Anyways, my first night in Prague on the last leg of our trip went something like this. Batman and I show up to the Hot Peppers strip club in Wenceslas Square, just around the corner from our hotel, at about 11:30 pm. A group of guys from our tour already happen to be occupying a table, one of who had traveled quite a bit with our agency in the past, who we’ll call Pizza Boy for the sake of this story. Now Pizza Boy and these other guys had already been at the joint for about 30 minutes, long enough to have already started in on the beers. The convo went a little something like this:

Me: (awkwardly) Hey, guys, what’s up? Uh, been here long?

Pizza Boy: Hey G! Hey Batman! What’s up guys? I’ve already had a lapdance and that dude over there is getting a private show in a minute.

Me: Dude, this is weird that I’m here right now. Get me a beer.

After a few minutes, it was clear to me that these guys were having the time of their lives. Batman was grinning from ear to ear as he checked out some of the ladies at the bar, and the other guys were laughing and talking as half-naked women walked around the room, sitting on laps and getting people’s attention. Only until I overheard that Pizza Boy was well on his way to securing a private room with a lady did I fully appreciate the hilarity of the situation. These broads were walking around with their tits out and I was the only female in a 30 mile radius who was wearing something to cover her nipples. I downed my beer, said adios to the boys, and left them to their wiley ways, expecting to hear all about it in the morning.

Sure enough, the next day dawned to a buffet brunch where Batman informed me that over the course of the night, Pizza Boy had managed to spend almost $500 dollars on a stripper last night (side note: PB is pretty well off but still, that’s a fuckload of money). Anyways, I got to hear all about their antics for about 3 hours straight, until I stopped the convo and moved on to more important things like visiting Prague Castle and getting some Starbucks (hey, I’m shallow and like the taste, ok?). And while the story might have gotten crazier if I had stayed to partake in the festivities of the previous night, I’m too classy a lady to be caught dead in one of those joints sober. Thanks for raising me right, parental units.

Now here’s a few mementos from Prague over the weekend:

Czech this guy out…

Visiting the John Lennon wall.

Some cathedral.

That dope astronomical clock in the town center.

Instead, I spent 18 hours on a bus getting to Poland thanks to Tom and Jerry, my two idiot bus drivers that decided to take the LONGEST route possible in getting us to our first stop on the tour. Not an ideal way to start off the weekend, and definitely not how I wanted to spend the first morning of a 5 day tour to Prague, Krakow and Auschwitz.

By the time we arrived in Krakow, it was after lunch and I had a busload of cranky, exhausted students who pretty much hated my guts after my endless proclamations of “We’re almost there, guys! I swear, we’re like 20 minutes away! 30 minutes MAX!” (Side note: Never, ever believe your tour guide when you ask them how much longer until you arrive. 9 times out of 10, we have no idea either.)

After having to reschedule the walking tour, breakfast (now lunch) on arrival, and get everyone checked into their hotel rooms, we FINALLY made it out into Krakow for our walking tour. Despite the frigid temperatures, the group was in good spirits as we checked out the town center and made our way to Wawel Castle.

Cotton candy clouds above St. Mary’s Basilica

Wawel Castle lit up at night.

By the end of our walking tour, my fingers were about to fall off and my intern Batman (I like making new names for the interns, it gets me through my long days) and I were so hungry we could have eaten a horse. Luckily, there happened to be a KFC nearby so we settled for imitation chicken instead.

(Side note: Don’t even think about judging me for eating at KFC, not until you’ve tour guided in Europe for 2 years and eaten at every disgusting roadside stop in the continent. I NEEDED SOME KFC THAT DAY, OK?!)

Once we had our mid-afternoon snackie break, Batman and I went back to our room to fall into a coma until our group dinner later than night. Now, I don’t know about you, but I would walk back to Poland for another one of these bad boys:

Pierogis made in Poland and eaten by me. Nom.

Once we had sufficiently stuffed our faces, we headed out to the local cemetery to check out the Halloween festivities.

