We leave baggage claim, feeling that weird mix of exhaustion and exhilaration that comes after the completion of any long journey. It turns out that Prague didn't bother to have a customs office, so we walk right into ground transportation. Perhaps after having been closed off the world by Soviet control for 45 years, the people of Prague now want no barriers at all to people coming in for a visit.
After searching just long enough to start getting concerned, we finally find a guy with a white board with my name on it. I say hello, in English and in Czech, but he doesn't seem to understand a word of either. The hotel advertised that their employees were fluent in English, but apparently that doesn't apply to their drivers. The driver comes within a half-inch of about six different accidents in a 30-minute hair-raising drive to the city center we finally arrive, and not a moment too soon because the driver seemed intent on killing us.
Sunday:
We walk into the hotel lobby, say hello in Czech, and then I tell the reception desk that we would like to check in for the reservation under the name "Andrew Smith" and hand him my driver's license.
"Do you have reservation?" he asks.
I repeat that I do.
"Can I get your name?" he responds.
I begin to wonder if everything I read about the people of Prague being willing and fluent English speakers was a lie from the chamber of commerce.
We are able to Czech in eventually, and decide we have just enough energy for a stroll to the main town square three blocks away. We have two of the juiciest sausages ever made and some tasty two-dollar beers from a kiosk in the square that cost $12 total, or in local currency, something like 125,823 koruna. Life is good, as we stare at the gothic tower that's the centerpiece of the square, except that we've been up for 23 hours and are a bit delusional.
There are two main, famous, historic buildings in Prague's center square. The Tyn Church is the gothic cathedral with the two spires that's in all the pictures. The other is the Astronomical Clock at the top of city hall, that has little figurines that put on a little show at the top of every hour, and have been doing so for literally, like a thousand years. We are surprised to find, on our arrival, that the clock tower is closed for renovation, and the show is on hold until later in the summer.
I hope this is not an omen of things to come.
We walk back to our hotel and notice that we've been walking at least four blocks and the hotel, which was only three blocks from the square, is nowhere in sight. There was only one turn involved, so maybe we passed it. We cut back over to the block we had passed, but our hotel isn't on that street either. Nor is it on another street that looked vaguely familiar.
Our cell phones don't work and we didn't bring a map on what seemed like a foolproof three block walk. But nothing is foolproof if you're a big enough fool, or if you haven't slept in what suddenly feels like 384 hours.
To make matters worse, I didn't wear the compression sleeve I have for the knee I broke last year when I came out tonight. I only need it for long walks, and this wasn't supposed to be one. But we've now walked about 9 blocks trying to find the hotel that was three blocks from where we started, so we wind our way back to the square to start over again from there.
We definitely get the first two blocks of the way back to the hotel right, but it's a bit confusing from there. The left turn at the intersection that forks into three different streets. We were pretty sure we came from one of them, but we've tried them all without success, our phones don't work, we don't have a map, and we don't speak the language. But other than that and my broken kneecap we're doing fine.
My wife offers to explore the left turn on the next intersection north on her own to save me some walking and report back once she finds the way or runs out of ideas. Half an hour later, I hear my wife yelling my name from that general direction. We meet up eventually, apparently both having figured out where the hotel was long before we found each other.
It's bedtime almost as soon as we get back to the room.
Monday:
We don't sleep that well, but make it through the night. Maybe thing will only get better from here and the jetlag won't be so bad?
The downtown churches and museums are closed on Mondays, so we tour the historic Jewish quarter, a well preserved neighborhood where Prague had segregated its Jewish population prior to World War II.
The main attractions there are a synagogue with all the thousands of names of the Czech Holocaust victims inscribed on the walls, and the mass graveyard where all the Jewish bodies were forced to be buried, because the Gentiles didn't want their own corpses to be defiled by contact with another race. Apparently even dead people can be racist. The quarter was a sobering and powerful look at the oppression of the people, so I'm happy to find a good lunch with cheap beer at the conclusion of the tour. We were also happy to get away from the tourists asking us to take their pictures at sites commemorating human suffering.
At lunch, we discover for the first time that sauerkraut can actually be good. Also, there's more sausage, and we have rabbit and pork dishes that were as good as anything I had ever eaten. Funny how the morning can be full of suffering, but a good meal a few hours later changes everything.
