Playful Prague, Part Two

My plan for the day was to head about an hour out Prague to a suburb known as Kutná Hora, where the famed Sedlec Ossuary, or "Bone Church" resides. It's a fairly small little town, and an even smaller church. It is more like a chapel, and rather than being made from bones as I'd been led to believe, it is simply decorated with them. The chapel was built on the site of a popular burial ground, and several hundred years ago when it was extended many thousands of human bones were exhumed. A half blind monk decided that it would be a good idea to then decorate the church with these remains, and the result was four massive piles of bones in each corner of the church, a bone chandelier consisting of at least one of each type of bone in the human body and a very cool coat of arms made out of human bones. Being a fairly small place, it didn't take long for me to go through it and snap some photos, and whilst it was not literally made of bones it was still pretty funky.

After wandering around for half an hour I made my way back to the station, confirmed with the guy on the train that it was going to Prague, and took a seat. What was a one hour journey there somehow managed to be a three hour journey back to Prague, and indeed back to a completely different station than the one I'd left from. A few metro stops and a bit of walking later, I was almost back at the hostel when I passed a girl standing at an intersection looking completely lost. She was an Aussie girl, Alison, and was simply waiting for her travelling partner. We chatted for a while and I convinced her that we were going out somewhere cool that evening and she should find me in the bar later on that night.

I got back to the hostel and dropped my bag off, headed downstairs to make my way out to get an authentic Czech meal for dinner. I was blocked halfway out the door by Renske who convinced me to go down to the supermarket with her and a few other people, get some food and cook it back in the hostel. I took her up on the offer, and we ended up getting some chicken, rice and vegetables with a couple of jars of sweet and sour sauce and a few Pilsener's for good measure. Renske and a Canadian guy also by the name of James (and also wearing a very similar shirt to myself) did the cooking, a process that was made excruciatingly slow due to the rather poor hotplates in the hostel kitchen. I simply couldn't get much heat out of the thing, and what should have been a 20 minute stir fry turned into an hour and a half slow stewing. The result was reasonable, however, and the three of us, a kiwi guy by the name of Anthony and an American guy whose name I forget sat down to a piping hot meal. I will emphasise here the temperature of our dish, which by the end in combination with working the stove had me looking like I'd just stepped out of a sauna. We finished up and retired to our respective rooms to get ready for that evenings shenanigans.

I went down to the bar, which had been open for an hour or so, but was still completely empty. I did find Alison there, however, and we had a few beers while the crowd slowly built up. It never got terribly busy, and after a while, the group I'd had dinner with showed up and told us of the club we were going to that night. I'd told Anthony that Alison and I would wait for him at the bar whilst he went and got changed, and about fifteen minutes later I realised that he probably wasn't coming back. The Dutch guys from my room decided they'd like to tag along now as well, and after they stuffed around for a further fifteen minutes we were finally on our way. We wandered out to find the club, walked in a few circles, asked a few shop assistants before deciding to cut out our losses and head back to the hostel for better directions. We received these and eventually did find the club, realising that the reason we'd missed it the first time was because it was completely shut. Apparently Thursday nights were this clubs night off.

I quickly convinced our group that Cross Club was our next destination, and shortly after we arrived, to my delight, back at the place of spinning lights and funky music. The music was a bit different this evening, being of a more house bent, but the drum 'n bass room downstairs was pretty funky. We sat upstairs for a while having a few rounds of the local brew. One of the Dutch guys challenged Alison to a beer sculling competition, to which she threw down hers faster than Dutchy could blink. Not wanting to be outdone, I followed suit, after which Alison and I had a couple of repeat rounds to the wide eyed amazement of our two companions who clearly had never tried to put down a beer quite so fast.

After a rounds of this we made our way down to the drum 'n bass area, and it was here that we ran into the rest of our group. I gave Anthony a serve for bailing on us while we were waiting for him, we all had a laugh and hung around a table we found. Shortly after sitting down I had an extremely attractive young Czech girl sit herself down next to me, and after a brief hello ask me for a smoke. I tried to communicate my lack of tobacco to her, at which point she promptly got up, walked around a bit and returned with a large joint paper and handed it to me. I think the look of extreme puzzlement on my face communicated more than my words ever could, and she retrieved the paper back off me and resumed her search for marijuana elsewhere.

Between watching the American guy try to hit on every chick in the place, and then convincing Anthony to dance next to him so he had a better chance with a pair of locals in another corner of the club, the rest of us just chilled at our table and wondered why they kept turning the house lights on and off. Every five minutes or so the bright lights usually reserved for the not-so-subtle "time to leave" hint would be turned on, and then a few minutes later would be turned off again. After a while of this Alison and I decided it would be a good time to get a dance in, and as she passed her bag to one of the Dutchmen for safe keeping, she managed to tip a full pint of beer all over him. I found this hilarious, and while the Dutchmen wasn't terribly impressed with the situation, he took it in good humour and went off to the toilet to soak off his shirt what he could.

An hour or so later I hit my wall and decided to wrap it up for the evening. I made my way back to the hostel and crashed out. The Dutchmen obviously stayed a couple of hours longer, and by the time they made it back to the hostel were in quite a drunken state. They made no attempt to keep their noise down as they entered the room, and in fact did quite the opposite. They were shouting and laughing and making a ton of noise for about twenty minutes, even after one of the other guys in our room asked them politely to keep it down. This had no effect whatsoever, and it wasn't until I told them to "Shut the f*** up" several times in no uncertain terms that they realised the extent of their annoying behaviour and eventually went to sleep.

