We decided to do a whirlwind tour through two very inexpensive European cities. Both cities are well known for their fun party atmosphere and their historical depth. Yeah, so we explored the first part of that sentence quite well, the historical part, well, you can just wikipedia that stuff I suppose. We did a few touristy things, but not too many. The short version of the trip can be summed as: wake up, eat, drink, drink, walk, drink, eat, drink, change, and party. Multiply that by 7 days, and that was pretty much the entire trip. I'll note a couple of things and places that stood out, as well as some of my favorite spots, and we'll call it a night.
Prague:
http://hudang6234.smugmug.com/Europe/4Jul14-Prague
From KSA it is a very short trip to Prague, taking less than 6 hours, but it did have a layover in Turkey to arrive there. Turkish airlines was the first airline that I flew that actually said the Muslim prayer on a flight in English, so it was nice to know what they were saying for the first time.
We arrived in afternoon, and proceeded to the main square, the square with the famous Astronomical Watch Tower. It is currently the worlds oldest working clock. Pretty cool looking, very crowded. We didn't hang around for the moving figures to move. Pretty cool looking square though.
When in Prague, there are two main sections, the town square side, which is where we stayed, and across the bridge, about 20 minutes, which is where the Prague Castle is. During the day, we made this 20 minute walk, stopping to enjoy the views, and the many bars, and grocery stores which may have had beer. We must have tried at least 6 beers, and this is just from the grocery store. Mostly pilsners, including Duff beer, which apparently is a copy-written brand name. I couldn't find out much about it on the web, except that it's not officially sold outside the US or UK. Apparently you can get away with that over in Eastern Europe. Who is going to stop them? In either case, Homer's got good taste. I never thought I'd ever say that.
The bridge that connects both sides of Prague itself is fairly famous, and full of singers, and people selling all sorts of knick-knack stuff, like jewerly, paintings, photographs and lots of live singers and bands playing for some cash. This is Eastern Europe, so they don't fall under the EU, and have their own currency. Rounding off, it's approximately 20 CZK or Koruna to one USD. Most beers were 25 CZK, for example. Nice. Anyways, yeah the bridge is old, and was completed in the 1400's. It is called the Charles Bridge. A really really old bridge. There were quite a few statures and monuments as well of Saints and important figures on the bridge. Many people were praying and touching certain statures. Good way to polish the statues I suppose.
Prague:
http://hudang6234.smugmug.com/Europe/4Jul14-Prague
From KSA it is a very short trip to Prague, taking less than 6 hours, but it did have a layover in Turkey to arrive there. Turkish airlines was the first airline that I flew that actually said the Muslim prayer on a flight in English, so it was nice to know what they were saying for the first time.
We arrived in afternoon, and proceeded to the main square, the square with the famous Astronomical Watch Tower. It is currently the worlds oldest working clock. Pretty cool looking, very crowded. We didn't hang around for the moving figures to move. Pretty cool looking square though.
When in Prague, there are two main sections, the town square side, which is where we stayed, and across the bridge, about 20 minutes, which is where the Prague Castle is. During the day, we made this 20 minute walk, stopping to enjoy the views, and the many bars, and grocery stores which may have had beer. We must have tried at least 6 beers, and this is just from the grocery store. Mostly pilsners, including Duff beer, which apparently is a copy-written brand name. I couldn't find out much about it on the web, except that it's not officially sold outside the US or UK. Apparently you can get away with that over in Eastern Europe. Who is going to stop them? In either case, Homer's got good taste. I never thought I'd ever say that.
The bridge that connects both sides of Prague itself is fairly famous, and full of singers, and people selling all sorts of knick-knack stuff, like jewerly, paintings, photographs and lots of live singers and bands playing for some cash. This is Eastern Europe, so they don't fall under the EU, and have their own currency. Rounding off, it's approximately 20 CZK or Koruna to one USD. Most beers were 25 CZK, for example. Nice. Anyways, yeah the bridge is old, and was completed in the 1400's. It is called the Charles Bridge. A really really old bridge. There were quite a few statures and monuments as well of Saints and important figures on the bridge. Many people were praying and touching certain statures. Good way to polish the statues I suppose.
The Prague Castle itself is quite big, and stands out in the landscape. However, before we could get to there, we had to go to the Absinthery. It was basically a bar, but did sell Absinthe. And absinthe flavored ice cream. Interesting concept. Now whether absinthe actually does things to the body or not, I'm not sure, i'm not risking it. I did know that the absinthe that was sold, was around 90% alcohol, and needed to be cut with water. Good luck to whoever tries that. I'll stick to the duff.
The castle itself has a few little areas that you can visit, mostly restaurants, and a fairly big square looking area as well. You can also climb all the way to the top. It's only 208 steps. A little more tiring if you've had a few beers, or like some in my group, who drink and smoke. Yeah, pretty exhausting. But once you're up there though, it's gorgeous, Prague is pretty small, so you can end up seeing the entire town.
A little past the Prague Castle was a monastery that made their own craft beer. It was quite a bit more serene, and quite a bit more flavorful than the canned beer we had been drinking. It was a nice change of pace.
