Go north, young man!

Normally, if I were to kick off a post such as this (i.e., one after a long period of nothingness), I would start with an apology to my loyal (read: dwindling) readership. Well, I've apologized so many times that I think it's starting to be a waste of everyone's time. So I offer this instead: It's been a long time since I last posted. Deal with it.

Now that I've got that out of the way, time to pick up where I left off. After I left Munich, I had a day to kill before I went over to Mainz, so I ended up staying with Calci, a German girl I met in New Zealand. I had given her a ride from Queenstown to Wanaka (back in the glorious Blue Steel days), and she gave me her email address, so I figured, why the hell not? Anyways, she was living with her parents in the tiny village of Haag, about 45 minutes away from Munich, which is where I met up with her. It was cool to see a part of Germany outside the huge metropolises (metropoli?), although she was more or less correct in her assertion that there isn't much to do in Haag. I did get some delicious, home-cooked German food out of the deal, though. After dinner we decided to play a game of Scrabble. I'll be honest...even though Calci speaks English very well, I assumed that the matchup would be inherently lopsided, what with me being a native English speaker (with a relatively large vocabulary) and all that. So I went easy on her at first...until she started to catch up and eventually surpass my score. This was not something I had bargained for. So I kicked it into high gear, hoping for miracle words like "quickly" and "quizzed," but it was all for naught. Ladies and gentleman, may I present to you my ultimate humiliation: I was beaten at Scrabble by someone who isn't even a native English speaker. I'm going to sit in the corner and cry now.

Anyways, the next morning I took the tain to Mainz where I met up with Nadja, yet another German that I had met in New Zealand. (This is proof that NZ is actually crawling with Germans). She is a medical student and had just finished a big exam that morning, so we celebrated with a bunch of her friends at a local club. We danced and drank until the wee hours of the morning, and it was a great time except for the fact that the club's speaker system was, to quote Spinal Tap, "turned up to 11." This made it almost impossible for me to hear or understand anyone, let alone people with German accents (i.e., everyone). The end result was that, after me giving blank looks and saying "what?" several times, people would just get right up in my ear and start screaming. I think my ears rang for about 48 hours afterwards. Yowza.

Anywho, I didn't really take that many pictures in Mainz, but here's one of me and Nadja right before I left:

After Mainz I tore over to Prague. By that point I had heard so many people gush about the place that I figured I had to give it a visit. Let me tell you, all the praise that Prague receives is well-deserved, for a variety of reasons. First, the city has some great history, especially if you are interested in the Soviet era, the Cold War, and communism. Second, everything is cheap! My hostel was less than $10 per night, and you could get a decent meal for a couple bucks. And last, but certainly not least: The beer is damn tasty. And cheap. And consumed in mass quantities by Czechs and visitors alike. They say that the Czech Republic has the highest per capita beer consumption of any country in the world. Now I understand why.

I was lucky enough to meet some really cool guys at the hostel: Brad from Colorado, and Connal from Australia. We usually did our own things during the day, but we'd always meet up in the evenings for meals and for nighttime excursions into the heart of Prague. On one day, though, we all made a daytrip to Kutna Hora, a small town about an hour outside of Prague. It's most famous for what most people refer to as "The Bone Church," which is basically a small church decorated with intricate arrangements of human bones. Yes, definitely weird, and definitely creepy. Here are some pics:

After The Bone Church we were all starving (go figure), so we tried to find the Kutna Hora town center in hopes of finding a restaurant. Well, either we missed it completely, or Kutna Hora doesn't have much of a town center, because we didn't find much. Eventually we stumbled upon a local pub/restaurant, and we went inside to eat. It was an interesting experience. Everybody stopped and stared at us as soon as we went in. Nobody spoke a lick of English. The food and beer were about 50% cheaper than in Prague. I ended up having a half liter of beer and a really tasty beef/goulash/potato dumpling meal for the equivalent of about $3 USD. Hot damn!

When we went back to the Kutna Hora train station to catch the train to Prague, I noticed one of those funny little typos you get when you translate between languages. Don't you hate it when you call up a taxi service, and the guy on the other end of the line is a complete tool? Well, not with these guys:

While I'm still feeling pictorial, let me throw in a few extra shots of Prague:

The famous(ly touristy) Charles Bridge:

Wenceslas Square, where all the protests during the Velvet Revloution took place:

A creepy, Soviet-era monument that I hiked up to. Supposedly that statue is the largest equestrian statue in the world. And since everybody knows how much I love equestrian statues, I just HAD to go:

So that was Prague. After that I continued northwards to Berlin, which was very different from all the other cities I had visited. Because it had the shit bombed out of it during WWII, and has been undergoing all sorts of construction since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's all very modern and new-looking. And its most interesting history all happened within the last 100 years. Anyways, I spent most of my time in Berlin in its numerous museums. And since I don't really like taking pictures in museums, I don't have a lot of pictures of Berlin. But here's one of the good ol' Brandenburg Gate:

Thus concludes my ridiculously brief summary of my days in Germany and Bohemia. Afterwards I continued my northward trajectory to Denmark, but I think I'll leave that for a separate post.