For those of you not familiar with Polish traditions (aka pretty much everybody), on Halloween everyone and their mother/brother/uncle/cousin/sister’s nephew’s best friend hikes on over to their local cemetery to pay their respects to the dead. What’s unusual about Polish tradition (apart from the creepin’ around on a bunch of dead people) is that they leave beautiful, ornate candles on each of the gravestones so that the cemetery is lit up by hundreds of colored lights throughout the evening and into the morning.

One of the first statues we saw as we came into the Rackowicki cemetery…so many candles!

So after wandering around the cemetery for a little bit (hey, there’s a time limit on how long one person can hang out with dead folks before weird shit starts to happen) we headed back to the hotel and passed out after a long day of gallivanting around Poland.

In the morning, we packed up and hit the road for Auschwitz. I’m gonna skim over this bit of the trip as I don’t want to depress you all with the details of this hideous place. Suffice it to say, it was one of the more memorable, shocking, and truly humbling experiences I’ve ever had.

Touring the Birkenau bit of the Auschwitz labor camps.

By evening, we had finally, finally reached Prague. YAY PRAGUE! Prague is like stepping into your very own Disney movie (I like to pretend I’m in Shrek) except with BEER. I love Prague, Praguey Prague Prague.

Here’s where the real fun began. As we got off the bus in Wenceslas Square and headed over to our hotel, a group of guys on our tour couldn’t help but notice that we were within spitting distance of a strip club (to be honest, nobody could help noticing as there were some very chesty girls hanging around out front luring in people passing by with their enormous honkers.)

Now, as I was raised by a very classy lady (shout out to my mom here, she’s awesome and I hope she’s not mad about what happens next) I have gone 25 years on this earth without ever setting foot inside a naked lady den. According to Batman and this group of gentlemen on our tour, this is an atrocious sin and could only be remedied by visiting this naked lady den as soon as we checked in to our hotel. Try as I might, I could not persuade Batman to budge, and so rather than wander around Prague by myself like a lonely McLonerson, I covered myself up and headed out to join the boys for my first visit to a strip club.

Stay tuned for what happens next in Part 2 of Prague, Krakow & Auschwitz: The time I went to my first strip club.

Self-explanatory Budapest sign.

There are a few things every person should know before visiting Budapest. Now, you might think that the most important thing to know, especially if you are an ignoramus like myself who never learned geography in school, is that Budapest is actually 2 cities; Buda and Pest. But you would be wrong. The most important thing you need to know about Budapest is this: Hungarians like to get naked in public places. Like, really naked.

Budapest is famous for many things, most notably their abundance of thermal hot springs which are open year round. Hungarians use these public baths as a social centerpiece for their daily lives, going to the baths to swim (duh), get spa treatments, meet up with friends, and other Budapestian things. The thermal baths are awesome, and most tourists, including myself, make this a priority on their list of must-sees while in Budapest.

So when I arrived in Budapest, my number one goal of the weekend other than not getting lost was to get to experience the thermal bath culture of the Hungarians. Myself and a group of girls on my tour met up in the afternoon after exploring both the Buda and the Pesty side of Budapest (side note: Buda Castle has live hunting eagles you can hold and take pictures with. Birds are cool….hunting eagles are way, way cooler–especially when they have their own leather hats like the Buda ones.)

whaddup BUDA CASTLE

Anyways, we went off in search of the nearest thermal bath, which happened to be the Gellert bath on the opposite side of the river. The inside of the building was absolutely beautiful, with tiled mosaics lining the floors and ceilings and a very Turkish “Arabian Nights” vibe to it.

Inside the reception hall at the Gellert Baths

Once inside, we made our way to the ticket booth to inquire about pricing for the baths (side note: if you wait until past 5 pm, ticket prices are reduced by half. Ka-ching!) and were immediately molested by a tall bald Hungarian man who informed us that we MUST have the proper equipment for bathing (And here I was thinking all i needed was a swimsuit…obviously i am an idiot) and directed us towards his shop. Here, my friends, is where I am not proud to say that I was ripped off and coerced into buying both rubber flip flops AND a bathing cap with a hideously pink, purple and orange pattern on it. Once I put on my bathing cap and flip flops, I no longer resembled myself but instead had transformed into what I can only assume Dennis Rodman’s condoms look like.

