Prague speed blogging

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So I fell behind on blog posts again. You may or may not have noticed. So here is the quick all at once not so quick verson.

Saturday:
Arrive, trains to hostel. Czech love stairs apparently. Settle in, walk down to restaurant area for dinner. Huge beers (awesome) and they are cheaper than water (more awesome). I got some bangin mussles and that basically made my night. Came back and tried to watch Hooligans online, fell asleep in the first scene. Oh by the way, the beds like sleeping on a set of 1' gapped ribs. And the room has no ventilation. Smells musty. Its nice though. Free breakfast, internet, and exercise because we are on the 5th floor with no elevator.

One note on Prauge this time of the year. It says that the sunset is at 9 but the city is still light until like 10:30. and to boot, the sun comes up around 4. Our room is on the top floor with skylights and some poor excuses for shades so the combination of ribbed beds and early sun is a GREAT alarm clock if you dont ever feel like getting any sleep.

Sunday:
Explore day. We woke up and I looked up one of those walking tours where they just give you a PDF with directions and explanations of what you are looking at when walk along their directions. It was alright. kinda short and we didn't find the oldest store in Prague (apparently its a famous gift shop but used to be a iron mongrel place). It was Sunday though so there was like NO one out. We did get to step into the St James Chapel during a service. Let me tell you, I didnt even spend more than 5 min in there but that was the most ornate church I have ever been in. I recommend if you are ever here to stop in there. Then we just happen to walk up on the astronomical clock (most rediculous clock in the world) at noon time to catch the little performance that it puts on. We definaly lucked out on that one.

After that we got lunch by the Charles Bridge (beers and kabab), took a water sample in case the ones from Monday became an issue with travel and then pushed on to the Prague castle. Dana busted out the storming the castle line from princess Bride. First time she has used a line from a movie on me. Usually its vice versa. Honestly, not that impressive after traveling through the cities that we have seen before. The vienna Palace has basically ruined my expectations for any imperial castel ever beause that place was re-dic-u-lous.

After that it started raining (first time on the trip after two weeks it was too good to be true) but it actually felt pretty good because the sun was still shining and we were huddled under a umbrella drinking water and coffee trying to wake up after walking so much. then we went down through a shopping and Dana got a really pretty ring for herself. Made from a rock mined right outside of Prague. I was impressed.

Tram back and I had a message from Jiri our contact here asking us to call him. We schdaled a meeting to discuss our events for Moday at 6 and it was like 4:30 so guess what ...P-A-S-S out time. We woke up just in time to go meet him in the lobby and as soon as he walked in and I introduced myself he responded with "Professor Andy Crawford?" I knew this was going to be an issue. He was basically expecting a whole class and thought that I was the professor. Yeaaaa nooo, want some carmex, yeaa yeaa nooo (south park if you dont know). I explained to him our situation and all he wanted was to collaborate with someone in the US about his project so i gave him Ferdi's info and I think we came to an understanding. I kinda knew ssomething like that was going to happen because of a few of the emails i got but i was jsut hoping that it wouldnt.

Anyway we were going to try to go to a show at 9:30 but it turns out you needed to get tickets by 3 and we missed that easily so we ended up just going to dinner at this local place. They didnt like us at all for some reason. I got some goulash and it was ok. nothing to write home about. We got out of there pretty much as fast as we could and then stopped at the square closer to us for some drinks. Aka I had some beers and Dana had half a Pina Colata thing and said her legs felt funny (...lightweights, what can you do). And we came back, she passed out and I worked on questions for tomorrow since I really didnt want to make Jiri look like a fool because these people were going to be expecting the same type of group so i wanted to be as professional as possible. Too bad i didnt bring a tie or jacket or anything. OHH well, what can you do.

Monday:
Wake up. Get ready. Pray these People speak english. Meet Jiri and he daughter in the lobby. Walk to the place. Not a lick of english. His daughter has to translate everything for us and she is pretty good but not perfect. Anyway i dont think I made us look like fools but Im not exactly sure. We talked about the Vltava for a while. I tried to keep them on their toes with interesting questions. We talked for almost 2 hours. I got 4 pages of notes. BOOM perfect. That is exactly waht I needed.

