Despite my lack of photos and posts I have managed to find a number of great new bars and restaurants!! On Tuesday, a few friends all finished our teaching day around 10AM, so we decided to meet up for lunch in the city center. One of my friends knew of an awesome brewery with a great lunch special, so we decided to try it out. The restaurant lunch special runs from 11AM to 2PM on weekdays only, and I'm soooo happy we went!! The food was FANTASTIC, all traditional Czech meals and an entirely Czech menu. Between the three of us, we knew about 10 or 15 scattered words on the menu (who am I kidding, I was no help...), so it was quite the adventure! I had a delicious Svichkova (braised beef in a thick gravy with cranberry chutney and whipped cream on top served with bread dumplings, absolutely AMAZING and extremely heavy, following the Czech culinary tradition!) and a number of 19 crown beers! Definitely the cheapest beer I've found in Prague until....
A group of us went out to this TINY bar (seriously. it seats about 20 people and you have to go up this impossibly narrow and steep staircase to get there) called....... drumroll please..... The Big Lebowski!!! For those of you who know me, you know how big a deal this was to me! Once you got upstairs, there actually wasn't much that was Lebowski themed besides the menu and the sign at the entrance, but it was awesome! It is one of the few smoke-free bars I know of in Prague, and the lack of stale cigarette smoke in the air was quite refreshing! But the coolest part about this bar is that you decide how much you want to pay. No joke. There are no prices on the menu, and you pay the bartender at the end of the night however much you think you should. I can imagine the confused look on my friends faces hearing about this, how would this work you say? To put it bluntly, people are far more socially conscious here than they are back home. People still pay about 20 crowns a beer (still cheaper than most establishments) and don't try to get away paying 1 or 2 crowns, because that's simply not done. I can't really explain it, but it works. And it's awesome.
Saturday I was planning on watching the "football" (no matter how long I live in Europe, it will always be strange for me to call soccer football) match between Man U and Liverpool at this Irish Cuban Bar called O'Che's (I still have no idea what an Irish-Cuban bar is, or how it works, its for sure on the list of things-to-do before it gets too cold!) but it was an absolutely STUNNING day and I couldn't stand the thought of spending it inside in a smoky pub watching a game I didn't really care about. So instead...
A friend and I went to a beautiful National Park called Divoka Sarka and went hiking for a few hours! It was absolutely amazing! Coming from Florida, it is still strange for me to see hills and mountains everywhere, and the views were AMAZING!! You could look one way and see all of Prague laid out beneath you, but if you turned around all you saw was hillside and rock faces and other hikers enjoying the sunshine. Sadly I forgot to bring my camera, but I've found some pictures online graciously posted by more prepared hikers than myself so you can get an idea...
And, because it is Prague after all, I wasn't even that surprised to find a pub in the middle of nowhere after an hour or two of hiking around. Not being one to miss out on a cultural experience, I stopped in for a pint or two before taking the tram back home :)
That about does it for this week, more to come soon.
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