Karel - CS # 16

Waking up early was I guess easier than expected. Ross was so amazing, and woke up at 5 with us and took us all the way to the train station to make sure we for sure got on a Prague-bound train this time! We made our train with no problems at all, and Laura and I both slept the entire 4 hours, only waking up to show our tickets every so often. We got really lucky in that we had a kind of cabin all to ourselves. We were both able to lay out horizontally and not worry about other people coming in or out or sharing our space. We just sprawled, and slept. We arrived in Pardubice, Czech Republic around 10:15 AM, and caught our next train a short while later. That train only took an hour to get to Prague, and finally, FINALLY, we had arrived.

Then: on to find our host. That took a little while. At the main train station, the tourist center wouldn't give you free maps. Every city has free maps somewhere, so no way were we paying 2 euros. To get to Karel's house, we had to find the local train station, which was not connected to the main train station. This took a while. Finally, we found it and arrived at his stop. All we were going off of were his directions to his house, he wasn't picking us up...so then we had to figure out how to follow his directions (sounds stupid but it was more complicated than it sounds). Staring desperately at a map outside the station, a nice man asked us if we needed help. We told him what street we were looking for and he said, "oh, that's easy, just go up this hill, blah blah blah." Easy, great. We thanked him with huge smiles and began the trek. And when I say trek, I mean TREK. This hill was HUGE and steep and we were carrying so much stuff! And we had been walking around already for about an hour!! Kinda thought I was gonna die...my legs were burning and my back was tired.

Finally...around 1:30 PM, after only 4 hours of sleep and a 7.5 hour commute, we arrived at Karel's door. He answered and announced he had just woken up and gotten out of the shower. We came in and set our bags down in the room we were staying in. He agreed to host us all of our nights here - which was awesome of him. We read his references and I had seen tons of plurals, as in "we slept very comfortably" so I figured there would be space for 2 people. Wrong. There was one tiny bed and the floor, which was mostly covered with out bags. It was also covered with one of the dirtiest carpets I've ever seen. I didn't want to be rude and say, 'hey, can I have a vacuum cleaner because your floor is too dirty for me to sleep on,' so I just thought to myself....sweet. CouchSurfing :) You win some, you lose some :)

Karel took us to the pub around the corner from his house. A total local's place where he knew everybody. Lunch however was SUPER awkward. For all the CS and hitchhiking he's done, he was really difficult to hold a conversation with. Lots of awkward silences, though Laura tried really hard to keep it going. My food wasn't that good, and - oh yeah - came with unannounced and highly unwelcome mushrooms. I was exhausted, nervous about sleeping on that gross floor, and a little paranoid this was going to turn into another Amsterdam-esque experience where we don't really connect with our hosts at all. Everybody says that Prague is so great, so I'm excited, but seriously, people, and CouchSurfers, are such a huge part of my experience. But I didn't want to let a mediocre host dampen my spirits! You just need to go with the flow.

After lunch, Laura and I headed out to go familiarize ourselves with the city. We got off at a metro stop that spit us out into this huge square, that was actually a very, very large rectangle. It was literally lined with tourist shops; I've never seen so many so close together in my life. And, they were all selling the exact same stuff for the exact same price. It was crazy. At one end of the huge square was the National Museum with a couple of monuments out front. We were trying to find a tourist center or information center to find a map and things to do in the city. Finally we found an information center and acquired a map. With more wandering, we found an actual tourist center close to the other end of the rectangle. Here there were tons of useful pamphlets - it felt like we had found a pot of gold! There are so many cool things to do and see in this city!

Laura overheard an American girl talking to the tourist information clerk and struck up a conversation with her. The girl's name was Jacquelyn and she is 19 years old and from Chicago. She just finished studying abroad in Rome and is now traveling alone. Guess what? Turns out she was CouchSurfing too!! Except she had this terrible story about how her CouchSurfer here had forgot that she was coming, couldn't remember her name, and had told her that he and his friends were filming at his apartment currently. So, taking pity on the sole fellow traveler, we invited her to join us in our aimless wanderings. We walked around tons of cute streets and alley ways. Our best find was a rock candy making place, where they just happened to have eye candy doing the actual making. Mesmerized by the colors of candy being pushed, pulled, twisted, rolled, and cut, we stood there for probably 20 minutes watching the entire process of making rock candy. Unluckily for us, the rock candy shop was connected to a Belgian chocolate store...and it smelled amazing. There were also chocolate making demonstrations and free tastings but they had closed for the day! Major bummer! We continued on and found the Old City square where there is a huge church, of course, and the astronomical clock building. We had pretty good weather today, even though the forecast said it was going to be rainy all day. So even though it was getting close to dusk, I took some pictures of all the famous things. We eventually found a place for dinner that was pretty cheap but the food was incredibly mediocre. After that, it seemed late enough for Jacquelyn to try to make her way back to her host's house. We wished her luck and parted ways.

Laura and I stopped by a grocery store and loaded up for the week. We got some cheese, bread, yogurt, a sausage, oatmeal, two cartons of juice, one pack of candy, and five new Czech beers. It cost us a total of $20 - AWESOME! Then we made it to our bus stop at 10:09:59 for our 10:10 bus...only to find our bus driver literally sleeping on the wheel. He slept for another solid 10 minutes before waking up at 10:20 and opening the doors to the extremely long line of patiently waiting bus riders.

When we arrived at our stop, we went home only to find that Karel wasn't there. He told us earlier that if he wasn't home then he would be at the pub. So we went back to the pub and found him sitting with about 7 other friends. We chatted with him briefly and asked for the keys and when he would be home...but as soon as we got out of the pub we were like, 'well, that was about as awkward as possible!' Something about it...his friends just silently staring at us, him asking us if we wanted to sit with them (it seemed really forced), it just didn't feel easy.

Anyway, we had the keys and went back to his place. Then Laura checked her CS messages and found that another girl, Leah, had responded to her. Leah had told us earlier that if her planned CouchSurfers bailed she could host us. We'd already been in Prague for a night, but Leah had messaged us again saying that her CSers actually HAD bailed and that we COULD stay with her. All I heard from the bedroom was Laura going, "Aw, shit." She told me about Leah, and I was like, No, that actually sounds great! She's a little closer to the city center, she's a girl, and most importantly, she has room for BOTH of us to sleep! (Laura and I were planning on sharing the tiny bed because the floor was so gross).

Karel came home a little bit later and we decided not to tell him about Leah until we confirmed with her that it would work to stay with her the next four nights. Karel was really nice to us - he didn't do anything wrong at all - it was just that "X" factor that was missing. He offered to go to a concert with us on Friday which was cool, but somehow still very awkward. Then he went back to his friends and Laura and I pondered how to tell him we were ditching him for another CSer...

Then we shared that horribly small bed; definitely not meant for two people. To make matters worse, he had given us a sleeping bag to use as a blanket, as well as a normal blanket. However, the normal blanket had a dead bee on it, and Laura and I just started laughing. Then we put the blanket in the corner, too disgusted to actually use it.

That was it for the night, we settled in for what I thought was an incredibly cold and uncomfortable night...


Quotes:
Laura: "What's going on over there?"
Me: "I dunno."
Laura: "Let's go Czech it out. Hahah. Yes, that's going to happen a lot this week."

Accomplishments:
Made it to Prague! Without going through Germany! WAY harder than it sounds.

Travel Tip:
Sleep sack. Seriously. Just bring it.