Re-enactment of my bathing cap in Budapest.

From this point onwards, there really are no words to describe the extreme culture shock we all received once we made our way into the baths and discovered that we were a) the only assholes in bathing caps and b) surrounded by old naked Hungarian ladies. I’m pretty sure my retinas are forever scarred by the image of these hefty bathing beauties paddling around in the different pools like majestic blue whales. Ah, the memories…

The next day, I herded 50 tired and hungover Americans back onto our bus so that we could jaunt off to Austria to hit the Christmas markets in Vienna. Naturally, as soon as I had counted everyone in their seats, 2 boys informed me that they had left their passports back in the hotel, making my blood pressure skyrocket and everyone wait for 20 minutes while they went back to find them. As the boys scrambled back onto the bus, I turned to ask my intern a question (We’ll call him “Boston” for purposes of this story) only to find that he, too, had hopped back off the bus to grab something from his luggage (side note: Boston’s luggage was, in fact, a large plastic bag–which prompted the bus drivers to ask me if he was homeless or not. There isn’t enough time in the world to describe all of the ridiculous things that make up this kid’s character.)

Once everyone had settled in their seats and I had re-checked the number of students on the bus, the bus drivers closed the passenger doors and asked me if we could depart. Looking around, I still didn’t see Boston anywhere when I heard a banging coming from outside the bus. Sighing, I told the bus drivers to re-open the doors because clearly Boston was outside still, farting around with his plastic bag. After about 2 minutes, Boston still had not come on the bus, and I was officially pissed.

Hopping off the bus to do some yelling and feet stomping, I discovered to my surprise that Boston was nowhere to be found. Puzzled, I walked back onto the bus only to hear the same banging noise coming from outside the bus. It was only then that I realized that Boston had, in fact, been locked underneath the bus in the luggage compartment and was probably having a nervous breakdown.

After the hilarity that ensued in Budapest, unfortunately Vienna could just not compete. While I found the city charming and elegantly decorated with the grotesquely commercialized Christmas markets, after eating a schnitzel and browsing the markets I was ready to call it a weekend and get back to Florence.

(**This description only applies to about 99.9% of college kids studying abroad in Europe. The other 0.1% are mostly cool as shit and I want to hug them and cry and be their besties when they get off my buses at the end of the weekend.)

However, these negative aspects of the job can be overshadowed in the blink of an eye when you get to finally, finally travel to a new place. Insert Croatia here, because I got to visit Split for 2 weekends in a row and I wanted to poop my pants I was so happy. THIS IS WHERE DALMATIAN DOGS COME FROM, PEOPLE. What more could a tour guide want?!

Spots on spots on spots!!!

In all seriousness though, I had an unbelievable, fantastic, super dooper pooper time in Croatia, minus the first weekend when Hurricane Asshole decided to try and knock our bus over on the highway with its gale-force winds and make us 3 hours late to Split, therefore ensuring that we would spend the rest of the weekend trying to make up for it.

Split, in my humble opinion, is a city that both rocks and is incredibly dangerous for people like me, who like to wear flip flops 24/7. I mean, seriously, people–what is up with the treacherously smooth marble floors? You’re just asking for a lawsuit when somebody (namely me) goes ass over elbow because your street cleaners have just sprayed the ground with copious amounts of water. Who knows, maybe Croatians just like to live life on the edge. Or they are just really good at skating.

Marble stairs of death.

All of this beautiful white marble, while being faintly tomblike and creepy, only further enhanced my opinion that Croatia is, in fact, one of the coolest places ever.  Throughout the weekend, I successfully managed not to kill myself or any students while river rafting on the Cetina, eating local fish on an island hopping tour of Brac and Postira (i only choked on like 30 or so bones), exploring the alleyways and canals of Trogir, and swimming underneath the waterfalls at Krka National Park. And I even took pictures!

Team Sexy for the win.

Walking down the smallest street in Split.

Stopping on the island of Postira during the boat tour.

Krka National Park and its bitchin’ waterfalls.

