Submitted by Abagail Scout on the 2012 fall semester program in London, England…
This past weekend I visited Prague, Czech Republic and had the time of my life! London is just as amazing, but in a very different way. Prague is situated in Bohemia, an area of central Europe also shared with Germany, and is breathtakingly beautiful. We took off from Luton airport right around 9:30pm and landed in Prague right around midnight… conveniently right as public transportation shut down. Not one of us spoke any Czech besides, “na zdravi!” (cheers!), so at this point we were pretty nervous about getting ripped off by a taxi driver to get to our hostel. Luckily for us, we ran into a guy who was from London, but had family in Prague and spoke perfect Czech, so we managed to catch a taxi between the five of us and him for 500 koruna (about $25). As soon as we arrived at the hostel and placed our things in our room, we immediately went down to the bar area and had our first Czech beer and boy, was it good! The entire area is known around the world for its beer, so we all had a pretty hard time resisting a pint or two whenever we went out to eat.
The next day we hit all the famous sights in Prague: Charles Bridge, Prague Castle, and the Prague Orloj (an astronomical clock that’s been in operation since 1410!). We saw countless other sites around New Town and Old Town, but if I tried to list them here, you’d be reading this blog post for the next hour. That night we hit up a club next to the Charles Bridge that was five floors of nonstop dancing until 6am. The first floor was the loudest and busiest and the fifth floor played rock music, so it basically went from most energy to least and that was nice to move through as the night went on. Who needs sleep when you’re in a beautiful city for only the weekend?
On Saturday, we didn’t wake up until 2pm! We still went out and explored other small niches of Prague, but took it easy during the day. That night was our last night there, so we decided to go out on the town again even though our flight was at 10:10am on Sunday. We ended up going to two clubs called Deluxe and Double Trouble and we had a mind-blowingly awesome time at both. Of course, we made it to our flight on time and when we finally made it back to our flats in Ealing, I promptly passed out until Monday morning at which point I turned in a history paper that I wrote before we left, which was a great idea on my part because I was so exhausted when we got back to London that there was no way I would have been able to do it on Sunday!
Until fall break, I plan on staying around London and doing more touristy things since it’s impossible to check out all the places in London even when you’re living here.