Next, Jiri's daughter took us to a bunch of sites (upstream of Prage, Central Prague, and Downstream) to do some water samples. 5 in total.

Eva was her name. Super nice person. Has two kids (6,8) and she works with her dad about the drinking water problem that Prague has. Appareanly the watershed (groundwater area that drains to their drinking source) is 1200km^2 so they have an issue with agricultural runoff contamination. interesting but it was a long day traveling from one side of the city to the other. let just say I totally understand their rail and metro system now which i had NO clue before what the tickets did, and i was doing it totally wrong. 1 ticket is not for 1 ride, its for an amount of time in case you ever come to prague.

After that we went back and got food on the way. Did the samples, and took naps. We went out again and explored. We picked up tickets for the Aspects of Alice show that we missed last night and ended up hanging out on the Chalres bridge people watching and listening to the jazz people that were playing for about 2 hours. I could get used to this.

Tuesday (today)
We got u

Links

I uploaded a bunch of links! Czech them out!

Athens

Well when we got off the boat we took a subway to our near our hotel and then had to walk a bit.

The subway was crazy. Before we got on the train, a lady working for the subway company warned us about getting pick pocketed. She was not kidding. Ferdi got his back pocket unbuttoned and nick caught a guy with his passpor in his hand. The guys standing around me all had scars on their face similar to the one on my forehead. Athens must be a rough city. It is definatly very dirty, and not maintained very well. Every sidewalk was cracked up and broken, the streets were all rutted up.

I got a delicious gyro, used some Internet, and then fell asleep around 5. Some people went to go see the ancient metropolis but I passed.

I woke up just in time for 7 for group dinner but honestly I was in no mood to be in the group and I was still tired. August and justin were skipping to sleep so I did not feel bad dropping out.

Woke up around 10 when nick got back. Used some more Internet to figure out my stuff for getting around prague. Fell asleep again at like 11:30. Just in time to get up at 3:20 for a 6:40 flight. I was the first one to the bus to the airport by far but i was only 10 min. early. I used the extra time to go get a sub and coffee. Both were delicious. Best 3,40€ i spent on the trip.

Now I'm waiting in the airport and since iwas so on the ball I checked in early and got the exit row. Boom headshot.

Looking back I'm kinds liking myself that I didn't go to see the historic Athens witheveryone but I rationalize it because I know that I will be going back to the Greek islands sometime soon. I can go see it then.

Gonna miss Greece, that is for sure

GeoTagged, [N37.07015, W25.44951]

Im on the ferry back to athens right now. Just took a test on the presentations at the conference and I feel pretty good about it because some people only got through 4 out of 6 questions but I just got cut off at the end of question 6 but I got what I had to say in.

Leaving greece was actually tough becuase everyone is so happy here. The sun is always out and the act that I got that quad really put me in my element getting around and stuff. After the trip around the island though I turned in the little quad and got a 250 from a different guy. Which was prerfect. This one actually had a spedometer and I got it up to 90 kmh. You can do the math on that one.

Me Dana nick Gary stacey and Elizabeth went for another ride up the coast, dana on the back of my quad and Gary took stacey on his moped. I could do that kind of thing all day.

After that ride I passed out hard in nicks double bed with air conditioning. Which just made it that much harder to wake up for the Galla dinner which was at 8. I think I fell asleep around 6 so that was the equivalant of a nights sleep I guess.

The Galla dinner was cool. It was at a place up in the countryside with an open roof very similar to the wine deli in Vienna. People got to meet back up for like one final event and exchange numbers, cards, and facebook info. The food was excellent again. They had a tradional greek band playing, and after the meals there was a performance of some sort of tradional Greek dancing. The Greeks we had been parting with came over and dragged us out of our chairs and we got dancing in the mix of the real dancers. The dance was kinda like the conga in that you hold the person ahead of you an behinds hand and but it's more a dance in a circle around the table. Dimitri, one of the Greeks, said this is how the Greek digest their food. I could get used to it.