It’s not often that I get one of those “Oh my god, this is my life right now” moments while working, but Croatia definitely put me under its lavender spell of love. Maybe that’s because there’s lots of lavender in the hills, but I like to think it’s the universe’s way of saying “Thanks for working your butt off. Enjoy the view.” Which I most certainly did.

Drivin down the highway

After a few hours, we showed up in the town of Hopfgarden, about 30 minutes outside of Innsbruck. Even I had to admit the town was cute–little houses that looked like they were made out of gingerbread, brightly colored plants hanging in boxes from the windows, and people strolling down the main street. Plus, it wasn’t 400 degrees outside, so obviously I immediately took a liking to it.

Our hotel, owned by Hansel and Gretel’s great-great-grandchildren, thrice removed.

The best part about Austria? It’s full of Australians! Apparently somebody caught on to the fact that Hopfgarden is a cheaper place to ski, snowboard, hike, etc. than neighboring Salzburg or Innsbruck, so they started carting in busloads of tourist on holiday. And I thought I was getting AWAY from tourists for the day…sigh.

After we checked in to our hotel, we set off to explore the area. Which took about 90 seconds, as the entire town can pretty much be summed up by one long main road with a bunch of meaningless alleyways attached. This is in no way a bad thing, because it left us with the rest of the day to do more important things, like drink beer and watch hilarious Austrian TV from the 1890′s television set in our hotel room.

And that’s the story of that monday I went to Austria. The end.

P.S- It’s summer, people. There are no students around and I am spending my days in the office talking to weirdos trying to sell me socks and stalking people on Facebook. There will be no interesting posts until the semester starts. Fair warning.

1. Ollie had some flatulence problems, but I loved him anyways.

Like, really bad. He could clear a room like nobody’s business. It actually made me a little proud, when I wasn’t gagging or running into the next room for some fresh air.

2. Ollie liked to eat freshly planted flowers. Like Ferdinand the Bull.

He actually used to really piss off my mom, who would plant beautiful roses only to have Oliver come running into the house a few minutes later chewing on their dead carcasses.

3. Ollie wasn’t very dainty.

Unless you count inhaling food (along with a couple of your fingers if you tried to hand-feed him).

4. Ollie could be a bit of an asshole.

He used to wait until my other dog, Tache, was fast asleep on her pillow before walking over and sitting directly on top of her head. I like to think it was because he found it entertaining–as did I, Ollie.

5. Oliver was one of my best friends.

I used to lie awake at night, waiting to fall asleep but unable to because Tache was hogging the entire bed. So sometimes, I’d get out of bed in the middle of the night and lay next to Ollie. He’d lick my ear and didn’t mind if I shared his pillow as long as I scratched his belly for a few minutes. Whenever I had a nightmare, or was pissed off or sad, Oliver would let me hug him and pour my heart out. And that’s what really matters.

I’m gonna miss you, buddy. You were truly one of a kind.

As I haven’t been tour guiding for the past month (yes, my job is entirely dependent on students coming into Florence and not wanting to do anything on their own–oh, yeah, and I went on vacation. So sue me.) I’ve had some free time to do a little relaxing out in the Tuscan countryside. And you know something?

Tuscany in the summertime doesn’t suck. In fact, it can be pretty awesome.

Consuma, in the middle of Butt-freaking-nowhere Tuscany.

On Saturday, the boyfriend was feeling sorry for me (to be fair, my dog died this weekend. RIP Ollie. You were the best boyfriend I ever had.) so he took me out of the sweltering armpit that is Florence and off to Consuma for a few hours. Where is Consuma, you might ask?

No clue, folks. That’s what Google is for. (*Sidenote: upon actually googling Consuma, turns out this place really is a podunk middle-of-nowhere town that not even Google cares about).

We drove around in the car for about 45 minutes before stopping at this little place (don’t ask me what its called, I don’t know or care) that makes drool-worthy schiacciata bread, along with a crapload of other Tuscan specialities like prosciutto crudo, olives, cheese and delightful little chocolate thingys. We pigged out on a mix of schiacciata, mushrooms, olives and prosciutto (the picture looks a lot daintier than it actually was. We made that food our bitch.) :

NOMS.

