DiscoverEU : Prague🇨🇿

Hi friends, hope we’re all keeping well.

I recently had the opportunity to visit Prague through the Discover EU initiative (meant to help young people travel around Europe and discover European culture and identity) and I’d very much like to talk about it!

Let’s go through it on a day by day basis (since that’s how I’m recording the events😃)

Day 1

Not going to lie, bad things started to happen to me even before setting foot into the city. First, my newly bought hoodie suddenly ripped a hole when I tried taking it off while getting off the train. Then as I reached into my pockets to check my belongings, I discovered my Polaroid sunglasses had also broke. Very minor in the grand scheme of things, but still pretty annoying😭To make matters slightly worse, we found out once we arrived that pretty much everything closes at 11:30 or 12. This has pretty much shattered our dreams of getting a late arrival dinner🤦🏻‍♂️. We got burritos delivered in the end, but those were delayed as well as the driver had went to the wrong address by accident. Minor stuff of course, but still not the best.

With all that stuff out the way now, let me go over the highlights in no particular order:

Scorching sun. This will probably be pretty common later throughout the trip, but this is the first city where the heat and temperature was insane.
Visiting the torture museum of Prague. It was morbidly interesting to learn about these gruesome devices, yet also painful to imagine how the victims felt. Made me truly appreciate not living in the Middles Ages and be accused of witchcraft.
Bumping into a Mandarin-speaking Ukrainian girl who overheard my friends and I speaking in Mandarin. She told us she had spent 2 years working in China, and had studied the language even prior to moving over. Her level of fluency was insanely impressive, and it was my second ever experience of meeting a foreigner speaking a near-fluent level of Mandarin. Made me even more motivated to become fluent in more foreign languages…
Accidentally walking in and eating in an extremely fancy Czech restaurant. My friend had apparently led us into the wrong restaurant and even though they had their tables all reserved, they still somehow made room for us🙃It was good, obviously, like really good. The steaks melted like butter in my mouth, and we also tried an apparent Czech specialty which was a fat knuckle of pork.

Visiting the sights and getting good photos. To be honest, they got a bit repetitive towards the end, but they were nonetheless beautiful.

Day 2

We didn’t do as much sightseeing today than yesterday, but there were still some noteworthy highlights.

Visiting the jellyfish aquarium. I now have a newfound love for this creatures, as I’ve found them stupidly adorable. 🙃Very worthwhile investment to go visit them.
Trying my first conveyor belt sushi buffet. The five of us easily ate away a loss for the restaurant, as the total combined number of dishes we had amounted to over a hundred. There was also an amusing encounter where the table in front of us, a father and his child, began noticing we were getting very mildly annoyed after he kept taking away the watermelon dishes before they could get to us. And so you know what he did? This man, after taking one more watermelon slice from us looked up, stared at me and my friend right in the eyes, and smirked cheekily. We later bought a full watermelon from the supermarket afterwards in spite.
Visiting Prague Castle during a thunderstorm. In retrospect this was not the smartest idea, as we were all aware one was coming, but decided that if we were fast and early enough, we would be fine. Pictures and sights were fantastic. Winds and rain eventually got so strong, my friend’s cap got blown away while trying to take last minute pictures, to which we all laughed at him for. We all got soaked later, but it was worth it🙃