Holly and I busted a mission today. We needed to catch a train to take us 3 hours East (almost to the Polish border) get on a tram and land ourselves at this music festival called Colours of Ostrava. See, Holly’s life dream-ish is to see Damien Rice perform live. He hasn’t performed in the states since 2007. Since we are in the same country, I agreed to go to this festival to see him.

We were in Prague and switched to a hotel that is close to a train station that could take us to the city of Ostrava. We woke up this morning, went to the train station to buy our tickets and the lady tells us we can only go to Ostrava from the main station–even though online said we could from that station. Alright, no big deal we hop on the Metro, take it 4 stops to Muzeum, get off, get our train tickets and take the 11:29 to Ostrava. It’s about a four hour trip with all the stops. The ride wasn’t so bad, we just listened to iPods and played games on our phones. Finally we get to Ostrava.

This was the tricky part, we know we need to take a tram to the festival but we don’t know which one. We bought 24 hour tickets (cause we would need them for the return too) and figured we would just pick a tram and see where it goes. We figured we would just figure it out. The first one comes and it’s just the number 1 so we hop on. We are riding along looking at the city and as we get more inland we notice people starting to get on with purple bracelets. For anyone who has been to Coachella or Stagecoach, they look like those. They’re a fancy fabric material and designed to stay on your wrist until you (in theory) cut it off. We eventually can see they say Colours on them so we know we are going the right way. As we continue on more and more people with these bracelets begin to board the tram. We decided then just to follow the crowd. When they get off, we will too. Which is exactly what we did and followed the group straight into the festival.

Oh my gosh. This festival is HUGE. You see, in researching Ostrava, Ostrava is a huge industrial city. It use to be a steel and mining town back in 1939.  The Nazi’s took over, deported the mayor, shut down the mines, and that was that. Since then it has built itself back up but the site for this festival is an old steel factory site (I think) and it’s huge and abandonded. It has signs eveywhere more as a historical site it seems that they give tours of. There’s towers, huge tall buildings everywhre and everything is old grungy ruined and looks like you are walking through a history book. It’s really cool. To give an idea of how big this festival and site was, there was 12 stages. Yes, 12. That’s insane!

Anyways, Damien Rice wasn’t playing until 9:00 and it was now 3:30. We had time to kill. We really didn’t know any of the artists and could only pick out certain parts of Czech to understand what kind of music each group was. So we walked around, got our return train tickets stamped (makes our 4 hour return ride free) and decided to go get food. By this time it was 4:30 and the first artist on the main stage was starting. We were sitting near the main stage and as we walked by we could hear him. His name was Dub FX. He’s an Australian guy who makes up beats on the fly (so he says) and then rolls with a song. He actually sounded pretty dang cool. We listened for a bit then grabbed food.

There were 2 artists playing on the main stage before Damien Rice, each about an hour with an hour break in between. We finished eating and decided to go explore more around the grounds and all these different stages. So we follow this path up some hill towards a large crowd. As we walk by the bathrooms, Holly noticies that they. Have a circular station just out in the open of about 5 urinals for guys to use. It’s as private as you can get, small walls on the aides and your back to block people but it seemed efficient enough. Just super awkward, haha!

At this point Holly is thirsty and we go on this drink quest. We keep seeing signs for Kofola, but we can’t decide if it’s beer, coffee or soda. Eventually Holly just goes for it. Turns out to be Czech soda. It didn’t taste bad.. But it had a kick to it. We decide to go watch the band performing because the music was a type I had never really heard before.

This groups name was Russkaja. They are from Russia, go figure. They looked and sounded Russian and it was great. The music style listed in our program, from the Czech we could decipher says they are a polka punk group but they sounded more like ska and heavy metal, haha! I loved the energy they gave, it was great, too funny.

