Interrailing – Prague

We arrived in Prague after three nights in Budapest. We decided to stay three nights there as we were all exhausted from the amount of moving around we were doing and needed some rest. We were fresh faced and ready to train again but we arrived fairly late and so dinner and a few drinks were the only things on the agenda. Our hostel was a bit outside of the city centre and so the next day we decided to grab a taxi in. The city is stunning. Full of old architecture and small cobblestone alleyways. We made a trip to Charles bridge which is also beautiful. If you can see it that is. We attempted to walk across it bit didn’t even make it halfway before turning back as the amount of tourists and tour groups makes it pretty impossible to focus on anything else other than squeezing through the crowds. We enjoyed it from a distance instead.

The main reason we came to Prague was to train in our gym’s HQ with our head coach Fernando Araujo. Our third day in the city was the day we finally got to. It was a very busy Monday night class. There was between 40 – 50 people on the mats. We started with a simple but long warm up of arm bars from closed guard, but without using our hands. Usually such a warm up wouldn’t be so difficult for us but we were definatley feeling the affects of doing little amounts of training and eating lots of food. After warm up we started on techniques. We learned an awesome back take, a strong bow and arrow adjustment and nice choke from the back. Because we were such a large group that night, not everyone could roll at the same time and so we only got 2/3 rolls in. As always though, everyone we interacted with was welcoming and friendly, and their level of jiu jitsu was awesome to watch and experience. It was great getting to meet Fernando again and be taught by someone with such a high level of jiu jitsu. After class we had to run to the train station to catch an overnight train to Krakow!

Unfortunately, this would be our last training session on the trip as we only had short stays planned in the last two cities. Travelling and training is something we definatley want to continue doing. Next time we will know to stay longer in places we visit so that we can train more, and we will 100% be investing in some light weight travel gis to bring with us!