On the square side, there were two places that caught my eye. The first was an American classic; Hooters. Right next to our hotel, by coincidence, not by design, there was a Hooters right next door. Great place to watch the world cup for sure. The food pretty much tasted the same too, so that was good. Hey, I do like the wings, regardless of what you may say. We ate there twice.
The other place was a different take on bar food and drink. They had computerized the waiter/waitress. When you came in, there was a touch screen, in which you ordered from. If you wanted beer, there was a tap on the table, and you each picked a number. When you wanted to fill up, you selected your number, and there was a flow meter that measured how many liters of beer you drank. There was also a scoreboard that tallied up how much your table drank versus those around you, and those at other locations of this bar. It became a contest pretty quickly. We hit 63 half liters. That's a lot of beer. That's a lot of pride. That's a lot of pee breaks.
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| If you can't see the number, that's a 50. We weren't done yet. |
During the night, there were very cheap beer tours you could go on, which involved going to 3 or 4 bars, and the first one being a all you can drink shot bar, and the last being somewhere, in which no one remembers how they got there, or how they got home.
Overall Prague lived up to what it was famous for. It was a very inexpensive party town. I might go back to do some more sightseeing, but the trip as it was, was quite fun, and anywhere where you can order food like this, I'm easily sold.
Buddapest
We took a train from Prague to Budapest. It was a 6 hour train ride, but it only cost $30, and that was with us paying to arrange our own seats. It was a pretty long ride still though. There was a drink train. We nearly drank all the beer on the train.
Budapest was even cheaper than Prague, with the currency change being 242 forint to the dollar. Just multiply by 4, and divide by 1000. Close enough anyway. It was a much larger city, with two distinct sides, the Buda part and the Pest side. We stayed on the Pest side. We had a three bedroom apartment in the middle of the city, which was quite nice. As with most of Europe, there is no air conditioning, but we were lucky enough that they provided us with a portable air conditioner. It was really really loud, and was in the living room, where I was sleeping on the futon. The air conditioner was used sparingly, i.e. once everyone else was asleep, I'd turn it off so I could get some rest.
Whereas Prague felt like a town, Budapest definitely felt like a city. Lots of high end shopping, and everything just seemed very trendy. It was a much larger city as well. We had to take a train if we wanted to go somewhere quickly, it could be walked, but it was a bit rainy for us to do that very often. During the night, we stayed on the Pest side. Travel blogs mention the same as well. Pest seemed more modern, with office buildings, and a more modern feel.
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| Of course, my favorite bar. |
We had lunch at a knock-off version of a Chipotle, and visited St. Stephen's Basilica. It was a pretty neat looking church, It was named after the first King of Hungary, so it has significance to the people in Hungary, and is in contrast to what we saw over in Prague, being Neo-Classic, rather than Gothic. The King's hand is in the church too by the way. Literally. Behind glass. No pictures!
The night scene was a bit different as well, there were two types of places that we went, one was what they would call a "ruin bar," which meant that they had converted an old abandoned building into a bar, keeping some of the "ruined" parts as a hip and trendy display. We went to a couple, both were very popular, filling up quite quickly. One looked and felt as though you were going on a weird psychedelic trip in a run down hotel.
As you walk the parliament building also appears in the background, and is huge compared to anything else on the Pest side. We couldn't go in, but it's size showed up very easily once you got up close.
On the Buda side, aside from the giant castle, there was a very big park as well. We didn't spend too much time in the park, just enough time to find the one bar in the park, and get some ice cream. We went to the castle on a separate day, and it was a very nice place to take in the scenery. The Castle is on a hill, so you had a pretty spectacular view of the river, and the two sides of Buda and Pest.
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| Buda side |
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| Pest Side |
The castle was pretty neat as well, very clean compared to the other places we saw. Lots of rennovation I would think to keep it as up to shape as it was .
There wasn't too much touristy stuff to do in Budapest that we could find, we spent some time watching more World Cup, including the infamous Brazil-Germany game. There was a super sketchy guy who kept on trying to sell us drugs for a while. Very annoying. Pretty obvious, since it was really warm outside, and he's wearing a sweater and a leather jacket, while lurking in the shadows. The bar in which we watched one of the games actually was closed down early to host a private party for a famous Hungarian adult film actress. She wasn't very friendly. They wouldn't let us take pictures or get an autograph either. Darn! The video camera guys were pretty cool to talk to, at least they told us what was going on.
We might have been burnt out as well, when we got to Budapest, as we ended up sleeping a little earlier, and not staying out to party until 5 in the morning each day. I must be getting old. On the way back home, we bumped into a beer festival, which provided some different types of beers, which made them easier to drink. I think. And they also had the iconic "I love _insert your city here" sign, so I got to check that out too. Budapest doesn't really abbreviate as well, unless you want to say you love BP. Too easy. Or maybe BP has a patent on it already. Who knows. Oh, and check out all this meat. Easily the best part of the trip, the fact that pork is served for all meals.
Budapest was a neat place, it is a place that I'd be happy living in, as there is quite a bit to do, places to eat and drink at. As for a touristy place, not so much. It was a short trip, but a long 7 days full of partying, and eating. A fun trip, even though we had such a large group going. Eight guys going out and partying every night, and we we probably one of the more calm big groups. I'm glad we didn't have a hangover moment, and lose someone.
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