Central-Eastern Europe Trip, Day 1, June 19th, 2010

This year we decided to take an international trip to Central Eastern Europe. Our initial plan involved spending 17 days in Italy, but following my Polish grandmother’s passing away in January, and our friends’ wedding in May (which was at the same time as the tentatively planned trip), we decided it would be more appropriate to head further east in Europe and leave closer to summer time.

In preparation for the trip, Tobia packed us extremely light- two carry on backpacks for the 18 days of Europe, followed by 3 full days in Israel. For my part, I had my head shaved to see what it’s like to be completely bald.

We flew out of SFO on Friday, June 18th, early in the afternoon, and reached Prague early in the afternoon on Saturday.

The first thing in Prague that stood out to me was that everything seemed naturally green. It was fairly cool temperature wise, and it looked like it could rain at any moment.

There were plenty of taxis outside the airport, and we ended up taking one out to our hotel in the heart of downtown Old City Prague. The hotel location was absolutely perfect for walking and exploration. We were a 5-10 minute walk from the Vltava River that runs through a part of the old town.

Welcome to Prague drink; I still don’t know what it was.	At Vltava River.	On Charles Bridge.	From the other side, looking back at Charles Bridge.
Prague Castle in the distance.	I liked the old city streets and architecture.	Tyn Church in the town square.	Enjoying live World Cup action (Ghana-Australia) on the big screen in town square.

After settling in pretty quickly, we stepped outside for some food and got a couple of free crazy hard drinks at the restaurant. We enjoyed our meal and went exploring some of the old architecture, including churches, bridges and old homes in the old town. We even managed to cross old town square and watched some World Cup action before crashing back in the room really hard due to jet-lag in the mid-afternoon.