After we’d gorged on enough carbs to run the New York City marathon (twice), we hopped back in the car and headed up the road to search for a place to have a coffee and a poo. Yes, those are important criteria in any day trip.

We stopped at a chalet-type looking place for our coffee, but alas the line was too long a.k.a neither of us felt like waiting for other people to get out of our way, so we decided to head back to Florence.

And that’s all, folks. Sometimes all it takes is a few hours to remember that life is precious and good.

Around early April, a group of my girlfriends and I were sitting around on our butts one Monday night, drinking copious amounts of wine and verbally abusing our European boyfriends (as you do) when someone had the brilliant idea of a girl’s weekend away to the island of Elba, just off the Tuscan coast . Now, since you’ve never met my group of friends, let me just tell you something about them–they are all very lovely, classy, and fabulous ladies. The problem is, we are all generally full of shit when it comes to making plans, and even worse when it comes to all of us getting time off from our ridiculously hectic schedules to follow through on said plans. However,  it just so happened that all of us were very determined to GET TIME OFF, since by this point in the year all of us were all in dire need of a vacation.  So with a little planning, and our powers combined…WE ARE CAPTAIN PLANET! Well, not really, but that would have been a cool start to our Elba Island getaway.

Elba is one of those hidden gems that most tourists visiting Tuscany for the first time have never even heard of.  Swarms of Italians flood the beaches of Isola d’Elba each summer, taking the 12 mile ferry ride from Piombino to arrive at their various beach houses for the month, where they will slather on the oil and work on getting so bronzato (tanned) that their miserable friends stuck in Florence will be consumed with jealousy by summer’s end.  Elba is actually quite a large island, the third largest after Sicily and Sardinia, making it the perfect place for taking an afternoon drive into the hills and getting lost on a private beach somewhere.

So we packed up K’s methane-powered beast of a car, kissed our boys goodbye, and made the 2 hour drive from Florence to the port of Piombino for our highly anticipated Elba vacation. Arriving mid-morning, we plugged in the GPS and headed off to our apartment rental to check in, and immediately hunt out some seafood for lunch.

Once fed and watered with the local fare, we set off in to explore our new home for the weekend. First stop, Capoliveri. Along the way, we found some very interesting local artwork that we couldn’t resist checking out. (SPOILER ALERT: If you don’t like profanities, stop reading this blog immediately and go back to your nunnery.)

Tu Troia…or as we say in English, you whore.

It’s good to know that Italian art didn’t die along with the Renaissance.

Anyways, after we wandered around Capoliveri a bit more, we decided to head back to our cozy little apartment and get our booze on. Luckily, our apartment was conveniently located next to a) an awesome restaurant with delicious pizzas, and b) a grocery store to stock up on snacks and vino. Saturday morning we woke up ready to head to the beach, so we hopped in the car and went off in search of a spiaggia. Luckily, those were about as hard to find as a gay man at a Madonna concert, and just as pretty!

Throughout the weekend, we beach hopped, swam in the frigid water of Capo Bianco, napped on the sand, hunted for sea glass, got drunk, took inappropriate pictures involving butts and fedoras, and ate enough food to satisfy even the pushiest Italian nonna. I’d go into more detail, but I’ve sufficiently bored myself with my words so I will just post some more pictures to do my job for me. By Sunday afternoon, the rain had started to fall and so we packed up our things and shlepped ourselves back to Florence, where I discovered that my English-born boyfriend had convinced his mate that Elba Island was, in fact, an island of lesbians, making for some really strange conversations at the bar on Sunday until I figured out what was going on.

FML.

P.S.–This week will probably only get worse since a swarm of American students is set to arrive on Thursday. I had a gaggle of them in the office today taking over an hour past office closing hours to decide whether or not they wanted to travel with us or sit with their thumbs up their butts in Florence all weekend.

P.P.S–You should probably also know that I have a raging case of PMS and am probably suffering from some weird island virus that I picked up in Elba.

P.P.P.S–I will eventually stop PPSing long enough to write about my weekend vacation in Elba which was, in fact, quite hilarious and also lots of fun and giggles and involves several pictures of butts.

