#imperial cafe

[breakfastwithjim]

Imperial Cafe, Splott Road, Cardiff

85 years of service and still going strong. We ordered food, sat down and it arrived - that quickly!

Beans on toast for Iona, bacon and sausage roll for Jim, veggie breakfast for me, and Jon had an egg and sausage roll. The food was fried and tasty. It’s another good greasy spoon to add too the list.

We were impressed especially by the speed

*****

[findkayla-blog-blog]

Praha, Praga, Prague

This is a bit delayed, but this week has been a bit crazy so you'll have to excuse me! So I left Friday morning from Granada airport after fighting with the check in employees to allow me on the plane, and made my way to Prague in the afternoon to meet up with two of my really good friends Laura and Lefki.  Our first evening we got settled into our hostel and met the guy who owned the place and made our way to get dinner and catch up over all the time that has passed.  We also went over to Charles Bridge to see the castle at night and the famous bridge that everyone insisted we visit.

Our second day we decided to get breakfast at the famous Imperial Cafe.  The entire place is covered in ceramic tiles to form gorgeous murals all over the walls-

Afterwards we took a tour with the organization that's popping up over Europe to provide free tours from English speakers throughout various countries.  We got lucky enough to have quite the Irish looker as our tour guide.  We visited tons of stuff all within three hours, it was honestly the best thing we could have done with our first day.  He told us about how the national anthem is more or less a song saying "where is my home?" At first he said that it was because Czech men get so drunk they can never find their way home at the end of the night, but really it's because the Czech Republic has been so many various countries and territories in the past 100 years.  He told us that one of the other tour guide's mother-in-law has lived in the same house her entire life and has been a citizen to 7 different countries! He told some other stories about the communist times like how there was a group of young men who thought that maybe if they could do something to tell the world how bad life was that they would intervene, and because of this they came to a suicide pact to burn themselves in front of the government building.  After the first guy attempted it he begged his friends not to follow in his footsteps while he laid on his death bed, but another boy followed his steps and a wooden cross has been placed where they burned themselves in memory. 

He also explained that while the city is covered in churches, around 80% of the country identifies as atheist.  For this reason, a few are used as concert halls and are free to enter and you can take as many pictures as you want!

Added to that we took a walk through the Jewish neighborhood to check out a few synagogues and get some more great stories about the past.  He told us about how during Nazi times they weren't allowed to exit their neighborhood for any reason whatsoever, which lead us to the story of the cemetery.  

It's built about 9 meters above ground now, and it goes down 3 meters even deeper.  The entire neighborhood was 3 meters deeper than what it is now because it used to be a swamp area where no one else wanted to live, but once they opened the neighborhood they built up the streets so that others would want to live there as well.  Anyways, because they couldn't leave the neighborhood they were forced to bury their dead in this small cemetery, so when they ran out of room they would dig up the headstones, put in a layer of dirt, bury the new bodies, and replace all of the old head stones and add the new ones.  Hence why they cemetery is now filled with headstones that crowd each other.

We also saw the Spanish synagogue! Woo!  I guess in the past when Spain was split into the Christian north and Muslim south the Jewish people in the north were treated horribly by the Christians while the Jews in the south were treated wonderfully by the Muslims, so they built this synagogue to thank them for treating them so well.

Afterwards we walked over towards the castle and took a little tour over there for the afternoon!

After all of that we made our way to dinner and then later on some cheese sandwiches, all of which were incredibly delicious!

Our third day in Prague was spent at the park right outside of Prague where we got some awesome views of the city and went through a mirror labyrinth that was probably made more for toddlers than a group of 20-some year olds.. but oh well!

And then for our grand finale, we went to the zoo! It was soo awesome! I saw all over tourist sites that the zoo was the place to hit up while you're in Prague so we knew we simply had to do it, and honestly it was a great decision.  There were tons of different animal enclosures that made it super exciting and we got to relax together for our last day until next semester at Arcadia.

remember how I went anaconda searching in the Amazon and we kept finding all of the tracks but couldn't find the snake? Yeah, that's because they sit under the water like this and this is probably how they were sitting under the water while we walked directly above.

  After all of that I made my way back to Granada Tuesday morning just in time to see the Easter processions through the city.  I'll blog on that later this week, after I've already seen the main ones!

34 days xo