Paige woke me up at about 4 AM, cold and freaked out to be sleeping on the street. Disoriented, I got up and we decided sleeping in the metro station would be a better, safer idea. Unfortunately, when the metro stopped running (at around midnight) the entrance/exit was blocked by a metal gate. Things were looking bleak, to say the least. Eventually, we flagged down a cab and paid him some inordinant amount to take us back to the train station. It was well worth it, however, because Paige and I were a very long walk away from the train station.
I’ll go ahead and skip over the rest of our stay in Vienna. Suffice it to say that we had a rough go of it pretty much the entire day. We decided to skip the Torture Museum, which was one thing we’d identified as something we really would’ve liked to have done, bought our tickets for Prague, and slept most of the four hours or so that it took to get there.
When we arrived in Prague, we had little difficulty finding our hostel, as they had given us excellent directions. Upon first glance, the hostel was really not in a good area of town at all. It was a little ways outside the center of Prague (a good 10 or 15 minute train ride) and the surrounding buildings appeared to be pretty run down. I reminded myself that this hostel was cheap, offered free internet, free breakfast, had a cheap laundry service, and didn’t have a curfew so it was going to be well worth it. After checking in and meeting one of the six people that we’d be sharing the room with that night, we went out and enjoyed pasta and salad at a local restaurant.
We returned to the hostel for an easy night of surfing on the internet, getting some laundry done, and getting to know a few of the people who were staying in the room. One of the guys, Dustin (an E-5 in the Navy who was stationed in Italy but was taking his leave in Prague), gave us a great tip about a town called Kutna Hora. More on it to follow but suffice it to say, it was a great tip. Paige and I packed it in early for the night since we wanted to get up, take advantage of the free breakfast, and start exploring Prague.
