Another sign that my time in Europe is quickly coming to an end, today I embarked on my last day trip, this time I took a train to the city of Pilsen in the Czech Republic.  Any guesses as to what made the city of Pilsen famous? As you might be able to guess by the name of the city, this is where Pilsner were invented.  The purpose of this day trip was to go on a brewery tour of the company that invented Pilsners, which is Pilsner-Urquell, the Czech brewery.  Now I did not go alone, on the contrary all but two of my classmates went to Pilsen today.  We got on a train that left Prague a little after 11:00 and would get us into Pilsen just before 1:00 in the afternoon, then we were scheduled to return to Prague a little after 7:00, so we had to make the most of our limited time there.  After getting off the train we headed straight for the brewery, which was a ten minute walk from the train station, where we were to meet our tour guide.  During our tour we saw everything from where they go their ingredients from to bottling and packaging.  At the end of our tour we had an opportunity to sample some of their Pilsners straight from the barrel in which they were fermented.  We concluded our tour a little after three, at which point we had about four hours to explore the rest of the city. Our first order of business, however, was to find a place to eat.  We eventually settled on a local Czech restaurant near the main square of Pilsen, after eating lunch we spent the rest of our time wandering the streets and taking in some of the sites of the fourth largest city in the Czech Republic.  Even though Pilsen is one of the bigger cities in the Czech Republic it is nothing like the hustle and bustle of Prague.  Prague is still full of tourists in the winter, I can’t imagine what it is like to visit the Czech capital in the summer, and Prague is probably the most Americanized city that I have seen on this trip.  Soon enough it was time to board another train and return to our apartments back in Prague.

To wrap-up my point from the beginning of this post, in less than a week I will be boarding a flight bound for Rome and from there I will begin my journey back to Seattle.  The last nine weeks have gone by so fast.