I left on one of the first busses because I had to pack my stuff but after hearing what happened after I wish I had stayed. I hate when that happens. I was going to go out with everyone but I never found out where the party location was so I ended up just going to bed. August came back around 7. He had the better night by far.

Whipping on quads

GeoTagged, [N37.09225, W25.36638]

Ok it's thirssay and I'm back at the water conference because it's the only place I can get Internet amdbthe only time I really have. Yesterday, everyone rented mopeds and due to my previous history I decided to rent a quad. The sad part of this is that they only rented 150 quads which could not even get me up a hill. I dealt with it for the day because I already paid for a day but the thing was a piece.

The night before we definatly went out buy thanks to Ferdi's great being, he let us miss the conference for the day ad long as we went to the party which the Greeks hosting the conference were organizing. It was 20 euro to drunk all u can drink and consideing that a beer was 5, after 4 drinks I was all set.

Ok, I'm all over the place now but I wanna go back to the quad phenomonom. After we woke up, nick an I decided that we wanted to try to see as much of the isalnd as possible but this idea spiraled out of control becuase everyone wanted to come with us. Let's just say, some people are ametures.

Age had some trouble the day before on a moped but he decided that taking someone withhim would be a good idea for me and the first thing that happened once Lovett jumped on is that they instantly crashed. Now I had andrea on the back of my whip because caroline couldn't turn on a quad with someone on it. As soon as age crashed, that was enough for me. I was not about to put up with rookie moves like that all day, so I took off and shoe we followed me was able too keep up. Turns out that was only Gary. Andrea was hesitant for the first part of the day becuase she wanted to ride with Caroline but I just hushed this until she stopped worrying because I told her, we were all meeting at a certain beach on the other side of the island. This was true but before we left, nick and I were the only ones to organize out plans.

Gary and I were doing fine until we came up on intersections. We had a map but the roads didn't have names so we had to just follow. Signs towards towns. The problem was that the signs didn't always have names of cities that lathes my map. At this point Gary and I decided that we would wing it.

One thing you joule know is that my quad was a 150 (very small for a guy my size) and then andrea was inthe back which made going up jumped an issue. Gary wasn't very confident on the moped so we plugged along until out of the blue, Nick ran into us in the middle of the island. I van only explain this by some ok d of ESP between Nick, who was alone, and I because we ended up taking two completly different roads and the intersections were a coin flip for us. Either way, nick was so happy becuase he had gone to register for the party last night because we heard it was required sand that's when the mayhem started with abe and lovett. Unforunatly for him he wasn't aronud when I took off becuase he is one of the best riders of the mopeds.

When he showed up, it was time for andrea to switch riders because I was defiantly the slowest(and heaviest). Once andrea was off my wheels, we started going quote fast. I led because I was still the slowest on uphills (yea I'm fat) but because I had a quad, I could take turns much faster and we set up a beep system to warn the bikers of on coming traffic and hazards in the road (sand, significant potholes, and animals in the road). The quad was so slow that I could go full throttle down hill around hairpi turns just by shifting my weight siginificantly. This is what saved the day for us because I could make time on the mopeds here because there were a lot, lot of hairpin turns.

We got up to a point where we were basically in the clouds (3000' above sea level, which is where we started) and the temperature drop was rediculous. It got cold and andrea needed to wrap herself in towles in order to stay warm (I do not get cold easily).

Some highlights of the trip: we stopped many times to ale pictures. At the first spot we stoppped (we saw a sign for a "tower") the road litteraly turnned into a gutter so skinny I had to ride 1 tire inthe road and one on a curb. We got to the top of this thing, the only person with a camera was Gary and as he went to take his first picture, his batteries died (ROOKIE). Now one can only imagine being in the Greek countryside with I my an iPhone camera and a video camera. Very dissapointing. Eventually we found a place where they sold batteries but did not speak a lick of English. It took Gary about 20 min just to combine he lady in the store what batteries were. This only added to the excitement when nick showed up because he was rocking his SLR and he defiantly knows how to use it.

Another story: at one spot we stopped to take pictures and such, we saw a farm with orange trees. Fresh Greek oranges sounded so good along the story going with it convinced Gary and I to walk down through so much brush, and a stream just to pick these oranges. I cannot lie though. They were the juciest orage I've ever had but as the rookie(gary) said, it could have been the placebo effect in this case.

