The Biggest Czech I've Ever Seen

I'm sure you're just dying with laughter over that awesome pun in the title. It's okay, I'll let you get your giggles out.

Done? Okay, so now I can go ahead and tell you all about just what exactly that means.

Today was another travel day for us, and so we left Austria behind and set out for the Czech Republic. As I'm sure you can guess, I am still very sad about this move. Vienna was awesome, better than our three stops in Italy put together, and I shall miss it. But alas, we had no choice in the matter, and at 10:00 (yes, this is two hours later than usual, and we were all very grateful for it) we were packing up the bus and eventually pulling away from the hotel.

Apparently Prague and Vienna aren't that far apart. I google map'd the trip and it told us the drive was only 3 and a half hours long. How it managed to take six hours for us to get there is beyond me, but I suppose it's okay. I need to say, the countryside of Austria and the Czech Republic have been incredible. Austria had these great wide rolling grassy hills, and Czech (I'm just going to call it Czech from now on because I really don't want to have to type Republic every time I say the country) has these endless fields of tall grass that roll in the wind. It's like an ocean, except with grass. It was awesome.

As for Prague itself though....I'm not as happy with it as I was with Vienna. That's probably because Prague feels a lot more like it belongs in Italy than in between the Germanic countries. It's also not a member of the European Union, so it's even more separated from what we've become accustomed to. Very few people speak English, and their language is almost impossible to decipher on the go. Plus, they don't use the Euro as currency here, they use the Koruna. And this is the source of my pun in the title.

We went out to dinner in Prague tonight before our concert, and there were 8 of us who sat down to eat together. I got a plain pizza and a Pilsner Beer, which was a total of 260 or so Korunas, which translates to maybe 10-12 Euros. So the Czeck (hehe) came and our total was about 2,200 Korunas. So yeah, it's the biggest total I've ever seen on a check. Past that, though, the whole situation was kind of unfortunate. The restaurant took Euros as well, and since we didn't have Korunas at the time, we all had to pay with Euros and the guy at the restaurant gave us an absymal exchange rate. Needless to say, I stopped at an ATM ASAP and pulled out 1,500 Karunos; hopefully that'll last me until the end of the stay here, and if I've got anything left over I'll just exchange it for Euros.

But that pretty much catches you up to the present, at least in terms of general details. Before I go, though, I'll share a story.

It's from last night, the last night in Vienna. Sydney, Lindsay, Carol, Kate and I all went out to dinner, and on the way back to the hotel everybody was apparently pretty cheery because Lindsay, Carol and Kate started skipping, all arm in arm. Well Sydney decided she wanted to get in on the action, and so she came up behind me and tried to link arms with me so we could join the line. Here's where she went wrong. First of all, her aim was terrible...either that, or she mistook my left kidney for the space between my arm and torso. Second of all, she tried to link arms with me at speeds at or around Mach 5 (if I were to guesstimate). So when you put those two together, you can understand that my side felt some mild discomfort for a few minutes.

Alright, and that's it for now, I'll be going to bed soon. I know I've been saying good night in whatever language of the country I'm in....but I have no idea how they do it here and I'm not going to google it right now. haha. Maybe tomorrow.