Prague

Here's for all of you who won't be able to wait for me to get back from Morocco. I leave tonight to catch my early morning flight tomorrow. Then I'll be in Marrakesh for 4 nights and Ouarzazate for a night in between. A total of 5 nights on a new continent.

Pictures from Prague are posted. I won't have time to get around to captions before I leave. I added a few of Krista's pictures as well. Hers are the ones stamped with the yellow date in the corners. You'll notice some appear to be taken from a bus. This isn't an illusion. After our two car Czech train stopped, we were informed we had to go the rest of the way by bus to the next station - a complete surprise because it didn't happen on the way to Prague, just the return. It was also an amazing example of communicating without a common language, as the Czechs on the train spoke neither English nor German. Following her pictures are the 9 train stations we went thru on our way back (Minus Giessen, forgot to take that picture).

My idea of fun is riding on a train for twelve hours. I would have taken a bus for eight hours, but when I heard the extra four hour alternative, I just couldn’t pass it up.

OK, actually, the bus schedule with Eurolines was such that a bus left Frankfurt late Thursday night and got into Prague at about 6am Friday. Return was either Sunday evening at 5pm getting back at midnight, or leaving Prague Sunday at 10pm and getting back at 5am Monday. As it turns out, the only seats that were left three days in advance were Friday night getting in Saturday morning, and then leaving Sunday at 5pm. Prague for one night didn’t seem worth the €80 round trip bus fare.

Instead, Karl, Krista and I split a Bayern-Böhmen group pass and tacked on a €12 ticket each from Plzen to Prague. Total was €52 for Karl and me to get to Prague and back. Slightly more for Krista because she’s just visiting. Just visiting means she doesn’t have the Hessen ticket on her student ID that was included in the €182,95 student fees that she didn’t pay.

All in all, €52 isn’t a bad price to pay to get to Prague. The downside is group tickets mean no fast trains, only regional ones. Regional trains only go so far before they turn around and go right back to where they came from. So we were required to jump on train after train, generally for about an hour each. No longer than an hour twenty on any train, with one exception. The exception was 1 hour 50 minutes.

The train schedules on the way there worked out well, relatively speaking. Well means we averaged no more than 20 minutes waiting at any particular train station. Usually it was between eight and thirteen minutes. The exception was 53 minutes in Nürnberg, which outside of Frankfurt was the biggest train station we stopped at, so there was plenty to keep us occupied.

The return trip wasn’t so lucky. Monday was a Feiertag in Germany, so there weren’t the usual number of trains running. On four occasions, we waited just over an hour sitting at various train stations. Total time for the return trip: 16 hours.

Prague itself was nice. The lack of extraordinary superlative reflects the lack of inspiration Prague gave me to seek one. But it was still nice.

Saturday the three of us blazed through the city, seeing most of the ‘must-sees’ on our way to/from Prague castle. Sunday, we struggled to come up with a list of more things to see. The list was complete after the Jewish quarter (Cemetery plus a couple of synagogues) and Wenceslas Square. When we realized we walked through Wenceslas Square the day before while exploring after fighting through the hordes of tourists on Charles Bridge, we scratched that off the list and were left with just the Jewish quarter. So we explored some more.

We stopped at two souvenir/beer/liquor stores: one before heading to the Jewish quarter, one after climbing down Prague’s second hill; each in a separate part of town. The separation is why we were stunned when the guy sitting behind the register at the second store was the exact same guy who was trying to sell us a 2000 Crown ($80) bottle of Absinth at the first store. The “free beer and wine samples” sign painted on the second store window drew three college students in like the blue glow of a bug zapper does to flies, mosquitoes, and the occasional squirrel. The persistent salesman poured us each a sample shot of absinth instead. For Karl and me, the creepy Italian poured an absinth called Beetle. For Krista, he poured the other brand of absinth he carried, because she seemed a bit freaked out by the 5 inch beetle floating near the bottom of each bottle of absinth which wears the name.

We carried on, hunting down a Tex-Mex restaurant, Buffalo Bill, which Karl found on a list next to the list of recommended pubs, bars, and brewing houses. Krista and I shared a Chicken Quesadilla and a plate of Nachos Grande. Karl enjoyed his own plate of regular nachos 'n cheese and a chimichanga. We were all impressed and delighted by the authenticity of a Tex-Mex restaurant in an 'eastern' European city.

Karl and I were also delighted by the Budweiser listed on the menu. And the price. 48 Crown ($3) for half a liter. That’s roughly the price for the price of a 20 oz bottle of Budweiser in a bar back home. But that’s not what we were especially pleased with; this stuff wasn’t the crap from St. Louis. This was the original Budvar from the Czech Republic, which we had had a taste of in Hungary. With nothing left on our Prague list except night pictures, we talked for about an hour after eating while Karl and I enjoyed three half liters of the good Budweiser.

(Side note: the first night was spent at an Irish pub, where Urquell Pilsner was the bar’s beer of choice. Urquell coming from Plzen, from which the term Pilsner is derived).

(Second side note: while Urquell is good, Budvar wins the contest hands down).

Three half liters, a decent half-hour walk back to our room, a call home for mother’s day, letting Krista use my phone to call home for mother’s day because she couldn’t get her phone card to work from the Czech Republic, a nighttime Prague photo shoot, and six hours of sleep later, we started our 16 hour journey home.