Act 1 (Prague)

Right then. Shall I get on to writing an actual account of my holiday with cheeky, now that more than a month has passed? Why not, it should be fun to see if I can actually remember anything. I won’t bother to put photos in here, since it seems like a lot of effort when most of you have already seen them on flickr, so I hope you don’t find all this text too dense. Or find me too dense. Or whatever.

When we got to the airport, I found out I’d left my camera at home. I felt particularly clever. Cheeky savoured the moment, because apparently she is usually the one who forgets things or makes silly mistakes on holidays. As may be observed as this story continues, she certainly managed to pass that mantle to me quite effectively (although reclaimed it rather spectacularly on her final day in Britain). I ummed and ahhed about buying a new camera from duty free, and was eventually convinced to do so by our flight being an hour delayed. I perhaps learned that one should not choose cameras based on shiny blueness.

The flight was uneventful except that I made us sit next to a smelly guy. Oops. Due to the delayed flight, though, it was nearly 11pm when we landed in Prague. I had made us a shiny two-sides-of-A4 itinerary with all the info I had for the various places we were going, which included the hostel’s directions for finding them. Doing our best to follow those, we discovered we needed coins for the bus ticket machines. Obviously we didn’t have any Czech koruna coins yet, so we returned into the airport terminal to see if anywhere was open that would sell us something. McDonalds was, unfortunately, the only place still serving – on the other hand, we were already at that stage of cold and tired and nervous about not knowing what we were doing that the food was actually very comforting and almost…enjoyable. We bought our bus tickets, waited for the next bus at 11pm and chatted. Then we caught the bus and metro, exactly as described in the directions, but hit a small snag with the third mode of transport, a tram, when there were engineering works and it wasn’t going the same route as usual. We didn’t have a map including tramlines, we couldn’t work out how to even say most of the placenames, so all we could do was get on a tram with the right number and hope like hell that a) it would go to our stop and b) we’d recognise its name when it came round. But it was a rather deserted, very dreary grey and red plastic tram whose only other inhabitants were either unsocial or a little drunk, and by this time it was midnight and I for one was beginning to get quite worried about how we’d sort ourselves out if we ended up in anywhere except the place we needed to be. Luckily, the tram rejoined its original route and we recognised our stop name, found the right street and then the hostel, to a general sigh of relief.

There was a very helpful guy with excellent English on the hostel reception desk, who insisted on telling us where everything was and giving us a free map on which he very helpfully marked all the most useful tram routes, and then we took our key and headed up our room. Or rather, our 8-bed mixed-gender dorm. Which we couldn’t see at this point, since the lights were already out, people were asleep and we just had to dive into bed quickly, but I will describe here anyway. I think our hostel (Sir Toby’s, for anyone who wants a recommendation) may be one of the best I’ve ever stayed in – very helpful, very friendly, and with tons of atmosphere because of being in an old town house with high ceilings, large windows and wood panelling. Also extremely cheap, at about £12 per night for a bed in one of the dorm rooms. There was a well-equipped kitchen if you wanted it, but when we dragged ourselves out of bed the next morning we decided to try their breakfast for an added £4 ish each, because we just couldn’t be bothered. Turned out that their breakfast was very cool and included things such as cooking your own pancakes or scrambled eggs.

Neither of us really knew what one was supposed to do in Prague (or anywhere else, for that matter), so we consulted a guidebook and took a tram towards the castle area. We got off near the river and walked up the hill, gaining our first real views of the city as we went. It was a dull, cold, grey day, but still rewarded us with red roofs and the river. May I just say how much I like having a river in the centre of a city? It is both an invaluable aid to navigation and an excellently comforting landmark, because whenever you come across it you immediately have an easy way back to any other point on it you’ve been before. Plus the shape of a city with a river sticks in my head so much more easily than one without. Venice was obviously excellent along these lines also, as the position of yourself relative to the Grand Canal tells you everything you need to know, but in Rome I actually forced us to take a small side-excursion to the Tiber for my own peace of mind – which then turned into a long side excursion as we ended up off the map and went slightly wrong. Oops. But that wasn’t the river’s fault, it was mine…

