czech please!

so now i find myself in the lovely, lovely medieval town of prague... ok, it's not SOOOO medieval, but there's still some remnants... like this pedestrian bridge over here, i mean really... who has pedestrian bridges anymore. who cares if it's a UNESCO world heritage site (it's the Charles' Bridge for those keeping score at home). but i guess it is pretty cool lookin from afar. i'll give them that one. so we all met up (myself and the sisters yang - eling and ailin) on thursday afternoon and made our way around the city. the one thing that stands out in my mind about this place is that although the map they give you tends to make you think that this place is HUGE, it's really not. strange thing is that we couldn't find a single scale on any of the plethora of maps we had. but hey, less walkin for us then.

anyway, so we're strollin around the city the first night and notice this funny lookin sculpture (yea, no clue?!?!?) in the middle of one of the squares. obviously, this little piggy needs help landin on the cement. so bein the generous guy that i am, i add an extra hand. cause that's what college kids do, and optimus prime always told me to stay in school. this square was filled with tons of random pieces of art (if you want to call them that), many of which i didn't understand so i'm not gonna bore you with their pictures here.

so you might remember the walk up window i mentioned in milan (of course you do cause you're memorizin every single word that i type), but anyway - they called it a "take away window" but i think the czech have somethin with this whole "McWalk" term... it's catchy, short and goes with their overall naming scheme. i'm gonna write mickey d's and see if we can get that portal renamed over there in milan on corso buenos aires...

so there's this cool thing in prague called - well, i'm not really sure what it's called but everyone just calls it the mini-eiffel, so when in rome... but it gives a great view of the city. as you see yours truly gazin upon the land... "the finest wine and cheeses to all my subjects!"

and yes, the reason they call it the "mini-eiffel" is cause allegedly the top of it is as high as the top of the eiffel tower - that is if you count the mountain we climbed up to get there... but hey, who am i to argue... i can barely speak the language (and by barely, i mean not at all).

so here i am with my lovely travel companions for this section of the trip (yes, the ballyhooed sisters yang). eling will be joinin me both at school in the fall and for the remainder of my trip. keep her in your prayers. thanks. and for those regulars, the playoff beard is comin in great and the hair is actually startin to show signs of collacs (gonna have a lovely alfafa point comin out the back of my head real soon). grand, just grand.

so on our journey back down said large hill, we spotted more than a few trees. as we're all curious young youths, we thought we'd investigate to figure out what type of trees these were. so after a great j.reis impression, i was able to garner a few fruits from this tree. although they look really weird, it appears that this is actually a pear tree. that might be quite obvious to some, but i'm an engineer not a botanical genius.

so after the long day of climbin up and down the hill with the orders from our lovely drill sargeant (who refused to take the tram and MADE us go up there), we were all tuckered out and ready for some relaxin touristy stuff. we (and by we, i mean eling) decided to go to the marrionette show. apparently marrionette's are one of the historical things that czech people do - or so all the marrionette shops in the city streets would have us believe. anyway, we decided to go see don giovanni (which i'm pretty sure is the only script being played in town, but at a few theatres). i thought this would be a good way to cross both opera and puppet show off my list of cultered things i have to do in my life. not a bad move, eh, two birds - one stone, foreign country. now none of us actually knew what the storyline was and didn't want to pay 10 euros for a program so i conversed with the south african dude next to me and we decided it went somethin like this: guy A meets girl, guy A is in love with girl, guy B comes in and steals girl from guy A, guy A and guy B fight (probably sword fight), guy A gets girl. that's pretty much the premise of every piece of work, right? well, turns out we were a little off - but still quite close. i'll leave you on your own to figure out the actual plot. for the record, this was a pretty cool little show. the puppets - sorry, marrionettes - are about 4 ft tall and move quite well for someone with wood for bones. the people runnin them are pretty darn good and there appears to always be some instances where things don't go exactly to plan, which is great comic relief.

so after that lovely two days of touring prague (which is all you really need for the entire city), we decided to use our third day to find a laundromat and do laundry. wonderful, wonderful times. but we did actually find what they called an "american style laundromat" somewhere in the north end of the city. it was run by an american dude and frequented by american travelers. so we had that goin for us, which is nice...