After them we went back to the main stage because our plan was that once everyone left after this next guy, we would go post it in front of the stage and wait for Damien Rice. Concerts here are different than at home. You don’t have to have any special pass or pay extra to be in the front. It’s first come first serve and I really like that. Anyways so we are watching this guy Asaf Avidan. He is from Israel and seriously had the weirdest sounding voice I have ever heard singing. I did not like him at all and kept mocking him. He kinda sounded like Amy Winehouse meets Duffy. It was so weird. The background music itself was fine but his voice wasn’t doing it for me. Eventually he made a comment about how he’s a man that sounds like a woman, so at least he KNOWS he sounds like a girl. It was just weird. No one in the crowd was having it, except for his last song which seemed to be the ONLY song people knew.

He ended and Holly and I made our way to the stage to camp for about an hour and fifteen minutes. We were in the front and so close to the stage!! There were a few other people around but we didn’t talk to anyone, we just waited. Then Holly realized people close to us were speaking English. And I mean American English not the proper British kind. After some awkward feelings Holly finally walked over and asked where they were from. Turns out it is a couple from St. Louis Missouri. They were in their early 20’s and had traveled all the way to Ostrava from the states just for Damien Rice. Turns out we weren’t the only crazy Americans there, we had two whole other people who did what Holly and I were doing! I’m pretty sure the 4 of us were the only Americans, but that’s okay! This festival had people from all over the world at it. You could hear accents and dialects, it was really cool. We also met some girls from Poland who were really nice. The time comes and Damien Rice comes out.

He doesn’t say a word but plays about a half hour straight before talking to the crowd. He was amazing!!! Holly was so happy, her dream was coming true so close to her eyes! He looked a hot mess. Shirt was shredded and torn and his guitar looked like it was about to break with lots of wood chipped and missing from all of his strumming. It was perfect. He had a great performance and even pulled a girl on stage to drink wine with him while he told a story and sang Cheers Darling. She was so happy, it was great. Damien Rice was so nice and a great performer.

When he ended, Holly and I knew we would be on crunch time. We knew once he was done, we had to go. He was to only play until10:15 and the last train out of Ostrava back to Prague left at 11:28.

Damien Rice bowed and Holly and I turned around and booked it! We ran straight for tram, waited, got on, got to the train station with about 20 minutes to spare. So we waited. I know, really anti climatic. Eventually we get on the train, find an empty compartment and take the two window seats hoping no one will join us. There are 4 seats on each side of the train cart and we had two to ourselves each side. Its 11:30 at night, how many people are really taking a night train? We get through like one stop and we are joine by a grungy looking man and his beer. Holly instantly thinks he’s drunk. Which he very well might have been. Holly and I exchange looks and then another younger man in a suit joins us. I was fine so I closed my eyes for like 10 minutes. I open them to find Holly staring a me wide eyed. She tells me she’s uncomfortable. I ask her why and she says because of that guy. She didn’t like how he looked. I looked over at him and he was leaning on his wall, quiet and eyes closed. He looked harmless to me. But nonetheless Holly was uncomfortable and wanted to look around to sit somewhere else. “If we both go look, won’t someone take our seats?” says I, “I think there are plenty of seats” says she. Alright so we both get up and go. We walk down looking in and almost every cart is completed filled. We head back to our original cart to find our seats taken. We walk as far as we can go before we get our tickets checked and then yelled at in Czech to go the other way. I’m looking at Holly like “oh yeah, plenty of seats” and she says “Wanna sit in here?” I look in and it’s two older men again. I say “Are you sure?” she responds with “yeah, it’s fine.” We enter this cart, sit down directly next to each other. The man across from us looks even worse than the first guy on the grungy scale. His teeth are all messed up and he begins to talk to us in Czech. I say I don’t understand so he asks if I speak Dutch, I say no, he asks English and I say yes. He said England or USA? I answer USA. He responds with state and I say California. His english is super minimal and after about 10 minutes of gesture and broken English, all I got (I think) was he was in Utah 20 years ago with his uncle. At this point I’m sketched out and annoyed we left our first cart. So next this guy says “Facebook” I say “yes, it’s popular” he points and says “Facebook” at us and Holly says we don’t have Facebook and I tell him our friends do. You can hear him and the other man talking in Czech and about us cause we hear America. At this point I am now uncomfortable and creeped out. I look at Holly and say “where is the bathroom?” Holly points close to the end corridor close and says “right there” I LOOK at Holly and say “right there?” Holly catches on and goes “I’ll show you.” And we walk out. The door shuts behind Holly turns to give me a look and all I can say is “fuck you Holly, fuck you so much right now.” and were kinda smiling and laughing and Holly keeps saying shes sorry because she knows that was awkward and way more uncomfortable than our first quiet cart and it’s her fault we werent there now. Walking up the train to find yet ANOTHER seat we see two seats and there’s two seprate couples in this one. We join them and everything is fine.