The main, ceremonial sort of parts of Prague Castle didn’t really appeal to either of us – too modern for me, and too formal and unnatural for cheeky. We watched the changing of the guards, though, and then proceeded through to the more mish-mash older area of the castle. After observing the length of the queue for St Vitus’ cathedral, we decided not to join it just yet but watch how it progressed while we went to find an information office with a handy map (since we had no idea which bits we were supposed to be seeing). Map in hand, we could see that all the tour groups which had been in the queue were already inside the castle, so we joined the queue and fairly soon were stepping out of the cold gloomy day into the cold gloomy cathedral. Which was impressive enough in an old cathedral way, I guess, but I most enjoyed the quirky bits that made it different – such as fantastically colourful modern stained glass windows, or the strange and over-ornamented tomb of Saint John of Nepomuk. Here also started our ongoing holiday thing of spotting tv references in all the most obvious places possible, when we simultaneously stopped and giggled in front of a confessional. However, we were already getting cold and tired, so we popped into one of the restaurants within the castle grounds – expecting over-priced rubbish in uninspired surroundings. However, what we got was superbly warming goulash and bread dumplings, which were excellent in recharging our batteries. We also fulfilled the usual Hobbling/restaurant requirement of either chasing all other customers away or at least getting many strange looks from them… onwards, to the much older (and thus better) Basilica of Saint George, featuring Romanesque architecture, mosaics and headless statues. Then across the courtyard and into the old parts of the castle, of which the best bit was probably Vladislav Hall, built around 1500 and fantastically late-mediaeval in style; cheeky and I decided that it could have been built at Buckkeep subsequent to Tawny Man, as decadent Jamaillian influences met Buck practicality and Mountain simplicity. We considered having a look at the upper deer moat purely because in Czech it is the Horní Jelení příkop – and I accidentally read Prilkop for prikop, plus the fact that ‘horny’ is clearly amusing because we’re really 12 years old. But instead we wandered downhill and out of the castle via Goldsmiths Alley, with its many tiny houses and its exhibitions of evil chicken armour, and then had a short detour to a dungeon and torture equipment exhibition in one of the old castle towers. Because torture and life imprisonment are Fun – or so the hordes of children in there certainly seemed to think. We finished off the castle by standing around a bit on a kind of courtyard area, taking photos of the city below, admiring the pure white pigeon that kept wandering by and drinking a cup of hot red wine (well, I drank it. Cheeky tried a sip and said no to more). It seems weird retrospectively that it was cold enough in Prague for me to need hot red wine in a polystyrene cup to boost my flagging energy, but indeed I did. We then trekked back downhill, across the river and into town, discussing the thematic resonances within Les Miserables’ music as we went. This resulted in the first annoying earworm of the holiday, Cosette’s In My Life. Grr, stupid song.

At this point we thought we’d better go and buy our train tickets for getting to Venice the next day, so we walked right through the centre of town (via Old Town Square, if I remember correctly) to the main train station. Where we found the most unhelpful ticket desk woman ever, who listened to what we wanted, consulted her computer and then just said ‘No.’ When pushed for a little more information, she elaborated to ‘No. No train’ and pointed us in the general direction of ‘away.’ Hmm. Luckily, when researching this train journey, I’d emailed a travel agent based in the station (thanks to tripadvisor forums where I saw them mentioned) and so we looked around until we found ‘Wasteels.’ Which had an extremely helpful man on the desk who both spoke excellent English and also knew that what was going on was that there were engineering works, and thus no direct train. However, he sold us our tickets (at which point I got to rub it in a little that I am younger than cheeky, since under-26s get cheaper tickets) and printed us out a little schedule showing where we would first be getting the local train to, the destination that we then needed to catch a bus for, and the times for getting everywhere (Venice arrival time was exactly the same – we would work out how this could be a day and a half later, when desperately trying to sleep whilst being shunted around Salzburg station for an hour). Happy with actually being able to get to Venice, we left the station and wandered back through town, crossing the Charles Bridge as a few raindrops fell, and eventually realising we were cold and exhausted and not getting anything out of it. We caught the tram back to the hostel and found a local food shop to sell us such necessities as pasta, tomato sauce and tea. Although we upset the checkout girl a bit by not weighing and labelling our tomatoes, and then failing to understand her Czech instructions to please do so. Oops. Cheeky was happy though because we had found Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which you don’t find in Britain and which she was quite happy to consume in preference to all other food. We may have also stocked up on such necessities as large bars of Milka. Mmm.

