The second issue of traveling with my sister was her aversion to hostels, she said she absolutely would not stay in one. Unfortunately, we were traveling on mommy-stipend, so I could not afford hotels for us. I brought this up with my mom, and my mom's response (I'm paraphrasing!) was that she should suck it up. Luckily, our hostel was nice and clean and the biggest issues we had was someone who snored. My sister spent about a week convinced that someone at the hostel had stolen her needles, but these were later found under a pile of junk in my room, so that never really happened. If I were to do it all over again, I would probably have picked a hostel closer to the city center, but ours was definitely fine.
The first day we got to Prague, my sister and I decided to hop on the tram and go to the restaurant that my friend had recommended. There was a line to get in, but since we had nothing better to do and no other dinner ideas, we waited. While in line, a fight broke out half a block down the street. Two guys were hitting and choking each other! One guys pants even started to fall off in the fight. I'm not quite sure what happened, because the fight ended eventually and no police showed up, but it was quite the show. The food at the restaurant was good at least...
The next morning, we decided to go to the walking tour. I didn't really like the Paris tour, but the Prague one was really good! Prague is filled with all sorts of cool buildings. For example, there's the astronomical clock, which is incredibly confusing to read, so I'm not even going to try to explain that here.
If you look closer, there are moving figures.
These guys are the four despised things when the clock was made! Vanity (the dude with the mirror), Greed, Death, and Pleasure. Please note that Greed is represented by a Jewish man with a bag of money and Pleasure is a Turk with a sitar. Yikes.
This is the Church of St. James. Apparently when you go inside the church, there's a mummified arm hanging in there. There's a legend that says some robber tried to steal a necklace from a statue of Mary. The statue got pissed and grabbed him. In order to fix the situation, the pastor chopped off the robber's arm and just as he was finishing, the statue let go. The robber became a servant of the pastor after repenting and the pastor chose to preserve the arm and hang it there. I never went inside, but it's a weird story nonetheless.
We also saw a statue dedicated to Kafka, the best part of German class.
One curious thing about Prague was the abundance of kitschy cat souvenirs. Even me, who is destined to be a spinster with 18 cats, found it out of hand. However, I still thought this store was totally cute
Our final day in Prague, we went to visit the castle. The castle was HUGE and cool. We bought the short pass and still let us see a lot, even if it wasn't the full castle. We saw the great hall, St. George's Basilica,
St. Vitus's Cathedral
and the Golden Lane, which turned out to be more or less a tourist trap.
The next morning, at approximately the buttcrack of dawn, it was time to leave for Germany. We came back and to our surprise, the next day was Epiphany, which is a holiday here in Baden-Württemberg. Everything was closed! Luckily tourist shops were still open, so that my sister could still by souvenirs and gifts. It was nice being able to travel around with my sister over break! I always feel anxious leaving Germany, because I'm only bilingual, but I get over it.
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