Pit Stop Prague

Prague has a reputation of being a bit of an English stag and hens weekend destination. This is not surprising as it is the capital of the Czech Republic which holds the record for the highest amount of beer consumption per person in the world. The record stands at a staggering 156.9 litres of beer per person per year. To give a comparison New Zealand stands at 77 Litres and the UK at 99.

The other slightly more sober fact about Prague is that it somehow escaped the ravages of the second words war so is filled with a massive amount of amazing Gothic and Victorian architecture.

Julie, Andrew, Amy and I started our journey to Prague from Luton airport. We jumped on a half empty plane surrounded by at least two stag parties and a league team. It didn’t take long before the party started. The league team got told off for sexually harassing the flight attendant and Andrew and I got ripped of buying aeroplane beers.

By the time we got to our hostel we were so hungry all we could talk about was food. The girls considered sleep more important so we left them to it and went to the local all night takeaway. Basically it sold Czech style donor Kebabs. They were pretty good. Andrew went back for another one while I tried some meat filled pastry thing which was too hot and tasteless. Time disappeared and we didn’t get back until two in the morning.

We didn’t have long as breakfast was at 8.30am. It doesn’t matter how far you go, cornflakes for breakfast are always on the menu. It was supposed to be a buffet but all that meant was that you could have as many cornflakes as you wanted.

Wrapped in our biggest jackets we set of into the morning mist to explore the city. We walked around visiting pretty much every church, bridge, opera house that Prague had to offer. We soon started to realise that Prague had a little bit of every country. A small Eifel Tower on the hill, a St Pauls looking cathedral, the Spanish steps and a church that resembled Notre Dame etc.

After a beautiful lunch in an underground cellar we decided to go back to the hostel for a few drinks. We bought some absinth which is a local delicacy (we never ended up drinking any thankfully). Not having our fill of stodgy (but delicious) Czcech food at lunch we went out for dinner to try some more local delacacies. The boys went for the slabs of meat and the girls got the local pasta speciality. Unfortuantely Amy's ended up being a version of macaroni and cheese and she ended up gazing longingly at our food with a great deal of envy. Unlucky for her trying to sample meat off mens plates is like trying to take a bone from a dog - you could lose an arm with that kind of carry on.

As I have mentioned Prague is famous for its drinking and therefore it has a huge amount of pubs and beer. So we decided to go on an organised pub crawl through the hostel in the hope we would get to see some of the nice Prague pubs and to get a chance to see how the locals lived. We were slightly disappointed when we turned up to the first pub which was called, can you believe it, Molly Malones! By about the third English filled pub we were over caring as the alcohol was free and for Julie especially the cheesy 80's music was great. I had no idea she loved Guns and Roses so much hmmmmmmmmm.

That night no one apart from me slept very well. They all spent the night desperately running to the bog, a record of seven in one night for Julie. I had been rough the day before and seemed to be on the mend. I had some how passed it onto everybody else though.

We had to get up early again for breakfast and also to get to the dilapidated rail station to catch a train to kutna hora where the famous Ossuary chapel was. The cemetery grounds were considered sacred, and hence became a much sought after location for relatives to bury their dead. In the 14th century, the Black Death spread the bubonic plague across Europe and now 30,000 bodies all wanted a resting place within the sacred grounds. Such vast numbers of dead led to the creation of the ossuary in 1511 by a half-blind monk who gathered up the bones to be stacked up within the ossuary, making space for new corpses, which were soon taken up by more victims from 15th century Hussite Wars. The monk decided to decorate the chapel with the bones and made them into such things as a chandelar, coat of arms and caves. Pretty bizarre stuff really!
Seeing as we were in Kutna Hora we thought it would be a good idea to check out the town as the chapel was out in the sticks. It took about 20 mins to walk into town and halfway there was that familiar need for the toilet brewing in a few of us. The pace picked up to almost a canter and after weaving through the narrow streets we burst into the tourist information looking desperate! fortunately there was more than one toilet otherwise I am sure a fight would have broken out. After the much needed toilet stop, we realised we only had a short amount of time left before we had to head back to Prague to get to the airport so we headed straight for St Barbaras which is one of the largest gothic cathedrals in europe. It was spectacular but there was no time to browse so we missioned our way back to Prague.

No matter what city you are in you always seem to stumble across dodgy taxi drivers who can spot tourists a mile off. Seeing as we knew how much we paid to get into town from the airport we were not liking the quote that was 4 times the price to get back! We managed to find a reasonable one and our long journey back to London begun. I am beginning to hate airports...