The Prague disease

The Canadian boys from the hostel and I decided to check out the Jewish museum in Prague. Our Aussie friend Jack, one of the original absinth shot drinkers, had been planning to stay in Prague only two nights, but he was still sitting in the lobby that morning, six nights after he’d arrived. We tried to convince him to come with us, spend just one more night.

 

‘I can’t,’ he said, ‘I have to go.  I have four more countries to cover in 10 days! I’ve been here too long!’ Okay, we agreed. He had to leave.

When we got back, hours later, he was sitting at a computer at the hostel.

‘Just one more night,’ he said.

***

Then, happily, Dan arrived.

Jase’s brother, who’s been travelling Europe for a few months, was going to Prague to visit an old friend. We dedicated his first day there to beer. Well, beer and walking.

My guidebook said there’s a good beer garden in a park that has a great view of the city, and we went to find it. It was empty, pretty much, when we got there (apparently it’s popular in the summer), but we could still buy a cheap beer at the stand. We sat looking at the city, and looked up how to say ‘Cheers’ in Czech.

Na zdravi!

Wandering, later, towards our next beer-related destination, we passed a group of people with an antique-looking video camera on a tripod. A woman from the group approached us – I thought they were going to give us hell for walking through their shot; instead she asked ‘Do you want to be in our movie?’.

My job was to walk to an ‘X’ she drew in the dirt with her shoe, look both ways as if waiting for someone, and turn and walk away. We practiced a few times, then shot it. I think it was an award-worthy performance.

We went up the funicular to the top of Petrin Hill, our destination: a monastery within the castle district that brews its own beer. We tried one of each kind - the amber, the dark, and the wheat, the amber ending up the clear winner. Monks are smart people.

The next day I was sure I was going to continue on to Cesky Krumlov south of Prague. I got up early, started packing my bag, phoned a hostel to see if they had available beds. By the time I’d finished packing my bag, I’d changed my mind. One more night in Prague – JUST ONE. I went down to the desk to say I’d be staying another night at the hostel.

‘Again?’ the receptionist said.

For the day wandered the city with my camera, read Milan Kundera’s ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’. A friend from the hostel, who had continued on to Cesky Krumlov, sent me a text to see if I’d be arriving any time soon.

‘Decided on one more day in Prague,’ I wrote back. ‘JUST ONE.’

‘Haha, I see you’re not immune to the Prague disease,’ he responded. ‘Might see you in Budapest’.

I did manage get out of Prague the next day, telling myself there is, in fact, more of Europe to see. Much, much more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prague: the first three days.

I got to Prague in the dark, and wandered a few cobbled lanes to my hostel. Early the next morning I hopped out of bed and headed directly out, deciding by my map to go towards the river and follow it.

 When I got there – when I got my first glimpse of Prague and the Vltava River, of the castle and city’s red-tiled roofs and layers of skyline, my eyes got big, and I couldn’t force the smile from my face. I got out my phone and texted Andrea: “I LOVE MY LIFE”.

I spent the first two days in Prague wandering the streets – I took in the free walking tour and then the castle tour, and tried to retain all the history I could fit in my excitable brain. Here’s what I retained:

1) Throughout history, Czechs have apparently prefered to solve political disputes by throwing important people out the window.

2) The Czech calendar has a different name for every day of the year, and children are only given those names – therefore they have a birthday, and a name day.

3) The astronomical clock is pretty, but the thing it does at the top of every hour is pretty underwhelming. 

4) Russia invaded after The Prague Spring in 1968, in which the Communist Party leader Alexander Dubcek tried to liberalize the system, allowing more freedom of speech and releasing political prisoners. A student set himself on fire to protest the invasion.

***

On my third night in the hostel I was sitting in the common room with my computer in my lap. Four guys were watching TV in their own corners; one was drinking a mixture of absinth and Fanta, slowly. A group of people came in, on their way to a movie, and saw the bottle.

“You know how you should drink that?” said a blonde girl. “Get a spoon, put a sugar cube on it, then pour a shot of absinth over it, light the sugar cube on fire for a few seconds, then pour water over it, stir it all together, and drink it. There’s some sugar cubes in the kitchen, okay bye!”

Absinth Guy looked at the rest of us left in the room and said “Well, I’m not going to do this by myself, who’s in?”

And that’s how long it takes to make friends in a hostel.

We decided the absinth tasted like Christmas trees. After a few more of our own drinks the movie group returned, and we retreated to The Fun Room (aka the basement). We started the largest, noisiest and most disorganized game of King’s Cup ever, and passed around a jar of Nutella that people either ate with their fingers, smeared on each other, or, unfortunately for Mitch from Medicine Hat, put in the King’s Cup.

At 2 a.m. we gathered everyone’s pocket change and went ot the corner store, which was still serving beer out of the fridge for 14Kc (about €0.50). We came back with four bags full.

I love my life.

Train ride, Munich to Prague

There are signs everywhere that this train splits in half part way through the journey – only part of it goes to Prague, the rest somewhere else in Germany. I make sure I’m in the right half. In my compartment there’s a couple from Bosnia, who now lives in the States, a blond Czech girl who speaks both English and German fluently. The Bosnian woman asks her husband to go get her a drink. He doesn’t come back for an awfully long time. Then she hears her name being called over the intercom.

The drink and food car is in the part of the train that doesn’t go to Prague, and her husband was in it when it split in half. He got off at the next station, but now they have to figure out how and where they’ll meet up again. She’s distraught, poor thing.

Once she’s worked out a plan, and the tears have subsided, the three of us chat. Bosnia was part of Yugoslavia when she left, and when the Czech girl was young, it was Czechoslovakia. They talk about ‘before the war’, how its hard for the older woman to go back to Sarajevo where she’s from. How Czech was able to split peacefully, and Yugoslavia not so much.

“And who wants the split? Not the people,” says the Bosnian woman.

The Czech girl nods, puts her hand up and waves it side to side, to indicate the ‘higher ups’, the proverbial ‘them’ is who wants these things. She shrugs.

When the train arrives in Prague, the Czech girl is heading in the same direction as I am — I tag along with her through the metro station, she tells me where to get off the train. I wave thanks, and wander the dark lanes to my hostel.