so, i’m back safe from my trip to prague. and if you’re dying to hear all about it, i’m sorry but i couldn’t possibly fit all the fun goings-on into digestible blog form. i did have a great time, did lots of good eating and drinking for not a lot of money, got to catch up with and hang out with josh, wandered the city a lot and saw lots of cool people and sights. i’m working on getting a functioning photo gallery up for that and other recent trips, which i’ll announce once it’s operational, so maybe that’ll tell more if this isn’t enough.

to fill in for long stories though, and to help me someday in the future remember the long stories that go with each of these things, i will give a brief list of things i saw of note:

— holy shrine of human bones

— old, beautiful castle with old, beautiful church (and 287 steps to climb to its tower)

— lots of other old, beautiful things

— a cool marionnette show

— largest dance club in central europe (5 floors! beautiful women! american pop music!)

— cool bars: secret lounge, marquis de sade, bombay (sort of–at least it was open late on sunday night)

— half the cool restaurants/bars being in underground basements for some reason we never pinned down

— stupid drunk american girl dancing on a table

— stupid drunk group of british dudes saying loudly and stereotypically, “oi, we jus’ come from a pub!”

— lots of other groups of drunk british guys, and restaurants/bars with “no stag groups!!!” signs in the window to ward them off

— several guys trying awfully hard to get us to come to their strip club

— their strip club, for about 5 seconds … sad, not sexy

— several girls offering us sex (“you know blowjob?”); several guys offering us marijuana (“you smoke joint?”)

— people in the hostile trying to get action when we walked in … sorry!

— those same people actually being the coolest english-speakers we met while there

— people in the hostile who were unbearably obnoxious … “i’m not usually retarded, amsterdam did this to me,” is not an excuse

— my first flambeed entree. my steak was on fire!

— absinthe, which we drank, and i purchased from a very nice girl who led us into their little winery/spirit shop. she described it as ‘making you a little strange in your brain’

— the waittress i wanted to marry where we got lunch one day

— the waittress i wanted to marry at the bar where we drank the last night

— the amazing german girl i danced with at a bar, which also had a waittress i wanted to marry

— the very fat man i sat next to on the 10 hour flight home

— the customs officers who stopped me for questioning for some reason they didn’t tell me, but which made me very nervous, and didn’t even result in a search of my bags for some reason. not that i’d ever smuggle anything questionable home from a winery/spirit shop

and even with all that, it’s good to be back.