Day 4: Travel (On the road again!)

I'd been looking forward to this day for some time, as we only got a small taste of the bus on our few miles from the Berlin airport to our hotel. It's a pretty schnazzy Mercedes bus with huge windows. It's pretty full once you add in over 45 people, but decently comfortable nonetheless.

It was our first checkout of the trip, so Jonathan and I packed up all our bags the night before just so we wouldn't be in a hurry. Turns out, I guess I hadn't made a last check through the room and assumed my iPod was in my suitcase--it's a huge blessing that the hotel found it, and secondly that they took the time to call our leader to figure out a way to get it back to me. Dr. B was amazing--she communicated with them and set everything up--I'm very grateful for all the behind the scenes things we rarely see.

 

We made our way from Berlin to Prague--I was hoping it would be a good, long, ride, and luckily it was! We left around 8:30 and stopped along the way for occasional breaks. Our lunch stop was at a McDonalds, and we went through the fun of dealing with our third currency--right now I have Dollars, Euros, and the Czech Crown in my pocket. Crowns are roughly 20 to one US Dollar.

I went through the line and got what I thought was going to be a good meal. The hamburger was the biggest I'd ever seen from a fast food joint, but I immediately regretted it. I don't know what was wrong with the meat, but it wasn't anything like what we have in the US.

Post meal we still had a few minutes before our allotted time was up, so Jonathan and I went to investigate an old, dilapidated tower on an adjacent hillside. The problem, however, was that it was surrounded by lots of overgrowth. I didn't necessarily plan on going up to the actual tower after I realized that there wasn't a particular path to it, but I kept looking around and ended up on a hillside overlooking the plains, then noticed a small opening in the woods. Jonathan stayed back, but I quickly investigated, realizing that the bus was most likely boarding! They have left people behind on previous trips, so I dashed through the overgrowth, ran inside the tower, shot a quick burst of photos, and then ran all the way back. Luckily, I had a minute or two to spare.

Eventually, we reached Prague mid-afternoon. This city is very different from Berlin. Besides having a hotel in the middle of the city, the streets are very tight and buildings tall, with very little to no open space. All sorts of power lines clutter the sky. Then, there are people. Large amounts of them, everywhere you turn. It's incredibly difficult to get down to the simplistic photograph without lots of extra distractions, so it wasn't quite as much fun. Regardless, here are some photos from Prague: