now what did i know about the Czech Republic 3 days ago? let's see... former Communist-Bloc country during which time it was half of Czechoslovakia. capital city: Prague. beer's cheaper than water. so not much, really. pardon my ignorance. i've picked up a bit since then...
remember how i said i loved Paris? and Berlin? when i sat around musing about places where i'd learn the language just so i could live there? welcome to Prague. been wondering where the most beautiful city in Europe was? welcome to Prague. where can you go into a supermarket and pick up three half-litre bottles of beer and still get change from a Euro? this is Prague, baby. it's the Happiest Place on Earth, City of 1000 Spires, possessed of more statues than anywhere else on the planet. ever watched the movie XXX with Vin Diesel, seen the big climax scene where they're trying to difuse the bio weapon before it destroys the city? that's the river in Prague. remember the story about the mad astronomer Tycho Brahe (who was actually Danish, but who's counting) who was supposed to have died of a burst bladder in the middle of a dinner party? Prague. read any Kafka? he was from Prague. it's got a Communism Museum and a Sex Machines Museum, plus the standard accumulation of churches, squares, and clutter you expect from an old, European city. it's just prettier than anywhere i've been. ever.
or at least: so far...
my first impression of the place was fairly average, but then i was heading from the main train station to my hostel somewhat outside the central area by foot at Stupidity in the morning and even then it was pleasant, walking past the statue commemorating the Soviet Liberation of Czechoslovakia (which looks suspiciously like two guys making out until you look more closely) on my way down to the river, through an industrial area and finding my hostel after an hour or so of walking after a sketchy night's sleep on the train. makes me glad i can carry my backpack a decent distance now. one way or another, i was HOURS too early to Czech in (ok, i SWEAR that's the last time i'll make that joke... it's just... you see so fucking many of those ridiculous "CZECH ME OUT!" tshirts at the touristy stores that eventually it works its way into your brain) so i Czeched (oops...) my email and joined in on the standard walking tour which, once again, happened to have a start point at this hostel. welcome to Plus Prague, a member of the "People Like US" chain of budget accomodation... and by budget i mean 6.60 Euro a night. it's a MegaHostel, but don't hold that against it. the busload after busload of Contiki and TopDeck fuckers just add to the colour... and give the Busabout folks someone to poke fun at. not that we feel superior or anything... today's NewEurope tour leader was a girl from Essex who went from "quite pleasant and sane" to "jumping around and yelling like there was something more than caffeine in her coffee" when she went into Performance Mode which is pretty much what i needed at the time, and she kept things nicely interesting the whole way through and by the time she'd finished i'd got chatting to a girl from Sydney who kept me company for the rest of the afternoon, cruising up to the castle, then down and around and in and out of the west-side of the river until got late and we both needed to get cleaned up for the pub crawl... but by that time we'd covered quite a lot of ground and walked some gorgeous streets.
fucking pub crawls. just about every hostel i've stayed in has advertised one, and Busabout is always pimping one or another. i've managed to avoid them all through this trip so far, but i figured that i might as well do ONE and see what all the fuss was about... and if i was going to do that i'd do it in the place with the cheapest beer. unfortunatly, the night turnout out to be crap. we met ran into Theo and Christian - the two lads i'd been out drinking with in Krakow - and hooked into their group for dinner which took so long to come that we were late for the meetup for the crawl. Chris and Theo distinguished themselves nicely by getting obnoxious with the wait-staff and then stiffing them on the bill. the crawl itself was crap - we found it at the first pub and joined in for Power Hour which is more or less: you have an hour to drink as many shots and pints of beer as you can before we move on to the next pub. it was an average pub, and i'm not a fan of rushing my drinking and the locations went steadily downhill from there. we got chatting with a couple of Canadian lads who were good value, but got stuck sitting next to a table of obnoxious Eurotrashy Germans who kept things loud and irritating. by the time we got to the next pub Sian (the skinny Aussie girl we'd met along with Chris and Theo) had drunk enough to be sick, so once she was done emptying her stomach on the pavement we poured her into a taxi with an honest driver (we found out later, seeing as she got to the hostel without being robbed or worse). come the fourth place Whatshername From Sydney was getting friendly with one of the Canadian lads and i was sick of it. we were out of pub territory now - into the underground club zone, and as fun as it was to get down and partying with the Eurotrash (what can i say? the German girls were pretty hot) my heart wasn't in it, so i bade my farewell and made a move.
i was pretty drunk, but no so far gone i couldn't find the tram stop... which is when i realised i didn't have a fucking ticket for the thing. they don't actually sell tickets ON the tram. you have to get one from a newsagent, or be lucky enough to be at a stop with a machine and this one didn't. nor did the next. or the next. next thing i know i'm walking back to the hostel at OMG at night, getting lost, finding myself, getting REALLY lost, giving in and hitting up a parked taxi only to find out that i was just 300m away by now and i might as well walk. i had a fun thing happen though - as i'm walking towards the river i see two people with backpacks being chased up the street by a cameraman and a sound guy who asked if i happened to know where the "Old New Synagogue" was. actually, i'd seen it before and gave them a hand on my map. next thing i know, a release form's been shoved under my nose and from the looks of things i may well just be featuring pissed as a newt on the next season of The Amazing Race. not bad for a night's work...
