Prague Part 2 - The Devil Wears Prague-a?

So we've come to the last part of our trip in Prague.

First off it looks like I need to apologise. It looks like my previous mentioning of Sarah's love of waiting didn't go down well at all. In fact, she was furious about it. So much so that she refused to wake me up or even talk to me for the first half of the morning. I've apologized in person to her, but it's probably prudent to apologise over the intarwebs as well. So Sarah, I'm sorry. Although I did find it amusing that regardless of not being woken up or informed of anything we didn't miss the free walking tour of Prague at all. But no doubt Sarah will receive emails from people saying "Oh my god, did you see what your brother said about you?" when it was obviously written in jest. And yes Cat, I'm talking about you.

So after a nice hot breakfast of bacon and eggs we got to the free walking tour as mentioned. This was a fantastic tour where the guide gave us a full history of Prague including both religious and war stories.One of my favourites was a part about passive resistance. Apparently when the Russians came through the town to take over Czechoslovakia, the Czech people had a fantastic idea. First off, they renamed all the towns "Dubcek" (sp?). Seriously, they renamed every single one the same thing. Then to mess with them even further, they took down every single street sign. Except the ones that pointed to Moscow. Now that's passive resistance!

We also saw two awesome statues. One was a statue of a ghost. This statue kicked so much ass it isn't funny. I seriously want one. It looks kind of like one of the wraiths from LOTR. Basically an empty cloak. Scary as hell and would definitely give little kids nightmares. Second was a statue from a dream Kafka had. It's a statue of him riding on the shoulders of an invisible man who's wearing a suit and giving him directions. Both of these statues should eventually be able to be seen on my facebook page.

Further along the tour we came across a church which had an interesting story behind it. Apparently in this church there was a statue of the Virgin Mary. This statue was adorned with a necklace of jewels which was incredibly valuable. Now, a local thief heard about this and decided that he'd like a piece of that action, so he crept in during the night. In the darkness he made his way to the statue, was about to grab the necklace and bolt, when the statue came to life and grabbed his hand before returning to stone. This left the thief in a dilly of a pickle. He was now trapped by the statue and had no way of escaping. So he thought about this for a while, eventually coming up with the idea "I know, I'll just wait till the priests come in the morning and confess the whole thing to them. I mean, they're Christians, right? What are they gonna do? They have to forgive me!" And so wait he did. And in came the priests in the morning and he confessed the whole thing. Now the priests realized that what had happened was undoubtably a miracle and so they did the only thing they could do. They decided that they needed to release the man. By cutting off the arm. Not the miraculous statue's arm though, the thief's arm.So they grabbed the hacksaw from out the back and for some reason figured that half an arm was as useful as no arm and hence they may as well cut it off from the shoulder. While the thief was yelling and screaming they sawed away until only the smallest bit of skin held the arm to his body. Just as it was cut the statue came back to life, dropped the arm and returned to its original position. So what did the priests do? They mummified the arm. And hung it on the wall. Kind of like my Uncle Roman wanted to do with his bar when doctors took his arm. I s'pose nothing quite says "don't steal from me" like hanging a dude's arm up in the church.

A little further along and we saw something awesome. From what I could tell, they were Death Star rides. I s*** you not. There was what looked like a giant weather balloon with two seats hanging from underneath it. You hopped up and then they let this massive balloon (which for some reason was painted like it was about to destroy Alderaan sans giant green laser)float into the sky with only a thin tether to stop you from floating away down the countryside.

Next was a quick story about the floods in Prague. Back in 2002 there were floods worse than any in about 150 years. This effected just about everywhere including the zoo which had to be evacuated. Unfortunately not all the animals could be evacuated and so they needed to be put down. But not all the animals didn't like the floods. The sea lions for example saw this as an opportunity. They waited till the flood waters rose high enough, then the four male lions leapt out and swam. No doubt yelling Mel Gibson style "Follow me! To freedooooom!" as they did so. Three were almost immediately captured, but one of them (named uh… hmm… I may have to fill in this later if I remember) decided that he was too pretty for jail and he wasn't going back. No way, no how(Gustav! That was his name!). So Gustav swan for it. And swan and swam. Eventually he was caught though. In Dresden. Unfortunately the toll of swimming frantically for 4 or 5 days straight and drinking heaps of dirty flood water caught up with his and he died in transit back to the zoo. I like to think that he was trying to pull an Andy Dufraine and he simply wouldn't go back to Shawshank. His escape was shown on the daily news with regular updates on his progress and even now they have a bronze statue of him in the zoo. Truly an inspiration to the kiddies.

Finally we learnt about one last thing on the walking tour. A church with a patron saint whose name I can't remember (that's right, I forgot a name… there's a surprise). This saint though, is the patron saint of actors, comedians, dogs and epilepsy. And apparently if he favours you, he'll stop you from being struck by lightning, sleeping in and being attacked by animals.

After the tour we walked around chatting to a nice kiwi girl and eventually hopped back to the station to get a train to Berlin. Which is where I am now. On a train to Berlin which will take the next few hours of my life. So I'll end this entry here and edit it later if anything cool happens. I have a feeling that all that will happen is we'll get to Berlin, get to the hostel and I may go have a few drinks somewhere.

EDIT: So here's me coming in and fixing this up.

We ended up chatting to an American on the train to help pass the time. Not really noteworthy, but will come back to it in a second.

We arrived at Berlin and made it to the hostel. Which, long story short,we found out had been booked for the wrong night and so we had to schlep all our crap across town to the only hostel with vacancy. Which happened to be the one this Yankee was staying at. Funnily enough we met him at reception and explained what had happened. From there we hauled our stuff up three flights of stairs, unpacked and went out to a bar. Just an ordinary bar.

We'd gone into the bar and had a few drinks when I noticed something was wrong. But before I go into that, let me explain something I may or may not have mentioned in my blog about Munich. The Germans have an interesting take on recycling. Everything is recycled. Hence, when you buy a bottle of coke or beer or when you get a glass of vodka and lemonade, you need to make a .50 Euro (about AU$1) deposit which you get back when you return your glass/bottle/whatever. I felt like going around at the end of the night and taking all the empties back to the bar just to collect the 20 or so Euro from it.

Anyways, I mentioned that something was wrong with the bar. Finally, it hit me. This gay bar didn't have a fire escape! Well, actually it was on the ground level. But I just looked up from my drink to see three gentlemen making special friends with each other. Then a lot of them seemed to be frequenting the women's bathroom. I will not speculate what went on in there, but I must say that there are a lot of open gay couples in Berlin.

So after drinking a bunch of 5 euro drinks we eventually left and went home. And that's the real end of that chapter.

Fun Fact: The toilets in Prague have the most homoerotic graffiti I've ever seen anywhere.