Walking toward the main bridge, an old woman with limp and a cane asks us for change. My heart breaks a little, and I'm tempted to see what I have, but I decide to keep walking. I don't like to pull out my wallet in unfamiliar places, especially with all the pickpockets you hear about in tourist areas.
As I decline and pass alongside her, she lunges in front of me with remarkable agility, given her apparent condition. She blocks my way and asks again, angrily this time, for money. I decline as I walk past, and soon begin to wonder out loud if the cane she was sporting was just a prop.
"And someone might have been lurking in the wings to grab and run the moment you pulled out your wallet," my wife says.
Tuesday:
We didn't sleep last night. We didn't sleep much the night before either. The air conditioning in the hotel blows, but doesn't really cool. That was fine the first night, a Sunday, because we slept with our windows open and it was cool outside, but the street noise has been increasing every night as the week goes on. We're a bit incoherent, but struggling through.
We visit the city center's two big cathedrals, the public market and the museum of Communism, which portrays life under 45 years of oppressive rule before the Iron Curtain fell. The Czech people suffered under the Holocaust in the 30's and 40's, and then immediately were forced into an oppressive Communist political system from the 40's until 1989. No wonder the people are somber, and a glass of beer is literally cheaper than a glass of water.
We walk over the ornate Charles bridge that crosses the Vlatava River, which has cut the city in half for about 700 years. There is a jazz band on it playing Cajun music for tips, along with a number of other kiosks full of people selling random trinkets. The Charles Bridge is another ornate gothic structure with medieval lookout towers on each side, and its cobblestone pavement is open to foot traffic only. Every twenty yards--er, meters, or so, there's a new statue of along its sides depicting some Saint in the midst of a titanic struggle. The flea market feel going on beside them seems kind of weird.
We get to the other side feeling hot and tired. It's about time to turn around and go home, but there's a church right on the other side too, so we figure we might as well see it. We buy a ticket to go inside, without realizing that we've actually only bought admission to its 200 foot--err, 600 meter, bell tower, for which there is no elevator. This becomes clear just as we reach the point of no return, so we trudge our way up the never-ending stairs. The view was nice at least.
Later, we make it back to hotel and sit for a bit before going to classical music concert, just as we would the following night. Prague was the home of Mozart for a while, so the concert venues and orchestras are reputed to be amazingly good. We don't go to the symphony all that often in the States, but maybe we would if they were as good as what we heard in Prague.
Wednesday:
We took the train up to Prague Castle, a massive structure on a hill overlooking the city which all the books said we has to see but that we were kind of unexcited about. It turned out to be a pleasant surprise, but it sure took a lot to get there.
We needed to take the train to get there, but we had read that the train stations required exact change. We walked to the main Tourist Information Center to ask where we could get tickets in advance, hoping that they would have them.
"Oh no, we don't have them here, but you can get them at a tobacco shop by the train station."
"Which one?," I asked.
"Oh, just any tobacco shop by the station."
"The tobacco shops are the only place to buy train tickets?"
"Yes, they will have them there."
No one thought this set up to be weird. Why would a tobacco shop sell train tickets? Do I also need to buy milk from the hair salon? Wouldn't it make more sense for the train station to sell train tickets?
We wandered in the direction of the station and passed by a convenience store. We asked if they had train tickets and got a funny look.
We got to train station and wandered a block or so until we found a tobacco shop. The person in front of us bought a pipe. We bought tickets to Prague Castle. Just another day at the office.
The grounds of the castle complex contained a little city within its gates. The St. Vitus Cathedral sits in the middle, a giant medieval church with stained glass windows every
Usually majestic old churches in Europe just feel like tourist attractions to me, and this one definitely had its share. But every once in a while the beauty inside transcends the crowds of tour groups taking selfies, and you can feel a connection inside to the something bigger to which the building was meant to connect. This was one of those places--one where you feel like your prayers aren't being said inside your head but broadcast through a satellite dish straight into Heaven.
I've been to Notre Dame, the Sagrada Familia, and a few other famous ones in Europe, but St. Vitus is my favorite.
We leave the castle, walking past the old dungeon where the used to house (and torture) the prisoners in all kinds of disturbing an innovative ways. We stop for a drink by the Vlatava River on the way home, at a place with a sign advertising "Fresh Sea Fish." Sadly, it was only three, so Sea Fish wasn't on the agenda, but we enjoyed our time respite from the heat alongside the water. It was nice to hear that the restaurants still served food, and that we didn't have to buy it from the dry cleaners.
