Yesterday I was on my feet a lot, to the point where my left knee felt swollen and my hips are sore.
First let me just say that I packed rather crappily for this trip. I checked and rechecked the weather and the hottest day was supposed to be when I arrived (81 degrees) followed by 70s and 60s and rain. I brought pants and long sleeve shirts. And while it is not oppressively hot, there are not a lot of jeans-wearers around. More on this later.
Yesterday after the complimentary breakfast, I left about 8:45 and walked to the Charles Bridge. The vendors were just setting up and it was low on tourists, which was nice. I paid to walk up to the tower (was that a tower?) to see the beautiful views of Prague. Oh, and I got a Thai foot massage. They were much less expensive in Thailand.
Now let me just say, I feel pretty adept at navigating cities. Give me a map and I'm generally good-to-go. But my ego is not so big as to not admit that Prague kicked my ass (and will continue to do so for the next 11 days). Holy shit is the road system impossible to negotiate. I tried to find the Kafka Museum for about an hour. I still can't tell you how I found it. I may have passed through a secret portal or something. By the way, Franz had some daddy issues (just saying). This is a letter to his dad. It's not English but I think the general message it "I can never live up to your expectations so I am doomed to negatively evaluate my own talents despite the fact that I'm about to become one of the most famous writers ever.' 
I was in the area so I went to the Vrtbov Gardens. They were very pretty.
Oh, and I got monumentally lost. I was hungry, really needed to pee and I couldn't tell which way was up. It was about 4pm and the streets were packed with tourist. And there are exasperated tourists all over the place, holding maps and looking perplexed. I finally found my way somehow, and walked back towards my hotel.
On the way to the bridge that morning I had passed a typical pub and I saw they had dumplings with bacon and lard and I said 'I'm going to come back here and wreck myself on lard and beer later.' (There are two types of dumplings- potato and bread- and I really wanted to try both). I went back to that pub but no one helped me and most of the tables were full so I went to another typical pub. I had a dish called strapacky, which is a Czech gnocchi with sauerkraut and sausage. It was pretty tasty. I got a side of bread dumplings. They were pretty much bread. I went to the Globe Bookstore - the largest English bookstore. It looks bigger in the picture- very pretty but not much going on there. After, I went to a supermarket and bought produce to keep in my room. I carry fruit with me, which is helpful because I have essentially been surrounded by tourist eating ice cream out of cinnamon dough tubes.
Sadly I did not have a rerun of the great night's sleep. This morning, I got woken up at 2am by a telemarketer call and barely got back to sleep. I'm not tired though. I spent part of the morning writing on my map so I knew what places I wanted to go to on there. I ate breakfast and walked to Old Town Square. On the way there I stopped at H&M and bought 3 $10 dresses so I could be dressed for the weather. I felt pretty proud of myself. I found some stores I wanted to check out. I stumbled across the Astronomical clock at 11:45 which means everyone was standing there waiting for it to turn 12:00 to watch it do it's thing. I was trying to find Church of our Lady Before Tyn. I could not find it. I looked for about a 1/2 hour. So I decided to go to a Dali exhibit which was great. I was secretly taking pics of the art just to find out I could buy a book of it for like $4 (this would have cost like $20 in NY or SF). I asked the lady in the museum where the church was and apparently it was in a courtyard. I went there but it was closed until 3pm. So did more window shopping with the intent of returning at 3:00. And then the rain came. 
And it looked like this:
So much for all the walking. I grabbed a taxi as fast as I could, which was not fast. Good thing I bought those dresses! I'm back at the hotel. The sun is out. My jeans are hanging over the kitchen chair and dripping on the floor. I'm going to a vegetarian restaurant for dinner. (Again, sorry about the formatting. I blogged on this sight for over 3 years for the show, you'd think I'd gotten the hang out it by now).
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