i woke up the yesterday with the innevitable hangover, but i had plans and i wasn't missing them. i heard about the Prague Sex Machines Museum years ago and i've always wanted to check it out, and the Museum of Communism almost as far back. with only 3 days in this place i wasn't going to miss out so i dragged myself together, cleaned myself up and got the tram back into town. the Museum of Communism is actually pretty amusing - it's located over Prague's biggest McDonalds and next to a Casino, which is fucking hillarious juxaposition if you ask me. it's not ALL communism, although it does discuss a bit of Stalin's rise in Russia. mostly it's about Communism in Czechoslovakia, in the days after WWII and before the Velvet Revolution when they cast off the old Marxist systems and the Velvet Divorce (because neither event was violent in any way - everything was completely peaceful) where the Czech Republic and Slovakia effectively said "Meh" and went their separate ways. the Museum is almost a photo essay with a couple of props, but worth seeing regardless, if only to check out some of the gear in the gift shop. there's not much, but the old-style propaganda posters with ammended captions are a laugh, like "You couldn't get laundry powder, but you sure could get your brainwashed..."
the funny thing is that the Czechs effectively liberated themselves, days before the Red Army showed up. in the final days of the war a Civilian Uprising kicked in, driving the Nazis out of Prague to be quietly mopped up by the Russians when they showed up later. the firefight between the remainders of the SS and the Czech guerillas was apparantly pretty epic, not to mention impressive considering they were untrained civilians for the most part. still, the Red Army rolled in the tanks so all the monuments point to them and since they were there they set up shop in the ashes, adding Czechoslovakia to the infamous Soviet-Bloc
me, i celebrated the capitalist society i've grown up in by cramming a massive amount of McDonalds down my throat before i went in. i hate having to resort to junk food like that, but i needed a sure-fire pickmeup and hangover cure and i knew it would deliver - especially once i'd acquired and demolished some variety of caffeine-drink. hangover fading, i wandered through the museum, then headed off and found the Sex Machines Museum which... well, it was better than the Sex Museum in Amsterdam, but i was still a little unimpressed. yeah, it had stuff... it's just not THAT well stocked with gear from history or kinky implements that actually shocked me. it's not that i'm so kinky that i'm unshockable or anything... it's just that nothing really surprised me, although some of the copies of patent applications on the walls made me burst into laughter.
museums out of the way, caffeine coursing through my veins, i was left in the middle of town with no specific plans and the rest of an afternoon to kill, which in my world means that it's time to abuse my footwear some more so i put my map away, picked a direction i'd not been in and walked. the rest of the afternoon was spent getting lost, then finding myself again, then getting lost some more. i stopped in a little arcade with an Alternative Music and Lifestyle store and Band venue, a tattoo artist and a funky little cafe where i read my book for a bit while satisfying my caffeine addiction, and i walked. i found the river and i walked. eventually i decided that i'd seen enough for one day and made my way back to the hostel to put on a load of washing and hit the pool and sauna.
yeah, Plus Prague has a sauna, and an underground swimming pool. how cool is that??? this meant that while every stick of clothing i own was spinning in the washing machine, i'd dived in the pool in my boardies, the cranked the heat, poured a bucket of water on and steamed the sauna way up while i sat there enjoying the sensation of my muscles relaxing while my body sweated out the toxins from my sinful life. i've done it every day i've been here - come back in the afternoon, dived in the pool, worked up a good sweat, then dived back in the pool. meanwhile, since the washing finished i've been able to enjoy the greatest luxury i've experienced in weeks:
All Of The Clothes i'm Wearing Right Now Were Clean When i Put Them On. this hasn't happened since... Valdelavilla. i think i finally sweated in my last clean tshirt when i was in Bruges or Amsterdam and since then i've just been living in my own filth. it was so happy to be have clean things to wear that afterwards i did a little dance and went for a celebratory beer at the pub down the road which is entirely decorated with car parts. i was supposed to be meeting with people in the lobby and we were all going to go together but they proved unreliable so i went solo and chilled out listened to the band while sitting in the beer garden with good Czech beer.
so why do i love this town so much? well, for starters: i'm rapidly coming to the opinion that there's no such thing as "bad Czech beer". it's not the same sort of artform the Belgians have made of it, but every beer i've drunk has been of good quality and GREAT value. a beer in the average pub? around a Euro, which will buy three cheapies in the corner store or two Budweiser Budvars (the original, not the American crap). the people are friendly, especially outside the city centre, and everywhere in the main part of town is just fucking gorgeous. it's the sort of looks that grab you reliably every time you look, and there's always something else to see. look across and you'll see art neuveau, art deco, gothic, baroque. look up and you'll realise that no matter how many statues there are at street level, there'll always be more on the rooftops. and over doors. and at the corners of buildings. the streets are that happy medium of "tidy" which means "not sterile and thereby boring" but also "not the squalid hellhole of Cairo" either. wander around in the afternoon sun, it's pretty. see it in the evening dusk and it's fucking gorgeous. look out over it all at night and you start wondering why you didn't bring your girlfriend... until you remember you don't have one because you're an hairy, unreliable pratt with a wanderlust. people say Paris is romantic, and i'll not disagree, but if you think that's "IT", you're fucking missing out when it comes to Prague.
it could be just me. i've spoken to people who haven't been impressed with the place, but i'm grooving this town. i could easily spend another couple of days running around this place, but i didn't have them to play with. i only had today and today was set aside to go to Kutna Hora - famous for one thing and one thing only: a small church decorated with human bones. you know me by now: macabre? gruesome? just TRY keeping me away, but i'll have to tell that story later, once i've had some sleep...
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