Week Six: A Trip to Prague

Wow, reading “Week 6” knowing that I only have 9 weeks in total here is making me a little bit sad. I cannot believe I’m this far into the summer, I swear I just got off the plane in Munich!

On Monday, I went to work as usual. I’ve begun working on controlling my robot car with the keys on my keyboard on my laptop. This project is turning out to be quite difficult, but I am really having a good time and I am learning a lot! After work, we travelled into the city to meet up with Nick’s friend from home Allie and a group of us had dinner at the Augustiner-Keller Biergarten, which is 100% our favorite restaurant in the whole city.

Tuesday started out very similar to Monday, with work and the frustrations of working with electronics. After work, we travelled towards Munich’s Olympic Park for the Tollwood Festival. This festival is a world-wide food festival where they offer, believe it or not, different foods from across the world. It was cool just walking around and seeing all the various food stands and little pop up shops. Apparently, this festival had been going on for a month and we just now found out about it, and it was the last week. I wish we had gone earlier because it was really cool! At 10pm there was a silent disco at the festival — for free! To participate in the disco, you got a pair of headphones that had two stations controlled by the DJ and then you could pick which music you wanted to listen to. This was actually so much fun! When I had the headphones on I didn’t even really realize how goofy the whole thing was because I was just dancing and enjoying the music with my friends. It was really funny whenever you took the headphones off though, because then it was just a dance floor full of people dancing around to silence. This was something I always wanted to do and I honestly had a great time!

Wednesday was a pretty chill day. After work we headed into the city to “do some work” at a coffee shop (I put it in quotes because naturally, we got nothing done and just chatted the whole time). It started pouring rain out of no where about 5 minutes after we got inside, so that was lucky! After hanging out for a bit — and waiting on the rain to pass — we decided to walk around the city and then headed home.

On Thursday I was finally able to control the robot from my laptop, and I felt pretty great after that! However, now I have to be able to do that and write data to a file at the same time, which is proving to be an extremely difficult task. The weather on Thursday was much nicer than the day before, so we decided to buy some wine, cheese, and bread and headed into the city to hang out by the Eis Bach in the English Gardens. This is one of our favorite ways to spend an afternoon, and I am really going to miss this place when I leave! Once the sun set, we headed to an Australian pub for Karaoke Night! It was so much fun! We jammed out to numbers by The Spice Girls, Neil Diamond, and A-ha! We even rocked out to the YMCA, dance moves and all. Overall Thursday was a really fun day!

We started Friday with work, as always, and then around 2 we all left early to go catch our train for this weekend’s destination: Prague! The train took about 5 hours and drove us through the beautiful German/Czech Republic country sides. We arrived at our Airbnb relatively late, so we did not do much that night.

On Saturday, we woke up and took a train towards the river to have breakfast. I got a banana omelet and it was so freaking delicious, I intend to figure out a way to make it at home. After breakfast we walked towards the Old Town square where we saw a gorgeous church and the famous Astronomical Clock of Prague. We conveniently arrived at 11:58 so we waited till 12 to watch its “performance” and then walked towards the St. Charles bridge. Jayme, Robert, and I climbed to the top where we had the most beautiful view of all of Prague. The city is full of red-roof buildings and it was just way too pretty. We then walked across the bridge and found a cute little farmers market where we enjoyed some shrimp and wine for lunch. Then, we went to the John Lennon Wall. This wall stands for the global ideas of peace and love and is full of graffiti. It was a really really cool place and we took many many photos. We then grabbed a beer at the John Lennon Pub nearby and headed back across the bridge to the Old Town.

On the old town side of Prague we got the infamous Chimneys that Prague is known for. These Chimneys are cinnamon sugar coated pastries filled with ice cream and I really don’t think I have ever had anything that delicious before. It was heaven. After our ice cream, we bought tickets for a boat tour. We lucked out because it started raining right as we were getting into the covered boat, so we were shielded from the rain. We then continued to hide from the rain in the Charles Bridge Museum until we picked out a place for dinner. After dinner we headed home for a bit before adventuring into the city to check out the Biggest Club in Central Europe. The place had 5 floors, and while it was fun, I don’t really feel the need to go again hahahah. We ended up spending most of our time on the least crowded floor where they played European techno(ish) music.

On Sunday we checked out of our Airbnb and went to see the Prague Castle. This was THE COOLEST!! It wasn’t just a castle. It was like a walled in little town, sort of like you would see in a Disney movie. We were all so amazed with the whole thing; I have never seen anything like it. In the Prague Castle complex was the St. Vitus Cathedral. Holy moly was this building beautiful. I think my jaw legitimately dropped when I looked up and saw the sun shining off the building’s golden accents. We spent a good five minutes just staring at this building in silence because of how beautiful it was. We then travelled outside the complex walls and across a bridge to walk through the gardens. These gardens were on the other side of the castle’s MOAT. There was an actual moat here and it was so deep! This complex was amazing, 10/10 would recommend going to Prague solely for it (but the other parts of Prague were awesome too so if you go check those out as well). After the castle we grabbed some lunch and then boarded our train back to Munich.

Prague was quite possibly my favorite place we have visited so far. Everything about the city was incredible and I absolutely would recommend going if you ever find yourself in Central Europe. I know I would totally go again!

Check out Prague’s beauty and other fun pics from this week right here!