Prague

We drove to Prague from Nuremberg, using directions from our Nuremberg hotel to our "Prague Hotel". Everything about Prague makes it nearly impossible to navigate through it. Imagine Boston's crappy layout, but remove most street signs, and those that you leave are as far as we were considered a random collection of letters and accent marks, which just happened to be repeated identically in our map. To make it worse, no street is longer than about 3 blocks worth, where it changes name to something else equally foreign to us. So if you're trying to follow a map driving on one road, you look up to see what road you just crossed, and when you look back at the map you're on a new road. The names change so quickly that at first I was convinced they were just the names of the buildings, not the street signs.

But despite everyone being at their nerve's end my first impressions were that the city was really quite gorgeous and I couldn't wait to be able to walk around the city once we found our hotel. We got to the address for our hotel, which also happened to be very near the city center of Prague, and certainly the most crowded area, only to discover that it was some sort of monument. This lead us to reconsider the accuracy of our information. After calling expedia, we finally discovered that our address was completely wrong, were able to get some internet access thanks to this really sweet girl working at Europcar, and once we got the real address she helped us locate it on our map. I think we partially owe our lives to that girl. Our wrong address took us to the dead center of the city, hence the worst driving conditions I've ever seen, but the real address took us towards the outer edges (district 10 of 14, instead of 1 of 14). At that point we could smell victory on our drive to the hotel and so the ride was much more fun than the stress induced first section. We checked into our hotel and decided to brave the public transit back to the city to wander a little before the night was over and to get an idea of what we want to do with our one full day in the city. On our way to a tram line we stopped inside of another hotel to buy tickets and saw an old German couple trying to ask the receptionist for help but they spoke no English and the receptionist spoke no German. Ian ordered me to go play translator so I tried to jump in and see if I could help. Essentially they wanted to exchange tickets they had bought so I was able to find out for them that the man that does that wouldn't be available until the following day and they needed to come back then. I felt mostly inadequate, but I think the couple was really frustrated before I jumped in and they at least knew something afterwards so it wasn't a complete bust.

We ended up at a place where the guy had no clue what language we spoke (his first guesses were Italian and Spanish) that served 'set' meals with the description of being Czech. I don't know if they were actually Czech, but it at least was neither German nor American and it was good so who cares. They serve almost exclusively Pilsener beer in Prague, and I'm not a huge fan of Pilsener, but I've been getting myself used to it, and as far as Pilsener goes it was pretty good.

After dinner it was a little on the late side, and we were getting towards the last 40 minute or so of public transport so we walked to a busy pick up point for the trams and started our... debate... about which way to go. I was proposing the 24 line, North... Ian was a big fan of the general Northern direction, and I think Dave was a little partial towards the 9, South. We had fewer maps than suggestions, and were making no progress so I was able to convince everyone to jump onto 24 North as it passed by. As I had guessed, the 24 line goes practically right next to our Hotel and would have been perfect... if we had picked it up going in the opposite direction. Dave saved us a few stops in and we hopped off and started to figure out where we need to go to not be lost in the middle of the Prague for the evening. Nice of a city as it was... not a place I wanted to be lost at past 1 am. We went to a metro during our random scramblings where we tried to ask a worker there to help us with directions and her first sentence to us was "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"! As it turns out, my German helped us more in the Czech Republic than it ever did in Germany.

We spent so much time being completely lost in our first day in Prague that I think we are NOW some of the most directionally apt tourists to ever visit Prague. Have to be. This was only the first day though and I'm really excited to go back to the city in the morning to have a full day of adventure. Yay!

7/30/2007
Shane