spa trip to karlovy vary

Last Saturday, Mary, Meredith, Julie and I took a 2 hour bus ride to the historic spa town called Karlovy Vary. I had visited this town once before with my parents and I remembered that the town was known for its spas and healing baths as well as mineral springs.

We arrived in Karlovy Vary at about 9 in the morning when the air was still very crisp and the town was covered with a thick fog. Not expecting the cold weather, we rushed to find the first bath so that we could schedule a treatment. We walked into the historic Victorian Bath Number Five to find that they had no openings for 4 people, and so we settled for a coffee in their café instead.

Realizing that we were not going to get into any bath if we stayed inside, away from the cold, we decided to walk the cold streets to find another bath. We found two others, but they were both closed on weekends to “healthy people” – meaning, they were only open to people needed serious treatments. This isn’t surprising, since Karlovy Vary is a healing town that is designed to help people with all types of ailments, serious or temporary.

Along the river in the center of town, we walked and found a small massage parlor on a hill. They had openings for all four of us that afternoon and we booked it. In the meantime, we decided to check out the rest of the town and get some lunch. We went through the mineral springs and tried some of the water – it’s very warm and you can definitely taste the sulfur. Not my favorite water, but supposedly it’s healing? Either way, every single person in Karlovy Vary had a porcelain cup and was sipping the water through a built in straw on the side of the cup. Not to mention, Mary, Meredith, Julie and I were the youngest people that we saw all day – it was kind of funny!

After a great and really inexpensive Czech lunch, we headed back to the spa for an hour aroma therapy massage. Afterwards they treated us to some warm coffee and invited us to hang out in their lounge for as long as we wanted. Not wanting to go back in the cold, we stayed for a little while and then paid for our remarkably cheap massages.

By the time we went back outside, the fog had lifted and the sun was shining, making the cold much more bearable. We had about 2 hours to kill before we had to catch our bus back to Prague, so we went back to the Historic Victorian Bath Number Five and bought 90 minutes in the swimming pool. The pool was heated with only a few people in it and there was a sauna and hot tub as well. It reminded me a little bit of the schwimbads we used to go to when I lived in Germany, but it wasn’t nearly as fun or as big as they were. But still, we had a good time and once again it was nice to get out from the cold.

After the pool it was time to head to the bus station and catch a ride back to Prague. We waited and waited at the station we were dropped off at until our bus showed up 5 minutes late. We tried to board the bus but the driver told us that that bus only dropped people off and we would have to walk 5 minutes down the road to another bus station. We ran to the other stop to find our bus had already left and the bus that refused to let us board wasn’t leaving for another two hours. AND we had to buy new bus tickets to get back to Prague. It was a huge ordeal and the bus agency’s fault because they never said there were two stops especially there was only one stop printed on both arrival and departure tickets. I got into a heated discussion with the agency’s representative, but with no resolution since she could barely even understand what I was saying in the first place.

In the end we sucked it up and got on another bus an hour later than intended, causing us to miss the concert we were trying to go to once we got back into Prague. Unfortunately it was a pretty stressful and frustrating end to an otherwise relaxing and very enjoyable day in Karlovy Vary.