I ended up getting a few hours sleep, but had to get up at 9 to check out, as I had to move rooms that day. I did so, had my shower and put my bags into the luggage room, and then proceeded to head down to the bar area. The bar is closed until 8PM, but there is a side room which is fairly dark at all times of the day which is never used while the bar is shut and has a couch, albeit rather uncomfortable, which I promptly fell asleep on for a few more hours. I was passed out here until about midday, at which point I got up, wrote a bit on this very blog and then checked into my new room and got a couple more hours shuteye. I woke up and it was closing in on dinner, Renske convincing me again to have dinner with her, this time being a specialty of Dutch pancakes.

I tried to assist in the cooking of said pancakes, but my flipping skills were atrocious, and I relegated the responsibilities to Renske. She had as much trouble as I had the previous evening with the poor quality of the hotplates, but after an extended cooking session she had a nice pile of pancakes ready for our group. They are pretty much the same as regular pancakes, however with things like thinly sliced apple or banana thrown in. Our dinner party this evening consisted of Renske, the American guy, an American girl, Ellen and myself. It was an unusual feast, but certainly satisfying.

As was becoming the trend by this stage, after we'd cleaned up after dinner we got ourselves ready and headed down to the hostel bar. There was actually a band playing in the bar area that night, a three piece set of two guitarists and a girl singing vocals in between playing the flute. They were pretty good and it was a nice way of warming up and getting a few beers in. Ellen and I were playing with our cameras, playing around with the manual modes trying to get some good pictures without having to use the flash. We managed to get a couple, but the lights that were in the room tended to wash out the photos a bit.

After the band was over we found out that there was a good reggae band playing at the Cross Club that evening, and it didn't take a lot of convincing to get a good contigent of people keen to head out there for the night. It was a fairly different group of people than previous nights, as most of the group I'd hung out with had moved on to different places. Renske, Ellen, the American guy and myself were the only ones from our original core, and added to this were a couple of other Australian guys and a few other people who I didn't end up chatting with on the night.

The Cross Club was many times more busy than the previous two nights, definitely a combination of the reggae band that was playing and also it being a Friday night. We payed the nominal cover charge and headed in, the group segregating a bit as we entered. Ellen, Renske, one of the Aussie guys and myself got some drinks and then found one of the side rooms with a foosball table and had a game of that, and then decided to check out the reggae band. It wasn't long after we'd been there that the majority of the group decided they didn't like the place one little bit and made plans to go to the five storey club in the city. Ellen and I were much more keen on hanging out at the current venue, and not an hour into us arriving and we were the only people of our group left in the place.

Ellen and I got to discussing the various cool lighting rigs they had set up around the place, and it wasn't until she pointed out that the lights behind the DJ were a face that I actually noticed. She described a couple of the other rigs she'd seen from the previous night here, as did I, and we both quickly realised that there were whole sections of the place we hadn't seen. We danced in the very crowded main floor to the excellent reggae group, and after that was over, we wandered through the whole place taking in all of the excellent setup's they had in so many different rooms. We both decided that the face behind the DJ and also the crazy spider rig (see the gallery) were definitely the highlights, and we got a few drinks and chilled out in that area.

We spent a few more hours in the place, including some time in the upstairs bar area. It was here that we observed some locals trying to teach a very frightened german shepherd to climb up the stairs to our area. Eventually they just carried the animal up, and he spent most of the night huddled under the tables trying to avoid the throngs of people, the crazy lights and the loud music. Ellen and I both agreed that while it was cool that someone had brought a dog, it wasn't really the right place for it, and both felt a bit sorry for the poor animal that was clearly scared out of its wits. Thankfully after a while he seemed to calm down a bit and actually was travelling up and down the stairs without a lot of trouble. The time started to push into the wee hours of the morning, and so we left the club and headed back to the hostel. We found the quiet room near the now closed bar where I'd slept for most of the morning, and hung out there for a while before crashing out for the night.

After a couple hours of sleep, I showered, packed my gear and headed down to the breakfast area. Ellen was there, which was lucky as she'd taken her watch off the previous evening at the club and left it with me for safekeeping. I returned it, said my goodbyes with her and headed to the reception area to find Renske. After a quick check on the Internet to find where my hostel was in Berlin, Renske and I headed off to the station. Renske was also headed to Berlin and we'd arranged to travel on the same train, however Renske was headed to a different hostel to me.

A very friendly Brazilian couple shared our cabin, and we had a chat to them about travelling and what it is like in South America, listened to some different Portugese music that Renske and I had on our respective ipods and eventually made it to Berlin in the mid afternoon. I arranged to catch up with Renske the following day, made my way to the hostel, dropped my bags off and spent some time in an Internet cafe across the road. I grabbed some chinese food for dinner, and then crashed out slightly before midnight.

Prague was fantastic. Following hot on the heels of Krakow, the party just seemed to keep rolling, and the people I was able to hang out with during my nights in the Czech capital were really good fun to hang around. The sights of Prague are nice to see, with the cathderal in the castle and the Charles bridge being the highlights.I thought the Lennon wall was also very cool, especially as it was just one of those things we happened to run into. The five storey club was average at best, and at least I can say I've been there.

Cross Club is definitely being most awesome club I have every been to. There are more small rooms with funky lighting and crazy decor than you could imagine, and the music was brilliant on each night. The whole place just had a wicked vibe, and I thoroughly enjoyed every second I was there, and I was there three nights in a row. Of all the nightlife I've seen on my trip so far, Cross Club was definitely the best, and it is a place I'll never forget.

Photos of Prague available!