Overall the day was essentially perfect, with the meeting up of nick, the REDICULOUS beautiful country side and giggling andrea hanging out with us making us smile the whole day. As of turns out, just taking off as the best plan becuase the people that couldn't keep up with me, never stopped the whole day and only saw half of what we did while getting back around an hour after us. Given our trip took about 3 hours, this was a lot more than necessary.

Pictures

GeoTagged, [N37.09225, W25.36638]

I forgot to add this to the last post

IWA water conference

Ok I think today is Tuesday. Things have been very very blurry lately because I have been going out partying every night. Two nights ago I even missed dinner. Not good. Woke up hurting after that one but it did lead me to finding the best coffee I've had while in Europe. The key is to ask for filtered coffee. Who knew.

Anyway, Greece is rediculous nice. Yesterday I took a 4 hour nap to recover and then went to the beach. The water is so clear that when I was in 20' deep water, I could see the bottom as if it was only a foot deep. I did a swimming lap out to a bouy at the beach and the only complaint I had was the salt water, but I can get over that. After my swim (took about 30 min and I was not expecting that) I had to lay down and take a breather. Not cfor long though because mike lovett has a volleyball and I wanted to play. After vollyball I went back, showered, and went to dinner down by the dock area where we came in by boat. The gyros here are SO GOOD. I've had 3 in the two days so far. For dinner I had a skewar of pork and chicken and next on my list to try is the seafood.

I have to apologize for the previous posts if they don't make sense but I'm so pressed for time (it's all about priorities - class, partying, activities) that I am just making it so I can remember. If anything doesn't make sense, please comment for me on it.

More glorious news today. Since we have been hanging out with the Greeks that are hosting the confernce they are throwing a sunset to sun rise beach party (10 € all you can drink- things could get interesting) Ferdi said we don't have to attend the conference tomorrow if we go to it. Ferdi said it's for the IAF class. I love that man.

Frankfurt

Running on fumes, only Dana and I had both a 7 am flight (meaning we had to leave at 4:30) and we had a 9 hour layover in Frankfurt. We decicdsd the night before to just stay up the whole night instead of trying to wake up. That's the way this trip has just been going. We were determinded to get out of the airport though so before we left I pulled up the wiki page on the city and

Peace out budapest

Well Budapest was a hell of a city but I basically missed all the blog posts I as supposed to do for it. I'm on a plane with Dana to Frankfurt right now where we have a 9 hour layover. Woo! We are going to be checking out Frankfurt. I read on wiki that it has a couple of the tallest skyscrapers in Europe. Should be good.

Let's just recap Budapest:

The Spas:
The first full day in Hungary, we went and listened to a lecture on the stsatus of the Danube in Budapest. The talker, Dora, was a really nice girl. Seemed to be a grad student or something like that.

Anyway after her lecture we got to go on a tour of the under ground caves that the minerals in the water come from for the spas. It was reallly really hot down there so everybody started sweating bullets. August started stripping down cuz he didn't want to ruin more of his clothes.

After the tour, we got to go to the spa for free. It seems like everywhere we go, people want to give us free stuff.

Anyway the spa was awesome. It had 2 pools at different temperatures with mineral water, a steam room with a cold pool right out side the door, a wave pool, several pools for joint gender swimming, sauna, and fountains at every pool. It all the different temperature changes made the place so relaxing, it was amazing.

After the pool we came back and I passed out. Seems to be a reoccuring theme. When I woke up I was basically still dead to the world so I just started editing videos, working on the beginning to the movie I'm going to make after all of this.

FREE DAY
Breakfast good(egg sandwich) ringing ears from club, hungover

Tour, good local feel

Lady on hill, exhausting

Pass out

Collect pics

WATER TESTING DAY
4 hours sleep

Yesterday we got a tour of the new wastewater treatment plant

Presentation

Long, no lunch, straight to lecture, everyone fell asleep hard core,

No nap, work on pics, missed dinner, hummus bar, party, no sleep, plane, impossibleto get up