Blog 3: Roughing it in Praha!

So day two was just as eventful as day one in Prague, don’t you worry. We had the day off from school so after lounging around all day (aka recovering from jet lag) we decided to head to the downtown part of the city and meet up with some of our classmates for dinner and drinks. While getting ready I plugged in my straightener into my converter and plugged it into the wall. NOT TWENTY SECONDS LATER (promise) it was smoking and popping and BOOM…no power. In the whole house. Awesome. We flipped all the electrical switches and nothing. Powerless. We have no contacts, and have no idea who our landlord is, all we know is that he owns several buildings and doesn’t live in ours. So we decide to just head out for the night and hoped that we would come home to power. Downtown prague is absolutely gorgeous, especially when it is all lit up at night. We met quite the laundry list of characters including a group of Englishmen on a “bachelor pub crawl”, a group of Irishmen all dressed as the Mario character from Nintendo, and a group of Norwegians obsessed with soldja boy who proceeded to serenade us with “kiss me through the phone” (and yes, duh, I have it on video ). So we met up with our classmates and had a great time wandering the city (there was a great big group of us, so it was safe) and getting to know each other. We had been use to taking the subway around the city and of course once we were comfortable with it we found it doesn’t run at night. So apparently only the tram runs at night. We find our map and locate our tram stop, 25. Well that’s easy enough, right? Nope, the trams all change numbers at night and they all change to fifty somethings, and those are NOT on the map, because that would be just too simple. The subway stops at midnight, and starts in the morning again at 5. Since we couldn’t figure out which tram to take and were advised to not trust cab drivers we had to come up with a different solution. This is what happens when you put Ash and Al together… our brilliant idea? Stay out until five and catch the subway home!! When we first devised this plan (literally standing there saying, oh my gosh, we are so brilliant, this is genius!) Our friend Devon was skeptical. “You two are going to stay out by yourselves until five am just so you can take the subway home?!” Oh silly Devon, of course not… you all are going to stay out with us! (apparently he doesn’t know how persuasive Ash and I can be together). And that we were. We convinced everyone in our group (along with those crazy serenading Norwegians) to stay out past five. Now that is classmate bonding if Ive ever seen it! Overall it was a great first night in prague… until we got home. Still. No. power. We ROUGHED it for two full days with no power (so no computer, no phones after they died, no lights, no link to the outside world) and the cherry on top? The hot water heater is electric, so we had ICE cold showers. Ohhh my if that didn’t build some character I don’t think anything ever will. Ash and I began to joke about how we thought we were moving to civilized Prague, but somehow ended up feeling like we were in a third world country. But thankfullyyyy our power is back now and we are happy happy girls. We bought new straighteners, hair dryers, computer cords, and converters so now we are sure to not blow another fuse! Oh the life lessons I am learning in Prague! If I can survive living on my own here, I can absolutely make it anywhere  But we laughed it off, and Prauge really is gorgeous. It has tons of fun shops and beautiful architecture. After a few days of culture shock (and a lot of homesickness) I am feeling much better and loving every bit of my adventure!
Love love love from Prague!