We stopped to use the bathroom on the way home at one of those European pay toilets, where a nice woman of Roma ("gypsy") ancestry gave us change and thanked us. My change was correct, and I felt bad for even counting. I wondered how much harder her job, and that of every honest business person of her ethnicity, must be with people always wondering if they are getting "gyped." I got extra angry at the fake-disabled woman who had accosted me a few days before for perpetuating the stereotype and making life harder for this sweet little old lady.
Thursday
We were supposed to take a train to tour a concentration camp today. My MS had other plans.
I woke up and immediately knew I won't have the energy to make it out today. The day before had been hot and we had been more active than we had planned, and I was out of gas. I came down and had breakfast, and immediately went back to bed.
Somewhere around lunch time I stirred again, and started what might have been our best day in Prague. It was too late for our day trip, so we just wandered the city aimlessly, stopping at interesting shops and restaurants, buying a Tridelnik, the Czech version of an ice cream cone with a cinnamon sugary glaze on the cone, which might be the best thing I'd ever tasted. I'm not supposed to eat dairy very often because of my MS, so it's a good thing I didn't discover the majesty of the Tridelnik earlier on the trip. Once I discovered it, I was powerless to go a day without it.
We ate, we drank, we bought souvenirs. We took a picture with a giant inflatable panda in the town square. We heard drunken British soccer hooligans get way too excited about their team's performance in the very early stages of the World Cup. We stared at the church in the main square, and wished America had more cities with big squares where people gather to have fun and do silly things. We passed a shoe store and wondered if it might be the only place in town where we could buy ice cream.
I bet they sell cobbler as well.
But we'd rather have more Tridelnik.
Friday:
I woke up feeling normal on Friday, so we took the train (after purchasing tickets at a tobacco shop) to the bus station, where we took a bus to the Terezin Concentration Camp about an hour out of town. It was the transportation hub of the Holocaust operations in the region, the place where Jews were sent to acclimate to life in a Concentration Camp before being sent to the their final destinations, from which they would generally never return. Terezin had no gas chambers, so the Germans used it as the center of the PR scam to (falsely) show off to the International Red Cross that its work camps were humane. But behind the curtain, the facets on the sinks contained no running water, the food rations were miniscule, and anyone failing to abide by the harsh conditions were sent to the tower prison or executed in mass. Group showers were enforced here, so that the population would be fooled into walking into similar chambers in Auschwitz, were poison gas would flow from the shower heads instead of water.
It was a harsh reality, in the middle of a well preserved but strikingly grim town, but it has one ray of hope.
Behind a hidden door on the back side of a store front with the city was a secret chamber leading to a Hidden Synagogue that had been created during the Holocaust. It was a simple room that looked like a cave, but its meaning was powerful. Even during the darkness, those suffering found a way to create a ray of light. We came across it at the end of our tour, and I was glad to leave the sea of suffering on a hopeful note.
Then we got back to Prague and had Tridelnik.
Saturday:
Time to go home, just as our bodies acclimated to European time. We were up way too late on Friday soaking in the last bit of the square. We caught our shuttle to the airport and were relieved to find that we didn't also need to check in to our flight from the tobacco shop as well. We caught our connecting flight to Denmark, but I was disappointed that my stomach was too upset to want to eat a Danish that would be sold by people who themselves were Danish. Also, my wife had to endure my constant jokes about various things in the State of Denmark being rotten. Denmark leads the world in food-related bad jokes.
We left eventually, with no Danish, and we got home after a 10-hour flight that seemed endless. After about a week, our body clocks felt back to normal again.
I miss Prague. It isn't as glamorous as Paris, and it doesn't have a definitive touristy hook like the canals of Venice or even the quirks of Amsterdam. There aren't as many historical sights as London or Rome. It seems more like a city where people actually live, work, drink beer (and eat Tridelnik), and less like the tourist circus that envelops some of the other European cities I've visited. It was beautiful, but kind of sad. The people were formal, but polite from the outset and nice once you broke the ice and got to know them.
I miss the gothic architecture, and the cheap lunches on outdoor patios. I miss the symphonies, and the intrigue of seeing storefronts on cobblestone streets. And I missed the clock tower, because I never got to see it.
I hope I get back someday. I could use another Tridelnik.
