The bottle is already almost half empty, though, which is worrying since we now need to share it between the two of us. We were not sure if we'd find any open pharmacies, though, since it was a Sunday and the next two days would be public holidays. We'd just have to stick to the dosage (as far as we understood it) and hope for the best. Until then, it'd be loads of vitamin C in the form of orange juice for us both.
At breakfast, something quite funny happened to other members of our tour. Two of them were sitting at a table for four, when some random Chinese guy showed up and sat down with them. He didn't say anything to them, just quietly sitting there enjoying his breakfast. It was very awkward for the two of them, though!
Nicole and I were the first two people on the bus this morning because we walked straight up to it, while everyone else was waiting in the lobby. My bag is getting very heavy, and our bedroom was quite a long way off from the lobby, so my bag was eating quite painfully into my hand by the time we got there, and I didn't want to stop until the whole ordeal was over. Following that, we found ourselves standing out in the cold next to the bus until I figured out which button opens the bus door (clever me!). Once on the bus, though, I realised that I still had our room card (not so clever me) that I had to return before we left. I tend to take the room card with me onto the bus almost all the time.
The morning bus drive was a lazy one through the pastoral countryside of Austria. Nicole seems to have finally mastered the art of sleeping on a bus (ahem, coach - Joey doesn't like the word bus) and spent some of the morning napping. I spent it blogging about our Vienna trip. Luckily, the drive to Prague is only 4.5 hours, so there wasn't a good chance that I'd run out of blogging to do and do some napping of my own, which may interfere with my evening sleep.
Just when I was thinking that everything in Europe was starting to look the same, things got weird pretty quickly as we crossed over into the Czech Republic, where there was a service station that looked like a theme park. There was a huge painted airplane outside and a globe painted like the earth on the roof. A giant knight was holding up the roof of the station. Behind that was "Excalibur City" with a restaurant that had huge dragons on the roof. We also passed a "non stop nightclub" that looked decidedly closed and signs every 100m for "Moulin Rouge" with erotic pictures all over the show. We also passed a statue of a man victoriously holding a machine gun above his head. It was like we had driven through a time warp.
You can see that the Czech Republic is a lot poorer than any of the other countries we have visited. Their houses are simple and dilapidated, with plaster coming off the walls in huge chunks. The houses are more brightly painted here, though, unlike other countries that have tended to stick to neutral colours. The streets have been absolutely dead, with almost no people or cars in sight. It is a Sunday, though, I guess. And the coldest it has been so far. There is snow everywhere and all the lakes are frozen over.
The service station that we stopped at for lunch was also pretty empty until we showed up and took over. We headed to the cafeteria, where Nicole ordered a schnitzel and potato bake, while I had a mixed potato dish. Despite the Rand being twice as strong as the Czech Crown, our meal wasn't any cheaper than the previous rest stops that we had eaten at so far on our trip. For that reason, we've decided to do the R1200 New Year's Eve pub crawl with the rest of our tour. At least drinks and entry into bars will be included and we'll be guaranteed a good time.
Upon arriving in Prague, we didn't stop at the hotel first. Instead, we headed to the old palace Habsburg complex (they seemed to have property everywhere), where the president now lives. There are guards outside the palace that stand staring straight ahead like you see at Buckingham Palace. Everyone gets their photos taken with the guards. It seems like a pretty crummy job, and I saw one guard even sigh as I was taking a photo of him and one of the girls on our tour. Poor guy!
After that, we walked down, down, down to the Charles Bridge. At one point, Nicole and I lost the group and were unable to find them. Luckily, I'm pretty good at map work and was able to navigate us to the bridge, but we still couldn't find anyone we knew. Nicole began to panic, despite my assurances that I could even get us to the hotel if necessary. To calm her down, I switched my phone's data on and got the phone numbers of some of our tour from Facebook, but no one answered when I phoned them.
Eventually, we found some familiar faces in the crowd of people on the bridge, and Nicole breathed a very heavy sigh of relief. As we walked along to the other side to meet up with Jen and the rest of the group, we realised how easy it was to lose people in the swarming crowd around us. At least we were fairly contained on the bridge, so we couldn't get too separated (but goodness, little Nicole is hard to spot when surrounded by people - thank goodness for her red hair!).
When we hit the streets, though, and headed to the square that is home to the famous Astronomical Clock and that Jan Hus statue. I have no idea who Jan Hus even is. I swear, I took in so little history while in Prague. What is the significance of the famous statue-studded bridge? I feel like I've reached my historical saturation point, and I just can't take anything else in anymore.
Nevertheless, Prague is a beautiful attractive city, especially considering what we'd seen in the poorer, smaller towns that we'd passed earlier that day. It was also jam-packed with people, making it hard to move at all. In Prague, Christmas markets extend beyond New Years, and Nicole and I were able to get our gluhwein fix at one of the stalls. We also tried some Czech delicacies, such as Langose, a flat piece of deep fried dough (a LOT like vetkoek) that they cover with cheese, garlic, and ketchup. They also make these spiral pastries called Trndeljnk, which are deliciously covered in cinnamon and sugar. #Nom.
After that, we made our way along the high end shopping street, passing by the likes of Dior and Armani, to where the coach was parked quite far away from the heart of the old town, finally making our way to the hotel. Luckily, in Prague, we were treated to another pretty corporate hotel with comfy beds and decent bathrooms.
The beds only had one pillow each again, but in the cupboard, we found one extra pillow and one extra blanket, oddly. Nicole joked that the extra bedding was for the secret fugitive we must have stowed away in our luggage. Why else wouldn't there be two extra sets of bedding? I joked with Nicole that she could buy my 50% of shares in the spare pillow and have it all to herself rather than only one of the two nights. Instead, she pretty much commandeered it.
The only two problems with the hotel were that the room key cards tended to stop working, so we needed to keep heading to reception to get that sorted out. The other problem was that the lifts would take forever to collect you, even though there were three of them, and there weren't any stairs you could take instead, even though we were only one floor up. (Surely that is a fire hazard?)
Dinner was included at our hotel, and to our delight, it was a buffet offering a wide variety of cooked and salad-style vegetables. You have never seen a girl so excited to see Brussels sprouts as I was when I lifted the warmer and saw all the greens that we had available for dinner. We ate very well and healthily that night!
Our hotel was also very conveniently next door to a large shopping mall that stayed open quite late into the night. Even the pharmacy was still open when we got there at 7pm, to our relief, so we were able to get more cough syrup for both Nicole and I. While we were there, the very cheap handbag that I'd brought along from South Africa finally gave up the fight, with both the zip and strap breaking, so I found a new one at one of the stores there to replace it as well as some earrings for our New Year's Eve pub crawl.
We didn't shop around for too long, though, because our big New Year's Eve night was coming up and we wanted to get as much sleep in as we could in advance. It feels impossible to ever get enough sleep on Contiki, for some reason. I never seem to wake up fully refreshed. But we were sure going to try!
No comments:
Post a Comment