Prague

Prague is great; it has lots of history, lots to see and do, and best of all...DUMPLINGS!! I love them. I love what the Czechs call "sweet and sour beef" (which is what we think of as beef stroganoff). I love all this heavy, rich food. Yay for Czech food!

Of course, we are limited by the fact that Val's sisters and niece really don't like to sample "exotic" food so we are eating at places like TGIFriday's, but I am also finding places that have chicken and french fries but also have traditional Czech food as well. There's something so comforting and wonderful about having huge bread dumplings soaking up enormous quantities of stroganoff-like sauce..mmmmmmmmmm.

Prague is a very musical city, but sometimes it's hilarious. Our first evening here, we got talked into going to a "concert" of popular hits from musicals. Sounds good, but it only involved three people: a pianist, a singer, and a guy who played the sax. In addition to the oddness of that, he singer and the pianist (both female) clearly did not like each other. Oh yeah, and the singer had this very loud soprano voice that was clearly classically trained. This would have been great in an opera, but not so much for singing, "I Feel Pretty." To top it off, she also did not speak English, but had obviously memorized the English words (or the sounds of the English words) as well as she could. But, in some cases, what came out were new and innovative lyrics that had never been heard before (or since). There were a few moments where I wanted to laugh out loud, but held it in. To make it worse, I looked over at Val and he clearly was perplexed as to why we were even there! It could only have been more funny if the singer had launched into a rendition of "Puff the Magic Dragon." Thankfully, that didn't happen. I was able to maintain my composure and, soon enough, we were back out on the cool nighttime streets of Prague.