Prague Photos (~November 16)

Here are a bunch of photos, mostly from the trip I took to Prague with my friends last weekend! As usual, the post prior to this one is all text explaining what I was up to in the last two weeks. I'll try to provide captions with more context when possible, but to be honest I don't know what all of the buildings I photographed are so my comments here might be lackluster. Anyway, enjoy!

A fun park we walked through in the night on the way to our hotel in Prague!

The Church of Our Lady Before Tyn, one of the main buildings in Old Town Square.

The Prague astronomical clock, the oldest astronomical clock that's still working!

I think this tower was part of the walls of Old Town back in medieval times? I'm honestly not sure though.

Close-ups of some parts of the astronomical clock

Czech cuisine is really something

Meg and Grace enjoying some good good candy we bought

This photo and the one before it are the two ends of the Charles bridge, which was absolutely beautiful

The Rainbow's End cafe is a great place! Highly recommend if you ever find yourself exploring Prague :D

Illuminati confirmed?

Three photos of St. Vitus Cathedral, which is a huge church located inside Prague castle.

Some nice trees and hills just outside the castle! These were part of the royal gardens.

Beautiful views of Prague

The "Stopped Metronome" memorial. You can't see very well in this photo, but the metronome is red and it's meant to symbolize the end of communism in the Czech Republic (exactly 30 years ago on the weekend we were here!)

They have lots of puppet shops near the castle!

A cool seal that has something to do with alchemists? I don't know the exact details, I'm afraid.

Sunset near Charles Bridge

Meg got to hold an owl!

We had a nice candlelit dinner featuring soup in bread!

As part of the freedom celebrations, people bought E.U. balloons and took photos with stilt-walkers dressed up like communist soldiers. Unrelated fun fact: my last name supposedly means something like "man who walks on stilts"

We went thrift shopping and I got this great new fall look! Orange is the new purple

This statue is composed of a bunch of horizontal layers, all of which can and do rotate independently. It's quite fascinating to watch in person.

The central Prague railway station, where I had to bid my friends goodbye (until I get to visit them in Vienna next week at least)

Müpa, the concert hall I went to in Budapest! It's lit with fun colors that are constantly changing and is very fancy inside, as the next picture indicates.

More Weekends, More Music, More Travel

Hello again,
It seems that once again I've gone two weeks without posting an update, so this one might be a little on the long side. Last weekend I met my friends Grace and Meg (close friends from Lawrence studying in Vienna this semester who have come up in my travel blog previously) in Prague, which was fantastic! I've also done a fair number of interesting things around Budapest in the time since my last post, so I'll try to describe them as well. A photo post will follow as per usual, although there might be a bit of a delay this time around because I need to consolidate the photos from my friends. Without further ado, here's what I've been up to lately!

I didn't travel at all the weekend before last, which meant I had a lot of time to focus on my studies and stay on top of my workload for the upcoming week. Despite spending most of my time working, I did get to have some fun too--on Saturday night, I went out with a couple of other BSM students to see a show being put on by a small theater company called the Asterion project. The show was a 2-person piece in English, and although it started out as a romantic comedy it was pretty weird and I think it ended up being about euthanasia? I was confused for a lot of it, but it was very interesting and I had a good time. On Sunday night, Rowan (one of the BSM students I sing with) came over to my apartment to do a casual folk song exchange--we each taught each other a couple of songs that we enjoy and had a lot of fun singing together. I miss the huge number of musical opportunities that I have at Lawrence, so any chance to make or listen to music with other people is especially great here. :)

