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<\/a><\/p>\nI took a train to Passau to visit a friend.\u00a0 The weather was really wonderful during the week and we took lots of walks around the small city and her hometown, which is a small neighboring town named F\u00fcrstenzell.\u00a0 I was really glad I got to take a break from the big city life and retrieve to a quieter place.\u00a0 I think that is what I would like to do when I have more opportunities to travel later \u2013 I want to be able to visit smaller places.\u00a0 After a beautiful train ride, I arrived at Passau Hauptbahnhof (train station) on Wednesday evening.\u00a0 J picked me up and drove us to her home.\u00a0 We drove through some country scenery and saw the gorgeous sunset.\u00a0 It suddenly reminded me how long it has been since I have lived in a big city and missed the sunset.\u00a0 Passau is a city only about 300 km from Vienna, about three hours drive.\u00a0 It is on the Austrian-German boarder and a meeting point of three rivers, Donau, Inn, and Ilz, so you can imagine how beautiful it must be!\u00a0 And then it was just really great to see J again after we parted last May.\u00a0 I was really glad I got to spend some time with her!<\/p>\n
I have decided that the theme of my travels last week must have been river cities!\u00a0 Because I then went to Prague for the weekend with Suzanne and Kevin \u2013 okay, so I guess the theme was beautiful rivers and awesome people\/friends\/travel buddies, because they are some of my favorite people!\u00a0 It is needless for me to say how important it is to have good company.\u00a0 Prague was a marvelously beautiful city.\u00a0 It lies by the river Vltava, or Moldau, the German name that I knew.\u00a0 The walks along the river and across the bridges were absolutely beautiful.\u00a0 Suzanne did a tour of a few major Central\/West European cities with her family last summer, and Prague was the city that she wanted to visit again.\u00a0 I have always wanted to visit too, as I am fascinated by all the East European cultures and post-communist arts, about which, I have to admit, I knew very little, and was even considering study abroad in Czech Republic at first!\u00a0 What I didn’t know was the city also contains a lot of medieval beauty, especially when you start going underground!\u00a0 Suzanne loves the city; she would repeat that again and again just walking down the cobble stone streets.\u00a0 I think it is the perfect representation my experience with the city.\u00a0 I mean, it’s just the atmosphere that is so attractive, and you don’t need to see any particular thing, but just breath the air of the city is enough.\u00a0 We just walked around a lot and tried to take in the city as much as we could.<\/p>\n I decided that everything in Prague was put together with good taste, it seemed.\u00a0 Like restaurants.\u00a0 Of course all these major cities would have plenty of descent, expensive restaurants all over.\u00a0 But too often I just see ones that are purely fancy.\u00a0 Just by looking through the windows of these restaurants in Prague, I was intrigued by the unique design and characters of each one of these places.\u00a0 I loved the heavy wooden tables, or individual old-fashioned lamps and lounge sofas.\u00a0 It’s good taste.\u00a0 And the streets are all dimly lit at night, together with the narrow stone-paved streets, they create a pleasant nostalgic feeling that I really enjoyed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week was midterms week here.\u00a0 I turned in one paper and had three other exams.\u00a0 We soon discovered that midterms week here are sort of like finals week at home, in that no class is held during the week.\u00a0 … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n