Hello everyone,
it has been one week since I arrived in Pilsen for my Erasmus program and for a student like me, there are a lot of change than France.
Today I will talk about the things that impressed me the most during my first week here, including my arrival, the preparation, and more.
So, let’s start !
Vintage architecture
In Pilsen you can see a lot of old buildings with beautiful and colourful façade. The colours are mostly smooth shades (including yellow, blue, green, red and white) what enhances architecture. These are well preserved.
The historical centre is dominated by St. Bartholomew's Cathedral, which stands in the middle of a large square with cobbled streets. At first, I found it strange that the cathedral has only one tower, after research the second tower was planned but never finished !
In contrast to this old city, the sky is filled with a dense network of overhead electrical cables for trams and buses. When you watch the sky in the centre of the city you can see a big number of this cables which power all the buses and trams, it’s very impressive.
Industrial Traffic System
When I arrived at Pilsen, I was very impressed about the traffic, the city was designed for heavy circulation, so unlike in France, many traffic lights are suspended, and many intersections are very wide. Moreover, despite the presence of pedestrians, the trams and cars move surprisingly fast, which surprised me. Especially as there are no white stripes to indicate pedestrian crossings, so cars don't slow down!
Another fun fact, it’s very impressive to hear each 2 hours an emergency siren very different than France, and when we see it it's even more impressive because they zigzag around the cars at high speed!
Pilsen and the Beer
How could I finish this article without talking about the beer?!
As Mathis said in his article, which I recommend reading, I visited the Pilsner Urquell Brewery, which is the most famous brewery in the Czech Republic! Beer culture is very important, so much so that you can find it everywhere, even in the canteen at my university! What’s even crazier is that beer is cheaper than water, you can get a beer three times cheaper than in France, and the minimum size is a pint! Speaking of my university canteen where I was really surprised to see that water is expensive, and yes, it costs more than beer, in all restaurants, including the canteen, free water simply doesn’t exist,
so as the Czechs would say: "no reason for not to have a beer" !
This is the end of my article, so thank you for reading it, and I hope you enjoyed hearing about my first impressions of Pilsen.