Nothing particularly interesting happened during the week itself. I was less stressed than usual thanks to the extra studying time I had over the weekend, but I pretty much just went to class and stayed around my apartment otherwise. On Friday though, I went to Prague! My bus left Budapest around 11:30 Friday morning, which meant I arrived in Prague at 6:30 or so. The ride was very fun--I listened to a lot of nice music, admired the countryside all day, and read about half of The Da Vinci Code! Meg and Grace made it to Prague about 10 minutes before me, so they met me at my bus stop and we walked straight to our hotel, which was a couple kilometers away. The walk gave us a nice chance to catch up with each other, and we saw some pretty parks and things on the way (although it was dark so the views weren’t great). We got really good Thai food from a restaurant next to our hotel and had a nice night in talking to each other. Meg spent a few days in Prague on a school-related trip years ago, so she had recommendations and places she thought we should see on Saturday. Grace and I thought her plan sounded good, so we pretty much followed her lead for the day. We wandered around “the labyrinth” of Old Town, which is the medieval section of Prague. It’s fun because the streets are all winding and narrow with lots of cool old buildings everywhere. We went to see the astronomical clock, which is one of the main sights that everyone visits, and we watched it chime the hour on both Saturday and Sunday. We also wandered through some of the local shops, including some very nice glassblowers and woodcarvers. Christmas markets are just starting to spring up, so we looked at those as we passed them as well. We also looked at some different cathedrals and things from the outside before going to Charles Bridge, which is a beautiful pedestrian bridge connecting the castle to the labyrinthine part of the city. It's almost 700 years old!

On the bridge we bought some really cool ocarina-type flutes! One of my goals this semester was to purchase some sort of musical instrument in Europe, so that was very exciting for me. Once we crossed the river we hiked up to the castle and toured around the buildings there, which was a lot of fun. We didn’t get to go inside the fanciest buildings (the lines were hours long and it didn’t seem worth the amount of daylight we would lose waiting), but everything was spectacular from the outside. We had lunch in a The Rainbow's End, a great cafe/art gallery that I stumbled upon, and later we got chimney cakes with ice cream (one of Grace’s goals is to get ice cream in every country she visits this semester). There are also a bunch of marionette stores in Prague, and we had a lot of fun exploring one where the owner would tell us about the Czech folktales that inspired the different puppets. We walked through the gardens by the castle, which were nice and quiet but not super colorful since it’s November, and got some great overlook views of the whole city. We also found a stopped metronome monument representing the end of Soviet control in the Czech republic that Meg remembered from the last time she was here, although she said that it’s changed a lot in that time. We ended our day by walking back across the bridge and through Old Town as the gas lights turned on and getting dinner at a nice traditional place where I was able to get soup in a bread bowl! Even better, Meg got to hold a barn owl named Richard on the bridge! After dinner we went back to our apartment and had a quiet night together, which was a perfect finish to the day.

Sunday morning we woke up, checked out of our room, and went back to Old Town to do some souvenir/gift shopping for ourselves and our families. We also went to a couple of thrift shops, since that’s something that we’ve been enjoying doing together in different countries. I found some fun orange garments to complement my usual purple aesthetic. It also happens to be the 30^th anniversary of Czech independence from the Soviet Union this weekend, so there were a lot of open festival/concert-type things happening in the streets and we had fun walking by some of them. We ended our day by going through the Jewish quarter and seeing some of the synagogues and cemeteries in that area, which was really cool. We wanted to go into the museums, but they wouldn’t let us in with our bags so we had to make do with seeing the outside only. It was still nice though. We said our goodbyes and departed Prague around 4:00 PM, which meant that my bus arrived back in Budapest by midnight. It was a busy and fantastic weekend!

I didn't get much homework done while traveling, so this week was rather more stressful than the previous one. I did manage to get everything in good order though, and I also had a chance to go to a concert in the national concert hall Tuesday night! The group was the "Baltic Sea Philharmonic," and they perform all of their music from memory, so they have a lot of freedom to move and connect with the audience on stage. They performed Grieg's Pier Gynt suite and a minor piano concerto in the first half, and then finished with the Firebird suite in the second. They sang a cool folk song and performed a bit from Swan Lake as encores too! The conductor was a very Leonard Bernstein-esque character, jumping around and practically dancing on stage the whole time, which was especially fun to watch. I had a standing seat in the nosebleeds, but the music was still great and it's awesome that students are able to get cheap tickets here--the concert was sold out, but as a student I was able to get a $2 ticket an hour before it started. It was an amazing experience and I hope I can go to at least one more performance before the semester is over. In addition to the concert, I've started learning a couple of Hungarian folk songs with other BSM students, which is a lot of fun. It's been a musical week!

