Colin found Heaven in Prague

What?!  Beer is cheaper than water?!  We went to a Czech restaurant yesterday to have some traditional food and, being me, I order water.  The bill comes.  Beer, 40 Korunas ($2.50 Cdn).  Water, 98 Korunas ($5.75 Cdn)!!  Wow.  Serves me right for trying to order water I guess.  Won't do that again.

Prague has been absolutely amazing as well--what a beautiful city with so much history.  We've spent the last 4 nights in Prague and Colin and I have been packing our days completely full...leaving at 9am and getting back by 9pm...sometimes later.  We've been absolutely exhausted, and it doesn't help that we've both been a bit sick.  He's all better, now I'm trying to kick it by overdosing on vitamin C....work in progress.  One great thing is the weather Gods have been absolutely wonderful to us--we haven't been rained on yet.  It seems the rain starts after we get back to our hostel. 

Before coming to Europe, we knew what we would probably miss most are our dogs.  What we did not anticipate is how much we would miss vegetables and fruit!!  OMG...the common theme here is bread, cold cuts, and cheese for breakfast especially, and lots of bread and meat for lunch and dinner.  We're finding ourselves eating every last bit of anything remotely green on our plates, which is mostly garnish.  We're hoping Italy will be better.

We spent a lot of time in downtown Prague--very tourist-y but so much culture.  I really loved the outdoor market, and there's an awesome festival going on right now in Old Town Square--tons of delicious food and drink.  Prices in the city are not so cheap because it's mainly populated by tourists, but a lot of things are still less than at home.  Our tour guide told us the population of Prague is about 1 million, with 10 million tourists going through each year.  We saw our first string concert last night for $35 each, and spent about $40 each on a 1-hour Thai massage yesterday too--absolutely amazing.  We felt soooo good afterwards!  Just what we needed to continue on our journey. 

Today we went on a trip to Kutna Hora, a town about 1 hour from Prague, to see a chapel that's decorated on the inside with the bones of 40,000 people!  (Thanks, Sonia for the suggestion.)  There's a really long story behind all of that, but the gist is these are supposed to be the bones of the thousands of people who died from the plague in the area.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutn%C3%A1_Hora for a better explanation.  In Kutna Hora, we had a traditional Czech lunch, and Colin had their Kutna Hora beer for only 20 Koruna ($1.25 Cdn)! 
Our itinerary changed a bit again...we're off on our journey to Venice tomorrow via Vienna.  There don't seem to be any trains from Prague to anywhere in Switzerland!  Boo.  Then we thought we might spend a couple of days in Vienna since we're stopping there anyways but we realized after looking at the calendar that we are running out of time!  We're cutting Greece out entirely because of that.  Who knew 6 weeks would get filled up so quickly??  Guess we'll just have to come back another time.

Outdoor market near Old Town Square

Charles Bridge

Old man playing and instrument we've never seen before...sounds like bagpipes, but a lot quieter!

Bread baked over coals coated in sugar

Mmmmmmmmm....

Roast pork...with bread

Delicious chicken kebab in...yup, you guessed it...MORE BREAD!

Horse carriage ride...

The Rudolfinum in the background...where we saw the string concert

Look closely up top...you'll see a pair of skull and cross-bones.  This is apparently (and we believe it) the only Catholic church in the world where you will see such a thing!  This is where the inside is decorated in human bones.

The architect even signed his name on the wall in bones

That's a chandelier above Colin...apparently every bone in the human body can be found in it.  I didn't see any ribs in there though.

Here are a couple of pictures from the day before we came to Prague.  These were from Leipzig, Germany (pronounced Lype-zeesh).

Bodyworlds in Leipzig!  Some things we saw here that was different from the exhibit at home:  a fully fused skeleton of someone who had ankylosing spondylitis, a woman with an 8-month fetus, and a fully articulated male and female during intercourse. 

We visited the grave of Johann Sebastian Bach in the St. Thomas Cathedral