Two weeks in and I finally managed a decently early start to my day. I’m still falling woefully behind on maintaining this blog. Even doing this update the next morning I’m having trouble remembering what I did yesterday. But that’s probably just because it wasn’t much. In the morning we had Czech lessons at K10 which was hugely helpful. After that I spent most of the day working. I went to dinner at The Tavern and had an amazing blue cheese and bacon burger with some other members of the group. After that I sat in Riegrovy Sady and did a conference call before rejoining a very significant portion of our group for beers at the beer garden. I even managed to make it home at a reasonable hour.
Category: Daily
Day 13 | June 8
Today we embarked on one of my favor activities so far which was the Taste of Prague tour. I would highly recommend this to any foodies hitting Prague. We walked around to a lot of the excellent and representative restaurants of the town and tried a sample dish from each. They weren’t small bites either. By the end we were all stuffed and I have been too full to eat for the rest of the day. Afterwards I headed back to organize some adventures over other parts of Europe and to try and do some work. Unfortunately, eating so much on that tour totally sapped my of my motivation for the rest of the day!
Day 12 | June 7
Still struggling to keep my head above water with doing this daily. I was trying to catch up on my sleep so I went to bed early last night and still slept in too late today. Since I was so productive yesterday I had some downtime this morning. I used this to go to the park near K10 and catch up on some reading. After that I had political work to do which took me back to the office. Once I was above water with that I headed to Old Town for dinner at Pasta Fresca. Then I met a group at the Dubliner for drinks before embarking on our ghost tour of old town that was really interesting. Our tour guide was a fella from New Orleans named Mark who was a blast.
Day 11 | June 6
As part of my new plan to combat FOMO I’ve decided to try and front load my work weeks as much as possible. This made for an uninteresting day, though. I woke up and headed to K10 and dialed in to work for the next eight hours. I had a quick dinner and then returned to K10 for the Game of Thrones viewing party. Then it was right to bed to finally try and get a full nights sleep.
Day 10 | June 5
I need sleep so I’ll need to clean these up later but I don’t want to forget anything. Today was finally a rather relaxed day. I just struck out walking and walked from my place up to Prague Castle and checked that out, then back across the Charles Bridge and stopped for lunch at Ristorante Rugantino. Good food but superlative service. After that I had to swing by the store on the way home which happens to be next to the know famous motorized statue of Kafka. I rested at home for a while before heading out to my best meal so far at Eska. That dinner deserves its own post which I’ll hopefully get around to!
Day 7 | June 2
After another late night I ended up sleeping in. When I finally roused myself up I headed over to our K10 workspace and stopped on the way at a cafe that I’d seen before. Kavarna Zanzibar is on a nice but not very well traveled traffic circle. They have a prixe fixe menu for lunch and I had risotto, mushroom soup and a couple cups of coffee. Then I headed in to work for the afternoon. In the evening we had lunch at the Letna beer garden which is in the Letenske Sady park which overlooks the city. For some reason they had fireworks in the city this evening as well. Then we walked in to old town for dinner and we managed to call it an early night at the crack of 1am.
Day 5| May 31
This morning began very easily with a very heavy rainstorm that made for a very cool and gorgeous morning around 5:00. I tried to go back to sleep after that but failing to do so I slowly eased into the day and once again researched a cool cafe to go start my day at. …spoiler alert! Once again it was closed! So I stopped at some random place I can’t remember and headed over to our K10 work space. I had a lot of work today so that’s mostly what I focused on.
Our group does this thing “lunch roulette” where you basically say you are free at X time and they organize you with four random members of the team and send you to a random restaurant. I did that today and we walked over to the restaurant that was picked for us. …but… it was closed as well! Turns out there was a water main break or something on the block so they had no water. We ended up having lunch across the street at a Vietnamese place that was excellent.
I went back to work after that for a long time until dinner when a group of about ten of us went to a Mexican restaurant which was, surprisingly, also great. After that I met up with some other members of my group and we went to a bar that is situated in the Prague TV tower and has some great views of the city.
I have to say, I was extremely underwhelmed by this place. It’s your typical tourist trap; outdated, overpriced, lazy. But after that we went out dancing down on Dlouha where all the bars are and that more than made up for it.
Day 4 | May 30
After an aggressive evening last night I slept in until it was time to get ready to head over to our first meeting and orientation today. We met at our new work space which is in a word… awesome.
We had a short meeting to go over the lay of the land as it pertains to the work space. Our hosts were kind enough to provide lunch while we did this. After some brief exploring I settled in to catch up on some work. Sadly, that’s how I spent most of the day until dinner when about 30 of us got together for dinner at the “Beer Museum”. Many of us were still recovering from the night before, though, so I called it an early night.
Day 3 | May 29
Another exhausting day. I woke up early as part of my continuing effort to adjust to this new time zone and struck out to find some breakfast. Once again I had carefully researched where I wanted to have breakfast and once again that plan fell through. So, I had to resort to wandering the streets of Prague again until I found a place to eat at the Cafe Orient. After that my desire for some American coffee drove me back to Starbucks for a to-go cup and then I headed back to my hotel to check out. After I checked out I spent some time in the cafe doing some work before I headed over to my new digs. I know there’s probably some curiosity so…
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After settling in we went out for beers with the new team and… kept getting beers. We closed down three different places and now… here we are… it’s 2 am and time to crash. Overall, a strong start to what will hopefully be a strong year.
Day 2 | May 28
I woke up early today to try and get adjusted to now being eight hours ahead of my old time zone. I had high hopes to catch up on some work in a local Prague cafe so I looked up one in my neighborhood that offered free WiFi and set out. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that Prague does not wake up as early as I do and that the cafe I had settled on was not open. Undertaking my usual wandering aimlessly didn’t turn up any better results either. It seemed everything was closed that early on a Saturday morning. Well… just about everything. Which is how I found myself traveling half-way across the world only to once again be sitting in a Starbucks working. Just like I would be at home.
After a productive morning I resolved to escape that Starbucks and get the lay of the land. I once again bean wandering around aimlessly and just happened to find myself passing through many of the big tourist areas of town before making my way back to my hotel by sheer luck as well. At this point it was starting to rain so I called it for a while and ended up falling asleep. When I woke up I set out for dinner and discovered Bredovský Dvůr which was excellent. I hung out there for too long before coming back home to try and be well rested for a next day full of introductions.