that tiny little spec on the left on the hill in the first picture. This is a pretty good representation of a NORMAL day for us, as we estimated walking between 3-6 hours each day. Our first full day in Prague we woke up and left the hostel by 8:30, only to get home sometime around 7pm. This happened a lot because Erin and I discovered that we had the ability to conquer the huge distances of a city in only one day. We'd wake up the second day in a city thinking "uhh did we just do everything we set out to do, only in one day!?", of course not...but in a way, yeah. We didn't utilize public transportation for site seeing purposes after we left Prague. Budapest, Krakow (other than going to Auschwitz), and Warsaw were pretty much done by foot.
This picture was taken from a bridge in Warsaw. That day it was my turn to lead us and I decided that we'd go to all of the far away places the first day (7 hours of walking) so that we didn't have to do as much on our last day there. Our hostel was located near that pointy building on the left. That's how far away we were haha, high five to ME.-everyone should be mandated to visit a concentration camp sometime in their lives. It's educationally heartbreaking, horrifying, emotionally draining, and only happened 60+ years ago.
-1 euro equals 23 koruna (czech crowns), 260 forint, and about 4 zloty. Converting currency for each country really sucked!
Overall I had a really great trip and I would definitely return to Budapest, Prague, or Warsaw. Krakow is so small that it doesn't warrant another visit.
I have a little under two months left in school but have I mentioned that I plan to live in Spain another year and hopefully work at the same exact school, plus another academy? Well that is the plan and I'll find out in a few weeks if that's what's going to happen. Take care, ciao.
