Mala strana – St. Nicholas Church
Three weeks ago today, I was in the Czech Republic (Česká republika, Česko) on my first ever trip to Europe, and here’s my little pet project trying to summarize it in a series of articles.
I had long been mesmerized by the Czech people; the literature, music, and history that emerged from that country has quite an impression effect on my education. Not official didactic education per se, but I seem to gravitate towards cultural products of Cesko. If I begin to explain in detail the reasons for my destination, I will perhaps lose everyone reading this blog.
There was also a trace of happenstance. As I was anticipating my month-long Chinese New Year holidays, the girlfriend and I were browsing through promotions sent by Air Canada. It was advertising flight and hotel packages to London and Paris, probably because of the dip in tourism and traffic after the Summer Olympics. We also “randomly” picked other European cities and check the prices for comparison.
In the end, flights to the Czech Republic cost about the same as flying to London/Paris, and courtesy of Expedia Secret Hotel deals, we found a CDN$40 per night double room, in 4-star* hotel within Prague’s centre boundaries.
I sincerely believe the cheap hotel deal was the deciding factor for our travels to Prague.
And so our adventure began.
(But I am still very interested in writing about why Cesko! I will probably close my articles/series by writing that)
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*The hotel is rated as 4-stars, though it appeared to be closer to a 3 star hotel. However, it was clean and tidy, beautifully furnished and a proper hotel; we were extremely pleased about it. I will write about it later.
Notes on and around Shanghai 