Adventures with Jack and Julia

After a rather turbulent 14 hour flight (Julia’s longest ever), we were thrilled to have arrived in Europe! We landed in Frankfurt, Germany, where we spent only one night before travelling onward. As we discovered with our planning, Germany is one of the most expensive countries in Europe, so unfortunately we couldn’t stay long. We did however, still find time to have a frankfurter and Krombacher before moving on. We also booked a train with a 3 hour layover in Nuremberg so we could at least check out one of Germany’s cute village towns as well!

Nuremberg is your quintessential German village with colourful buildings, beautiful waterways and bridges, and lots of cafes and outdoor food stalls. We had just enough time to walk around the Old Town including the castle and to make a stop for some delicious bratwurst complete with potato salad and mustard for lunch. The restaurant we went to, “Bratwursthäusle”, was originally opened back around 1312 and has been serving the same recipe ever since then and it was simply fantastic.

We only really got a taste of Germany and there is a huge list of other cities, towns, and villages that we want to visit there still, so we know we’ll have to come back in the future. Our journey on the train continued, however, and eventually we arrived in the capital city of the Czech Republic: Prague!

It’s so easy to walk over 20,000 steps a day in Europe, and we hit this step count most days. There is so much to see just by simply wandering the streets without a destination in mind. Prague is rich in history, beautiful architecture, stunning historical landmarks, inviting patios and cozy cafes. During our time in Prague, we had some amazing experiences, saw some wonderful sights, but also had one negative experience… but more on that later.

Since we are trying to make our money go as far as possible, we decided to not pay the entrance fee to enter every single cathedral or castle, as much as we wished that we could. Getting a chance to see them up close in person was just as rewarding and special for us. We visited the Prague Castle, St. Vitus Cathedral, crossed the famous Charles bridge and saw the Lennon Wall (a graffiti wall symbolizing love, peace, free expression, and of course, John Lennon). We wandered the Old Town Square and made it to the Astronomical Clock tower just in time to see the hourly show where the the twelve apostles appear dancing around the clock face. It was pretty entertaining and has been in operation for over 600 years making it the oldest astronomical clock in the world.

There are also many Franz Kafka art pieces and sculptures around town but the coolest one had to be a huge rotating metal head of him. Every hour or so, the many slices start spinning in different directions and the way the sun glimmered off it and onto the walls was beautiful.

We had scheduled an extra day in Prague because there were a couple of day trips that we thought we might want to do while we were in town, and we eventually settled on a trip to the town of Kutna Hora. Kutna Hora is well known because it is home to the Sedlec Ossuary, a small medieval Gothic church with a basement that is adorned with the real skeletons of 40,000-70,000 people! It is known as the “Bone Church,” and it features artistic arrangements of bones, including a large chandelier, pyramids and a coat of arms. It felt extremely spooky and eerie to be inside the church but it was fascinating at the same time. A lot of the bones were from people who died from the 14th-century plague and the 15th century Hussite wars so definitely not something you see every day! We were not allowed to take photos inside, but you can Google it to see what it looks like! We wandered through the small town, saw the stunning Gothic architecture of St Barbara’s Cathedral and had an afternoon treat before heading back to Prague.

The following day, we were feeling like a sweet treat, and Prague is famous for its chimney cake dessert, or trdelník, which is a dough pastry that is crispy on the outside, soft on the inside and coated with granulated sugar and cinnamon. It is baked over an open flame and served with ice cream. We had pretty much ruled out being able to try it since it doesn’t fit either of our dietary restrictions, so you can imagine how thrilled we were when we stumbled upon a store that served a vegan and gluten free option!! It was absolutely delicious and such a nice unexpected treat. After we had our chimney cake, we continued walking and ended up in Letna Park overlooking the city. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day and we soaked it all in as we enjoyed some candy and took in the views. We sat right under the metronome and had the best time relaxing and seeing the city from above. This was our last day in Prague and we thought we were ending on a high note, until we tried to go home on the subway and our day was soured by what happened next…

The way the subway system works in Prague is that you have to purchase your tickets ahead of time, either through an app or at the station. Whichever option you choose, you must validate your ticket before getting on the train or bus. If you bought your ticket at the station, there are validation machines that will stamp your printed ticket and it is immediately active. Unfortunately for us, we learned that if you buy your ticket on the app as we did, there is about a minute and a half of time before it becomes active, even after you click activate. Since we purchased the ticket once we arrived at the station, we activated it when we were on the escalator heading down to the train. There were ticket checking officers waiting at the bottom of the escalator, and when they looked at our tickets, there was still 30 seconds left until they became active. Apparently the ticket officer wasn’t feeling too kind or lenient that day, and he gave us each a ticket for $80 CAD because our ticket wasn’t valid, even though it became valid during the time we were speaking to him. This completely ruined our day, and we were out $160 for such an unfortunate reason. It also happened to be the last day of the month, so we think that the officers didn’t offer any leniency because they had to meet their quotas. We saw them give out tickets to 6 women right after us, who had just arrived in Prague and didn’t know where to buy the tickets. Of course, it’s on us as the visitors to understand the systems that we’re using but it can be hard when you’re going so many places and having to learn each and every system everywhere you go. The sentiment we got from researching online and from speaking with locals was that this was a way for them to keep their transit prices low for the locals and really is a tourist trap which is very unfortunate. Despite being upset about this happening on our last day in Prague, we complained about it to each other for a while, and then decided to let it go. We loved Prague up until that moment, and we didn’t want it to completely ruin the amazing time that we had!

Prague is a vibrant city with so many people out and about enjoying all that makes it great and we were thrilled to have been there. The food quality in Europe is so much higher than what we have at home so we have been really liking all the grocery stores as well. We’ve got a lot of countries packed in to the next couple of months, and we can’t wait to share them all with you. Next up, Bratislava and Vienna!

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