To make full use of the day off, Shradda and I had decided to take a day trip to Karlovy Vary. About 2 hours away, it is an easy trip by bus. For the cost of a round trip ticket from Morris County to NYC, we purchased 10:30 am and 6:00 pm student agency bus tickets to and from Karlovy Vary at the Florenc bus station in Prague.
Karlovy Vary is known in English, from the Germans, as Carlsbad. It is the biggest and most famous of the Czech "spa-triange." Named after Charles IV, this spa town has warm mineral springs and is home of the annual International Film Festical and the location for films such as Last Holiday and Casino Royale. The town is also home to the famous Czech liquor, Becherovka, local spa wafers, and the Moser glass museum.
We arrived at 1 pm, and this town is so small there is not even a tourist center where we could get a map! Some nice English speaking people at the Albert's (grocery store) did direct us to the Becherovka museum though, and after purchasing our 2:30 tour tickets, we walked around in search of a spa. Unfortunately, a lot of the spas were closed due to the holiday and we didn't have a lot of time before we had to get back for the start of the tour (although we would have had plenty of time if we had left at the initially planned time... ahem).
Inside the Becherovka museum
Mill Colonnade: this is a comfortable place where spa guests can drink the spring's curative water
After the tour, we went back to the central bus area and took a short bus ride to the Moser glass museum. After finishing up here we did some last minute souvenir shopping and walked along Old Louka street, a pretty pedestrian street. We also passed through Dvorakovy Sady where there is a huge ornate, wrought iron gazebo. We got some vanilla wafers to go before heading back to the station where our bus dropped us off to catch the bus back to Praha.
Inside the Moser glass museum
Dvorakovy Sady
In the process of making spa wafers!
Little did we know, we were actually waiting in the wrong area. The bus was picking us up at the bus terminals at the train station - more than 300 m away. When we didn't see any bus pull up to the station we were standing at, and after finally finding English speakers, we sprinted to the terminal... only to see our bus pull away from the curb, and literally start driving away from us.
What were we going to do now? The bus comes every hour so at 7 pm we were first on line to ask about available seats. There were none. At 8 pm, the last bus of the day pulled up. Again, the bus was fully reserved. We were just crossing our fingers that someone wouldn't show up. And luckily enough, 2 people canceled their reservation! The seats were ours and boy were we glad.
We got off at the Dejvicka stop and took metro A straight to Namesti Miru. It was 10:30 pm and we were about 2 hours late in coming back, but we at least had a warm bed to look forward to... not a cold street corner - yikes!
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