Now you see the other problem is we aren’t exactly sure how long the train ride is. When researching we knew it could be as short as 3 or as long as 6. But there was no way to know. I was uncomfortable with both of us sleeping because we wouldn’t know when we were arriving to our stop (there were several stops along the way). So Holly slept and I stay posted awake. We finally get to the main train station in Prague at 4:00 in the morning. We need to take the metro three stops to get to our hotel, easy enough it seems. The only problem being the metro doesn’t start running until 5:00. One hour. There are peopled laid out on the floor all over sleeping. So we find a spot on the ground, Holly sits and I lay down to get my one token hour of sleep on the train station floor. Not one of my finer moments but hey, I’m 22  backpacking through Europe.

We finally get to our hotel by 5:15 and I showered and was in bed by 5:30. Taxi was coming at 12 to take us to the airport.

We busted such a huge mission and got a good story. Now I’m in the airport, about to board my flight.

Next stop, Dublin, Ireland!

I’ve decided to make a few lists of things.

First, things that I have determined to seemingly be universal. This list is as follows:

1) English. No matter where or who you are, everyone’s default I-don’t-know-what-language-you-speak-so-I-will-be-neutral is English. With everyone.

2) Names of alcoholic drinks. Anywhere from jagger bombs or Long Island ice teas.

3) Music. I’ve heard so much music here, that even though people can’t speak English well, they can sing every line to the English song.

4) Candy Crush. Everyone is playing this game.

That’s all I have for now. Fun facts and words I’ve learned:

1) Tanty (tantrum)

2) Ciggy (cigarette)

3) British people only pay about 7,000 pounds for University (about 11,000 usd).

4) The same applies for University in Ausrtalia but they don’t have to start paying back their loans until they have a job at a certain pay level.

5) If before that happens they move over seas, they never have to pay it back.

6) Slingshots are illegal in Australia

7) In the Czech Republic you can carry small amounts of any type of drug you can think of (E, weed, meth, coke) and it’s not illegal because it’s for personal use.

8) The Koala’s in Australia have a huge clamittia problem and often die of it.

9) Everything is way sweeter here. Juice, coffee and soda tastes way different.

10) Fresh butter might be the best tasting thing ever.

Anyways, the last two days in Prague have been great! Yesterday we woke up, met up with Jade and Tracy and went to tour the Prague Castle. The castle grounds are huge! They have this huge beautiful Gothic Cathedral on the grounds too, it’s amazingl beautiful. We bought tickets that allowed us to access 4 different areas. St. Vitus’ Cathedral, Golden Land, Basillica of St. George, and the Old Royal Palace. The only bummer about all of it was that not every description had an English counterpart so not knowin Czech, there was lots we had to piece together.

The Cathedral as I said, was amazing.

Golden Lane was cute. It was basically old town Prague and what it use to look like with small shops and streets.

The Basillica of St. George didnt have much. It was very pretty though, the paintings were lovely.

The Old Royal Palace was my favorite after the Cathedral. For me, it’s just crazy cool to think about the people who had stood where I was standing, all the history held in each room, yet alone the whole palace, and that it’s withstanded so much time. The old royal palace was built at the end of the 10th century. That’s crazy. We stood in a room where soldiers charged and started the Cold War. There was a room where the King use to sit, displaying now the royal jewels. Another room we were in, the ceiling and walls were covered with the highest ranking bohemian officials’ coat of arms. It was just amazing to see and provided a beautiful view over the whole city.

