Day 31: Prague

EDIT: Uploading pictures from 6/16 and 6/17 tonight. Will update the blog tomorrow morning with two new posts and pictures (including Auschwitz).

Today I woke up around 8:00am and went to the lobby downstairs to plan for Krakow and Kiev. My hostel in Krakow costs 9 USD per night and I’ll be staying there four nights before I got to Kiev on the 21st.

Around 9:45am, I took the metro into town and grabbed some breakfast before meeting the tour group at 11:00am. The tour goes to Kutna Hora, a small silver mining town about an hour away by train, with the highlight being the Sedlec Ossuary, a chapel made from human skeletons.

We had a little bit of time to spare before our train left from Prague (about 10 minutes) so I quickly went to the international ticket office and booked my train from Prague to Krakow. For an overnight train (leaving at 9:30pm and arriving at 6:30am) it cost about 40 Euros or about 50 USD – not too terrible. The ticket agent took a little bit longer than I expected but we made it to our train on time with about two minutes to spare.

We got to Kutna Hora around 1:00pm and explored the town for the next couple hours. The bone chapel was amazing – it was filled with skeletons from 40,000 bodies and there was a chandelier made from every bone in the human body.

After going through the rest of the tow, we grabbed lunch at a small restaurant and then took the hour long train back to Prague. Overall, the tour was very good and it would have been a lot harder to see everything by myself.

For dinner, I went to a local Czech restaurant and ordered steak tartare, turkey stuffed with mozzarella, a baked potato, ice cream with hot raspberries, and hot chocolate – all for about 20 USD. The food in Prague is pretty cheap and I expect Krakow to be pretty similar. Tomorrow, I am spending most of the day in Prague before taking the night train to Krakow. I don’t have much planned, so I might just walk around the Jewish Quarter and figure out what I’m going to do in Krakow.