Green Faeries

Yesterday was a pretty busy day. Got up early to try to find a hostel downtown. There was a few people who had the same idea, and we called around to find openings. Vera looked very hurt that I was leaving so soon, but it was just way too much of a trek to get out there.

I'm now staying at the Traveller's Hostel, right in the middle of the Old Town, on a winding cobblestone street. Once Scott and I unloaded all our gear, we went out to see some sights. He'd seen most of the main stuff already, like the Charles Bridge and Prague Castle, but wanted to check out the Jewish Quarter, so I went along.

We bought a ticket that let us into all the main synagogues, as well at the Old Jewish Cemetary. Then we just wandered around and tried to find them all. Unfortunately, we're both quite..errr...navigationally challanged, so we did a LOT of wandering. I would really recommend the experience though. Especially the cemetary, which had graves from the 1400s in it. Thousands of crazy leaning tombtones, all packed together because they buried people in layers to cram them all in. The Old-New synogogue was amazing. At 700 years old, it's the oldest functioning synagogue in Europe. It's amazing that it's still in use by the small Jewish population left in Prague. The only bad thing about it was that because it's a real synagogue, there were no signs or explanations of anything. We just had to figure it out from our tour books.

Prague is a very easy city to get lost in, with narrow streets winding all over the place. So we just let ourselves get lost, and found some cool stuff. We stumbled on the main market, which mostly just sold touristy crap. Scott was highly amused to find boomerangs for sale that said "Greetings from Australia". I don't know who the hell would buy that for a souveneir of Prague.

We stopped for some traditional Czech food and beer, and ended up in a place full of local men (there don't actually seem to be a lot of women in Prague) and I had pork, dumplings and sauerkraut. Which I even knew how to order in Czech! (Thanks Peter)

We also checked out a very cool tea house called Dobra Cajovna (good tearoom). It was a super chilled out place with 90 different kinds of tea available, and a menu that was an inch thick. They had descriptions like "will make you reminice about the cool green mountain forests." I had a tea called Memories of Jerusalem that was a very nice spicy tea, and Scott had this crazy Latin American tea that had 2% caffeine (I've never heard of caffeine in percentages before) that came in a hollowed out gourd with a metal straw. Whoever came up the idea to drink boiling hot tea through a metal straw...not such a brilliant one. I think I'll definitely go back to try some of the other teas.

Then, last night, we met up with Scott's Bolivian friend Santiago and he took us to a fun bar called Chateau. One of Santiago's friends was no joke named Zorro, and he was telling about his band that plays hot blues music with Indian-style vocals. Yeah, I couldn't quite wrap my head around that either.

I made a dangerous discovery though. Absinthe. The real deal, with wormwood, not the fake stuff we get in Canada. Apparently they make it in the Czech Republic, I had no idea. So I had a couple of shots of that, with the whole lighting the sugar on fire and everything. I didn't see any green faeries, or start composing poetry or anything, but...well...let's just say it's a good thing I only had two. I'm feeling a little rough around the edges today. And unfortunately I must have boogied a little too hard, because I killed my back again.

So today I'm just going to take it easy, maybe wander around some of the gardens, maybe drink some more tea. Probably take a pass on the Absinthe though.