Yeah, so they beat us in hockey...

We left Brussels bound for Prague in the Czech Republic on a crowded, stinky, and loud night bus that took 12 hours. We passed through Germany but it was pitch black out so I only got to see the bathroom of a diner around 2am in Germany.
The first thing we did in Prague was buy two cups of coffee with a 2000 krown note. Turns out that's about $100 cdn. Oops. The waitress wasn't too impressed, but it's all the machine gave me! Next we went to meet up with Alison, my good friend and ex-roomate from Whistler. As Sally is heading for Toronto tomorrow, I'll be traveling the rest of this trip with Ali.
Prague is a beautiful city with a facinating history including the Velvet Revolution. Our visit to the communist museum was a real eye opener. Though very low-budget it still conveys the awful environment living under communism must have been. While Prague was great, the real highlight of the Czech Republic for me was Cesky Krumlov. It's a small medevel town in the south that has a winding river flowing through it and lots of crazy little cobblestone streets intertwined between the ancient buildings. The weather was awesome, we got to go horseback riding through the country side which was very similar to home. As well, we decided to take a 15KM canoe trip down the river. It was awesome. We rented the canoe for 600 Krowns ($30cdn)which included paddles, a waterproof bag, lifejackets, a poor map and a bottle of rum! Talk about a recipe for disaster! "Oh yeah and there's two sets of rapids" they mentioned as they pushed us off the shore. No guide by the way. Anyhoo, the long and short of it is the day was beautiful, I hardly paddled (Sally insisted on floating 'straight') so I laughed at her constant futile attempts to compensate for the current as I drank the rum. Yo ho ho! Yeah, anyway we missed the pickup point and went over some rapids we weren't supposed to. Hahaha. This meant I got to walk back a few Kms to tell the guy picking us up where we were. And he didn't speak a word of English. Fun.
Beer in Czech is pretty good too. Not like Belgium, but less than a dollar for half a litre. Nice! Turns out that Budweiser is originally from Czech, and wins hands down in comparison to the yellow water American version.
Don't have much time so I'll write more about Czech later. I'm trying to write more often as I forget things too quickly with all this cheap beer!