The weekend started out well enough. Well, after sitting for 2 hours on the side of a highway at 1:45am because our shitty little bus broke down 15 minutes from the hotel in Sorrento. After waving down not one, not two, not three but FOUR other tourist buses (who shall not be named, but suffice it to say, what goes around comes around, assholes) who refused to come back and rescue us from the side of the road and take us to our hotel in Sorrento, we FINALLY got someone to come back for us and got into the hotel at a sprightly 4:30 in the morning.  When the last of the grumbling students had stomped up to bed, me and my co-worker flopped down onto our beds and took a power nap for 2 hours before waking up to get everything ready for the ferry to Capri the next morning.

Boatin’ around the green grotto in Capri (yes, there is more than one grotto in Capri. Do your homework, people.)

After a relatively stress-free ferryride to Capri on Friday morning, we hopped on Gianluca’s boat tour to check out the island. Shout-out to LaserCapri’s boating captains for making sure we didn’t capsize or run into the rocks Titanic-style  like the boat tour from hell that we took 4 weeks ago. Another story for another time, folks.

Anyways, the sun was shining in Capri, the birds were chirping, the Italians were making inappropriate sexual innuendos to the American girls…all was right in the world. After stopping in the Blue Grotto, we headed up to the center of Capri and made our way down Via Krupp to the beach at Marina Piccola, where my favorite jewelry man Paolo lives, and so does the seafood deliciousness of La Gioa.

We said the usual hellos to the main man of La Gioa, who promptly brought us to a table with white wine chilling beside it (yes, I come here quite often. They know my order.) I made sure all the students were seated and gave my usual food recommendations before sitting my ass down to a gigantic plate of spaghetti with mussels, arugula and slivers of Parmesan cheese. Insert drool here. I’d walk back to Capri for another plate of those juicy sea-dwelling nuggets.

While I was basking in my food coma, I failed to notice that the sun was, in fact, pretty damn hot. Hot enough that by the time I got back to the hotel at 8 pm, I had received a pretty epic farmer tan on my arms and legs, not to mention a ghostly-white watch tan (which is ironic since my real watch is actually white as well. At least we match now!). I hopped my way into the shower and poured buckets of lotion onto my burns, but alas, I am now a tomato-red shadow of my former pale self.

Saturday arrived, and so did the clouds. Big, surly looking gray clouds of doom. Of course it WOULD be cloudy in Positano, making me look like an asshole for enthusiastically telling all of the students that Positano is “my absolute favorite place ever! We’re gonna swim and get tan all day long!” Insert foot in mouth here. To make up for a rather uninspiring day at the cloudy beach, I went out to the English Inn that night with a group of students, an outside bar/dance club in the center of Sorrento even though at this point I had acquired a cold that meant I was snotting big globs of mucus every 15 minutes. Sexy, I know. After 45 minutes, I had to call it a night, and my co-worker and I started the walk back up the giant hill to our hotel.

Unfortunately, us Americans stick out like polar bears in Africa. Walking up the narrow road of death that led back to our hotel, we were victims of a ruthless water-balloon bombing from some rowdy Italian boys driving by that left us looking like drowned rats, and feeling pretty sorry for ourselves. If you have any information on the whereabouts of these hooligans, please dial 1-800-AVENGE-ME-NOW.

By Sunday, the clouds turned to rain, a confusing scenario in which the sun was actually shining through a cloud cover in Pompeii, yet big fat raindrops were still falling steadily. After sending my entire group into the ruins of Pompeii, I collapsed at a table underneath a cafe owned by a rather lecherous Napolitani who is pretty much the Mayor of Pompeii, and nursed my orange juice. Exhausted, I slept on the way up to Mount Vesuvius, ate an icy smoothie thing from some crappy cafe to soothe my throat while the students hiked up the volcano, and praised the lord that the rain had stopped to reveal a beautiful sunny view of the Bay of Naples, therefore ensuring that no more bitching about the weather would continue on the bus ride back to Florence.

All in all, this was one of the more trying weekends in my young tour guiding career. A broken bus, lobster sunburn, head cold, crazy students, bizarre weather=one exhausted tour guide who couldn’t wait to jump into her bed on Sunday night and fall fast asleep.