We also watched the changing of the guards. It was lovely, the music was great, but it’s super freaking hot here. One guard looked like a Ken doll.

After all of this we grabbed this tastey snack that I keep seeing here but don’t actually know the name of. I would relate it to a churro. We split ways from Jade and Tracy and headed back to the hostel. We did some work that we had to do for future accommodations and took a nap. We got back up, met Jade and Tracy and headed to the meeting point for the Prague pub crawl.

For the first hour in the first bar you got free drinks of either beer, wine, vodka cranberry, or absinthe. Unlimited. Naturally we tried absinthe since that is not something you can get in the states, and at this first bar we made more friends. We met two girls from London, a boy from Manchester and two girls from New Zealand.

This was roughly our little group for the night, later joined by another man from Australia.

The Pub Crawl was great, probably one of the funnest things I have ever done. Met people from all over the world. Ireland, Austria, Italy, Sweden, you name it they were there!

I surprisingly met a lot of Americans last night as well. A guy from Colorado, a guy from Texas, a guy from Kansas, a guy from Maine, two girls from D.C. And a couple from Chicago, Illinois.

The it friend of the Chicago couple was talking with the group of us and said it was really nice to run into other Americans because it’s just having that common bond and knowing you’re not alone in such a foreign place was comforting. I totally got that, even though we didnt know each other, it’s still comforting.

Anyways, we went to 5 different bars and were suppose to go to one last one that’s a five story club but we were all over it and tired so we left!

This morning Holly and I got up, checked out by 11, had the best breakfast I have had so far, did some shopping and then busted a mission to get to our next place. We are sleeping closer to a train station because we have only decided to go into Ostrava for the day tomorrow (3 hour train ride) and will be back Saturday morning very late at night and don’t wanna walk too far back.

The coolest thing we have noticed about Prague and our waiter commented on this morning (he’s from Mexico City, Mexico. He followed a girl out here 4 years ago, they broke up and he’s still there. He says the quality of life is better) that the police presence is really good here.

I mentioned that this morning and the waiter said it really is. That there’s secret police everywhere. Apparently you could walk up the streets drunk at 3am and no one will bother you. It’s very interesting, but good to know. They are strict apparently though, but I don’t actually know, haha!

Prague has been great, but man the walking! We walk everywhere which I love, but the ground is cobblestone so that adds to it every time. And our hostel is at the top of the hill, so I’ve been a little sore! But no complaints, I love walking and seeing everything here.

Tomorrow is the Colours of Ostrava music festival! Apparently the biggest music festival in the Czech Republic! Gonna see Damien Rice! 🙂

Prague my friends, Prague!!

This city is so beautiful it’s unbelievable. But before I get there, let me catch you up to speed on getting here.

This morning Holly and I jumped on a 10:46 train headed to Prague. We shared a six seat compartment with two Parisian guys who were 23 and 20, a 19 year old from Mexico and an old German man who understood absolutely no English. Talk about funny!

This old man sat there slouched the whole time with a blue plaid shirt and a gray wind breaker. His lower lip just hung down low as he looked around in his bifocals confused. Lets not forget the hair coming out of his ears.

Anyways the train ride from Berlin to Prague was absolutely beautiful. It was 4 hours of green mountains with trees and fields of grass, weeds or sunflowers. It was a lovely ride that I would recommend to anyone. We were all quiet most of the ride, all people watching and laughing. Holly and I played cards, the two guys and holly were at one point all playing candy crush.

At one point I noticed one of the Parisian boys had marks on his elbows.

