Our first night in Prague, or Prague Fail.

We all loaded up on the bus to Dresden and many of us put on our headphones and immediately went to sleep, but were woken an hour or so later by our tour guide, Anita, who informed us we had entered the Czech Republic. The whole concept was difficult for me to wrap my head around, as I recall the sister of my second grade teacher coming into our class in 1992 and teaching us about Czechoslovakia, which she had just visited.

Although I was sleepy and bleary-eyed, I forced myself to wake up and take in the landscape, which was absolutely beautiful - so so green and quite picturesque.

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We stopped shortly after for a quick bathroom break, then loaded up and kept going until we hit Prague. This trip was particularly important for the Texas group, because they were Czech in background and all did traditional polka dances back home. Of course, the irony of it all was that a handful of them immediately booked it for the McDonald's at our rest stop. Ohhhh middle and Southern America...!

It took us some driving around to find our hotel, but we eventually came across it. Only this Hotel Legie was the most janky hotel I'd ever seen from the outside, and I felt like we were staying in the TL. Our group piled into the lobby, which smelled like smoke and deep-fried food, and waited around forever because the front desk ladies had a somewhat complicated method of checking everyone in. And once we got our keys to our rooms (mostly on the sixth, seventh and eighth floors), we had to wait for the ONLY elevator in the building - which only took three people at a time - to come down and go back up. Annoying.

But we made it to our room, which was small and smoky and not very luxurious ("This is a three-star hotel?" I asked Elia incredulously) and dropped off our baggage, then headed down to the second-floor "restaurant" for dinner.

The food was another adventure all its own, and by that, I mean it was disgusting. The food was mostly fried - fried potatoes, fried chicken, fried fish. And the vegetarian options consisted of a cucumber tomato salad with no dressing, stale-ish bread, and the aforementioned potatoes, plus some questionable scalloped kind of potatoes. When we told the kitchen staff that we couldn't eat that food, they begrudgingly informed us they would make us a vegetarian option. Which was... fried mushrooms. FML.

I was frustrated with this - add to it the fact that the front desk ladies told Lynn that our neighborhood was so unsafe that if we females stepped outside after 10 p.m., we wouldn't be seen again, and we were disappointed. After all the money we paid for our trip, we were not at all pleased with the accommodations or the location.

Lynn, Elia and I were pissed, and as a protest, we said we'd go get food elsewhere. Jesse was fine with the food, but he didn't want to be stuck with the Texans (who he was rooming with) so the four of us peaced out.

We wandered and finally came across a cute looking pizza place, although not before coming across a lot of sketchy looking bars and people. There we were able to have delicious food (for relatively cheap), delicious beer (but gross wine) and enjoy the weather and brainstorm our options.

When we returned to the hotel with a plan, we got beers at the "restaurant" and sat down with Renate who had, in the meantime, chatted with a couple employees and a couple from Berlin that was staying there. They said they stayed there every time there were in town, and quickly put to rest the garbage that the ladies at the front desk had told us, saying that they were trying to 1) stir up fear and 2) keep us in our rooms at night and not constantly coming in and out of the hotel at night. LAME.

But there wasn't much we could do at that moment, so we all decided to go to sleep and think about it, because that was all we COULD do, and reassess the situation in the morning.

Afternoon in Dresden.

On Friday morning, we all woke up far too early and began the nearly 200 kilometer trek to Dresden, a beautiful beautiful city in Saxony.

This was our first day of nearly unbearable heat, and our day began with one of the Texas kids passing out in the middle of the square, from what was likely dehydration or heatstroke (in my mind, lots of drinking plus little sleep plus lots of heat usually equals passing out). After that all passed, we picked up our tour guide, who took us on a guided tour of the city by bus, during which we saw lots of fancy and ornate buildings and gorgeous gorgeous homes, as well as a few castles.

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The tour ended after an hour or two and we were turned loose, so Elia and I went out to lunch and afterward, she opted to do some writing so I wandered and took in the architecture and street life.

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Finally, our group met up and we boarded the bus again, this time on another nearly 200 kilometer journey to the Czech Republic, although little did we know what awaited us there...

Shopping in Berlin.

The next morning, we began with a walk a few blocks down to a museum, The Story of Berlin, which could have been cool under different circumstances, but neither of us were particularly interested in it, so we breezed through it.

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Our plan of attack was to hit up the shopping on the street, since we were staying in a classy area. The first stop was Diesel, a no-brainer, where the pants were incredibly cheap (100 euros here for a pair as compared to 300 dollars back home) but none of the pants that I liked were in my size, so instead I got a new purse which was on sale. I also got my official German soccer jacket, which I'd been searching for everywhere and finally found at - duh - Adidas.

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Once those purchases were complete, we were off to the Berlin Zoo. Let me tell you: this zoo is amazing. Absolutely awesome. The landscaping is gorgeous, there are so many different animals, and all the animals actually appear happy. They have plenty of room to roam and aren't confined like other zoos I have seen.

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Next we went on a shopping excursion to Berlinomat, where Rich had suggested Elia go, and along the way, she picked up a great new dress at F95. We quickly had to head out to meet the group for dinner, so we made our way down near Alexanderplatz where we had another relatively subpar dinner of vegetables covered in cheese (thank goodness for the beer). After dinner, we skipped out on the whole group's trip to Potsdam and instead went to a nearby shopping mall (the first cool mall we found in Europe!) to cool down and walk around. After hitting up all the floors, we caught a train and began our walk back to the hotel, where Elia came across some shops and I made a new pug friend named Rocco who wanted to follow me back.

Since we weren't in a huge rush back to the hotel, we stopped off at a restaurant and hotel nearby our hotel and had a couple drinks and enjoyed the evening air. Then while she took a shower, I went out to the nearby store to pick up some beer and candy, and we watched "American Pie" on my laptop, before the both of us turned in for the night.