And that's about it! I'm not traveling this weekend, but I hope to visit some of the Christmas markets in Budapest and maybe attend a concert or two. I also want to get ahead on my homework, since I get Thanksgiving off and am planning to travel to Bratislava and Vienna during that break. I return home almost exactly four weeks from now, so while there's still plenty of time for me to do cool things in Europe the end is clearly in sight. Cheers!

Hiking Photos! (~November 2nd)

Hello! This is a photo-dump post corresponding to the events of the last two weeks, which most notably include my trip hiking in Poland with my friend Grace. If you want to know what exactly we were up to, I recommend you read the other post where I explain everything (especially since these photos aren't all in chronological order), but if you just want to see pretty mountain pictures there are something like 50 of them below. Enjoy!

No materials to make a proper Halloween costume this year, but at least I could dress up in a fun way!

All of the currently available túró rudi flavors, which Grace and I taste-tested over the course of the weekend. Our official recommendations are the plum and salted caramel flavors, although the original is hard to beat.

A tiny convenience store where I had to wait out the wee hours of the morning due to a weird connection en route to Zakopane.

Friends reunited!

The hotel where we stayed--we literally did not meet a staffperson until we checked out, but it was lovely!

Somewhere in the Tatras, probably near Giewont.

All of the most fun trails to hike looked like this

Mountain fall aesthetic

Bread, cheese, and oranges comprised the majority of our non-dinner meals and we wouldn't have had it any other way!

Did I mention it was pretty?

The path to Morskie Oko was more paved and crowded than the others, but it was still beautiful

Grace Likes Rocks

Near where we had our picnic, hiking in the mountains surrounding Morskie Oko

Grace is braver than me when it comes to hiking in the mountains

Good path, good lake, good friend

Grace ate an orange like a monster

We were singing in the mountains and then ran into some other hikers and we took this photo to preserve our emotions in that moment

All three of these are beautiful pictures we got around Morskie Oko

It gets dark early! This photo was taken before 5:00 PM

We ended up in a restaurant that was much fancier than we were

Outclassed by our meals

These pictures are from the Sunday morning hike and they are totally incapable of capturing just how beautiful this part of the park is. 

We got ice cream with a lot of fruit in it!

It was raining in Budapest when we had to say goodbye

Apparently Calvin and Hobbes still runs in Hungarian newspapers. The man reading this copy noticed us looking and gave us the newspaper, so now this comic is on my wall. :)

We tried to get dramatic shots when we could

We still don't know what kind of bird this is but it is excellent. Please let us know if you can identify it!

Turns out mountains are still pretty!

"So, Andrew, do you feel like you've changed much as a person after going away to college, studying abroad, learning to fend for yourself? Do you feel like a real adult now?"
"Definitely! I've left childish things behind me now and stay focused on more serious endeavours than I used to..."

Coming soon to an album cover near you?

Grace's photos (like this one) did a better job of capturing the Sunday hike than mine did.

The photo doesn't capture it well, but this spot was one of the most beautiful places I've ever been--Grace and I just started laughing when we saw it. It doesn't even look real.

This spot, too, is exceptionally beautiful in person even if it doesn't stand out on camera.

There was a lot of wind happening and the grass blowing both looked and sounded very beautiful

Sunlight!

An oddly aesthetic photo of me!

Grace took this beautiful panorama featuring a horrific distorted closeup of my face at the very end.

Polish restaurant gave us SO MUCH FOOD

A beautiful waterfall on the way to Morskie Oko!

Paths like this were everywhere. It was sooo beautiful and I'm so happy I had the opportunity to travel here!