It's All About Me...

All Good Things

Dan and I finally got home a couple of hours ago. Our last few of days in Prague/Czech Republic were great. On Thursday, Oct 12, while I was at the conference, Dan met up with Roman, his karate ontact in Czech Republic, who took him to a couple of interesting sights before going to his dojo near the border with Poland. Dan taught there for a few hours and was brought back to Prague afterwards.

That evening, May Shiu, Neil and I went to an Italian restaurant up the road, Trattoria Cicala (http://trattoria.cicala.cz/eng/), and had a great meal. Only when we were leaving did we noticed photos of celebraties who have eaten there as well: Sean Connery, Johnny Depp, Anthony Hopkins and a few other faces that I recognize but could not remember their names. It was so good that we decided to book a table there for dinner on our last night in Prague.

On Friday, I attended the lectures during the day and then in the evening, we met up with Drs. Upjohn and Stockley and their wives. We went to their hotel for a drink first and then headed to this wonderful French restaurant in the Old Town called Le Terroir. This is restaurant has an impressive wine cellar and also has a cheese room, a cigar room and a cognac room! The food was exquisite and we all had a great time. That was obviously the most expensive meal we have had during the whole trip, but considering the standard of the food and wine, the restaurant itself and its location, it was a pretty good deal!

We spend our full day on an excursion to Kutna Hora, an ex-silver-mining town 1 hours east of Prague by train. The cathedral (St. Barbara's Cathedral), churches, notable buldings and the town itself was very nice, but the most intriguing part of our trip was our visit to the Sedlec Ossuary (Kostnice). In this Gothic style church, the bones of no less than 40,000 people were assembled into candelabras, coat of arms, chalices... most of them were stacked up into 4 huge pyramids.. One has to see it to believe it. And Dan could not resist it and bought a reproduction of a human skull, which we named Frank, after the woodcarver who was responsible for arranging the bones into what they are now (it was not really Frank, but something that ressembled Frank in Czech; in order not to butcher the language, we decided to just call him Frank).

We went to Trattoria Cicala again for our last dinner in Prague. It was delicious. Just a wonderful way to wrap up a great vacation!

The taxi came to pick us up at 5:30 am to bring us to the airport. And for once on this trip, our flight was on time. There was the expected long waits for security check at Heathrow, but we had 6 hours before our next flight, so we were in no rush. It was hard to kill 6 hours, but we managed it by walking a little, then find a place to park ourselves and nap a bit and then get up and walk around some more... The flight was on time and uneventful, but the security/custom check when we got to SeaTac was a pain!! We finally managed to pick up our car about 2 hours after we landed and went on to go pick up the pup from Camp Happy Paws.

Gander is one tired puppy!! In fact, he has been asking to be put to bed since 8:30 pm! As much as I have enjoyed our vacation, it sure was great to see my furry little guy! And what a relief to find that he did not cause any trouble (like chewing up electrical cord and dog beds) or hurt himself while we were gone!

It's not quite 10 pm yet, but I think I will put Gander to bed and hit the sack myself!! It's back to the salt mine tomorrow!

posted by Anne-Gigi @ 9:20 PM