Flight, Brussels, Prague

The flight over to Europe was good. It went quick. I fell asleep for the take off, but was awake the rest of the flight. Luckily, each and every seat had a television on the headrest of the seat in front of it. They had plenty of movies and TV programs to watch. Andrea and I watched “I Love You, Man,” a movie we had been waiting to see. However, neither of us liked it as much as we thought we would. Maybe it would be better if we weren’t watching on a 10-inch screen and we were 30,000 feet in the air. Anyway, not an all-together bad flight. The bonus of the flight, which at first did not seem to be something we would be happy about, was we had about an eight-hour layover in Brussels.
Rather than sitting in the airport and doing nothing for eight-hours, we decided to take advantage of our chance to take a small tour of Brussels. The metro from the airport took us to the city’s center and was short trip, less than 20 minutes. Through many broken English questions we were able to find the attraction I had most wanted to see, The Grand Place, in English. It was called something different in Belgium. That is what led us on a little bit less direct route to it. I kept asking people, “Grand Place?” and they would simply look at me funny. I am sure they were looking at me funny for other reasons than my question, but that seemed to be their main reason for their awkward glances. Nonetheless, we found the Grand Place; it is an enormous square with all types of unbelievably old and beautiful buildings surrounding it. My description of it would do it no justice. Luckily, we do have pictures and I guess they say, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” We did see a few other extraordinary places around Brussels, I don’t know the names of any of them, but they were all old and they were all simply astonishing.
After walking around Brussels for the time we had we took the metro back to the airport and jumped on our plane to Prague. It was nice, Andrea actually saw them loading all the pieces of our luggage onto the plane headed to Prague. At that point we knew everything had gone extremely smoothly. We had not had one hiccup in our trip yet. The flight to Prague was less than an hour and a half and just as Andrea had seen each and every one of our bags made it safely to the Czech Republic, which was a great relief. With our bags on a cart we rolled to find the driver to our hotel waiting for us. He held a sign reading “Corbin.” I felt a little like a superstar getting picked up. I have always wanted to be one of those people that when they jump off a plane they have a driver waiting there for them with a sign with their name on it. Call it stupid, but I have always thought it was only important people who got their names on the signs. Anyway, the driver took our two hundred pounds of luggage and us to our hotel. The hotel was extremely affordable so we were not expecting much. Pleasantly, the hotel was very nice, nothing special, but very nice. Our room was big enough for both our luggage and us, it had two twin-size beds, we just pushed together, and the staff was nothing but nice. They answered all of my thousand questions with a smile. Once settled into the room we fell almost instantly asleep. We awoke at about midnight and not being tired at all anymore decided to go for a walk about town. Nothing too long, but we knew there was a popular square only a few blocks away from our hotel. We walked down to the square; of course, nothing was open except strip clubs (cabarets), pubs, and little stands selling sausages and such. Not feeling like a cabaret show or a pub we grabbed a couple a sausages from one of the stands and we sat in the square and ate. It was funny because I think Andrea was just about the only women out beside the girls that were dancing at the cabarets. After our midnight dinner, we walked back to our hotel, sleepy once again.
The next morning our clocks seemed to be on time. We both woke about 9 AM. We had a long day ahead of us, after we simply relaxed in our hotel room for a couple of hours. Our first stop was to get cell phones. So, we would not get lost from each other as we did on our other European excursion. We had success easily and the thoughts of getting lost from one another flew to the back of our minds. We then walked up to the river, which runs through the heart of Prague. I am sure at some point I will learn the names of all the different things we saw, but as for now you will just have to bear with me when I refer to the beautiful things we have seen as the river, the building, the church, or the castle. All over Prague, as we walked, we saw nothing but those exact things; they were really very much indescribable. Each was old and each was intricate in their design. Each was original and each was unbelievable. You actually feel as though you have been transplanted to another world walking around those streets. It is impossible to find anything like it in America, let alone Phoenix. It was actually the exact opposite of Phoenix, everything was old and original, whereas Phoenix, everything was new and the same.
Both days we spent in Prague we saw countless amounts of beauty. Both days were very similar; we walked around in amazement and just looked at each site with awe. The big difference on the second day, we rented a paddleboat and spent nearly an hour just slowly cruising about the river looking at the city from a truly magnificent perspective. Plus, while paddling around we had the pleasure sighting a naked old man bathing and swimming in the river naked. Luckily, never saw anything from the waist down, but definitely knew he had jumped into the river free-spiritedly as all of his clothes lay on the river bed.
We were picked up by the husband of Andrea’s principal on the second day around 4:30 in the afternoon and had a pleasant ride to the city where Andrea will be teaching. I don’t believe the conversation stopped once on the 45-minute ride and the man who picked us up was so friendly. And even though he took his time to pick us up, he bought Andrea a bottle of wine as a present. Odd, huh?