Matching like the end of a healing scab. So in light to make conversation, thinking it is gonna be a great story cause these scabs looked gnarly, I asked what happened. Him and his friend exchanged words in French trying to determine the English words and next thing I know he decides on “genetic skin.” Which we all could tell meant he had a genetic skin disease. Oh my god it got so awkward so fast, I just tried to look at Holly which didnt work at all. I couldn’t handle the awkwardness I had tried so hard to avoid that I looked at Holly like “oh my god this is so bad what do I do I want to laugh” and Holly looked at me like “I have no idea cause I want to laugh.” And we kinda chuckled cause we couldn’t do anything and the French guys started laughing and everyone involved was laughing at the awkward vibe that I had single handedly created.

We carried on and the rest of the train ride was quiet and filled with small talk. Once the old man got off at Dresden, everyone just got comfy.

We get to Prague, exchange money and begin following the directions our hostel gave us to the hostel. It said we could take bus 12, 20, or 22 just as long as we got off at a specific spot. So Holly and I see 22 and hop on.

We are talking, standing holding on to the rails and straps in the aisle with our backpacks weighing us down as the tram drives through Prague. We notice when we get on that we don’t see the name of our stop, but after we stop at each stop a new one would appear at the bottom of the list. So we chatted on, admiring the scenery, excited about the hot air balloons we see, watching the stops change after every stop.

Now, I can’t read Czech by any means but I can understand that the Czech word boxed in green with a long arrow pointing to another Czech word boxed in red with a bunch of light up words along the line that were a list constantly changing is probably the name of where this bus starts, ends, and every stop along the way.

We are watching the stops change and next thing I know the word boxed in red and the last word on this stop list are the same word. I mention it to Holly and we decide to see if one more comes up. We arrive to the next stop, all the stops move up in the list, we look at the last one and it’s blank.

Hm. Now we are pretty sure something’s not right and begin to read the metro maps and bus signs on this tram. As I’m finding the end destination, now only 3 stops away, I begin to look at how we can go backwards cause apparently this tram just stops.

A man standing near me realized we were looking at the maps and he stands behind me and says we are here and points to where we are on the route line. I already knew where we were, but I appreciated the help. He asked where we are trying to go, we show him the name of the stop and he says “no, no, wrong way. Here, get off here, take the bus back 6 or 7 stops and then get to your stop” alright, seems easy enough, he was nice. We thank him and get off 2 stops from the end. We go back to the bus stop, look at the trains and stations and realized we got on the 22, that was totally right for the stop we needed, we were just going the wrong direction!

Instead of going into Prague, Holly and I have ourselves our very own free country side tour, haha! We got off at our stop (which was only one after where we got on, go figure) and continue with our directions. Well, because the United States just can’t be like everyone else and use the metric system, our directions said to walk up this hill 300 meters. I have no idea how far 300 meters is. Holly says there’s 1,000 meters in a kilometer so 300 meters doesn’t sound so bad. Which it wasn’t. Except it was entirely uphill on a cobblestone sidewalk. With our backpacks. Ill have to post a picture of Holly’s backpack because hers has so much attached to it, I can’t even guess now heavy it is. So now it’s like 5:30 and we are hiking up this hill and finally make it to hostel. We check in, get our towels and sheets, drop everything and go to find food. We hadn’t had food since we left Berlin and we were starving. We chose this Garden restaurant which turned out pretty good, it was cute!

Holly and I decided to splurge and split a bottle of Riesling because it came out to about $7 each and it was our first night in Prague! As the waitress brought the wine she asked who wanted to try it and Holly told her I would. So I take a sip to find it not as sweet as usual and the waitress says “it’s a dry wine. All our wine is dry because we don’t have much rain” I feel that that’s either a) something you just don’t tell customers or b) tell them before they ask for a bottle of it. But it tasted fine and it all really worked out great.

As you can see I ate very American with my club Sandwhich, but the bacon man. Wow. The bacon. You would have sworn they had just kiled the pig and it was hanging in the kitchen.

We both loved our food and ate it all. From there we decided to walk all the way into town and explore a bit. This turns

Into a great decision.

We saw the Charles bridge, all sorts of street performers, buildings and the people. I loved it!!

This city is do beautiful I can’t wait for tomorrow! !