Back to the hostel, and time for dinner. By this time one earworm had been replaced by another and for goodness knows what reason we were now both being driven up the wall by our brains’ incessant repetition of Umbrella. Aaaaargh. Luckily, my mobile had a few songs on it which it can play through a tinny little speaker, so while we had the kitchen to ourselves I played us It Never Rains In Southern California. This is an excellent earworm because it’s not annoying but it’s really catchy, and it pretty much stayed with us for the next week and a half – being judiciously used to squash Umbrella or In My Life whenever they tried to make a reappearance. Anyway, we made dinner and I made sparky fire in the microwave. Oops. I had failed to notice that the waxy cardboard tetra-pak which our passata came in was foil-lined. Well, it made for a little excitement…unlike the pasta, which we rather overcooked and had to force our way through. Ah well. We had originally thought that once we had had dinner, warmed up and regained some energy, we’d go back into the city in the evening and see the views of the castle and Charles Bridge all illuminated at night that are so famous. But…we didn’t. Bed seemed like a much more appealing idea.

On the Friday morning, we discovered that the hostel’s teabags made much better tea than the ones we’d bought… so we swapped some of ours for some of theirs. We packed our stuff, handed our key in and bought a single-use tram ticket to the station, where we left our bags in lockers manned by an overly-friendly security guard who really seemed to want to talk… Having escaped him, we walked through town again and this time did our best to see the sights, such as the astronomical clock striking the hour and all the environs of Old Town Square generally. Cheeky spent time making friends with the carriage horses waiting at a stand – for which she was rewarded with slobber all down her jeans. We peeped in the Church of St Nicholas, which we really didn’t like thanks to its absurd over-ornamentation. We then did our best to find the Church of Our Lady before Tyn (the main church that dominates the square, whose twin steeples are one of the iconic images of Prague) and despite going round in circles several times we did eventually find our way through a music shop to the front doors. I liked this church more, although they seemed keen to enforce the no-photo rule (which Prague Castle has too but I sort of dodged it) so there are no photos from me. Cheeky was a jammy sod and found the tomb of one somebody Adama, which gained her a ridiculous number of points on our unintentional references scoreboard. We chose a restaurant completely at random for lunch but were rewarded with some rather excellent Czech food – I had a pig knuckle which came with something called ‘grandmother cabbage crackles.’ They were very nice, anyway. The next few hours were spent wandering some more and also performing much tacky souvenir shopping – good fun. We spent our final few hours in Prague walking up Petrin Hill, which is a wooded hill opposite the castle’s hill and appealed to both of us thanks to its woodsy un-city-ness. In the cold rain it was particularly nice and fresh and clean. We sort of kept climbing for too long, though, and eventually had to descend faster than our knees would have liked, figure out which shop we could buy another tram ticket from, work out which tram we needed and where it stopped and all as fast as possible…but it was all fine and we got back to the station in enough time to collect our bags, find the way to the platforms (the engineering works extend to the station), find our train and indulge in reassuring a few lost Americans that this was indeed the correct train to catch.

This theme continued, as despite convincing them to get on the same train, they did keep popping along to check that we were still in our compartment – oh yes, a good old continental train with proper compartments of 3 seats facing 3 seats, enclosed with a door and very reminiscent of Harry Potter – you know, if the Hogwarts Express had been built under communism. At around sunset, our train stopped and we headed out into a small town and followed print-outs stuck to lampposts saying “Bus” and the like. Unfortunately, it then turned out there were three buses waiting for those of us who’d got off one train. Nobody in charge who spoke English (or indeed spoke at all that I noticed – it may just have been that nobody was in charge) so we were all milling a bit pointlessly for a while. Cheeky and I noticed that one of the buses had a piece of paper stuck in the window which said Horni Dvoriste, which is also what our kindly-printed-by-Wasteels schedule said. So we caught that one – and convinced the still-confused Americans to do the same – and sat on it trustingly as it drove us ever further into the deepening night in the Czech countryside. As it turned out, we were rather lucky in all of this because the other two buses did not go to the same place (which we had assumed) and as ours got us to the correct train… I don’t know where the others went. Anyway, train! Hurrah. With sleeper compartments! Hurrah – except that they were sleeper compartments made for hobbits. Skinny hobbits. The seats are not comfortable to sit on as seats and are certainly not comfortable to lie on as beds. I suppose I should be grateful that we could lie down but… I’m almost not, given how impossibly hard and narrow they were. Anyway, I’m skipping ahead of myself as we’d only just had dinner (warm and soggy cheese & tomato sandwiches – good thing we made them though as no food available on the train) when we boarded the train, which we were now rounding off with some cinnamon toast crunch. Our guard/ticket collector came round, sleazed at us a little in bad (Italian) English, then came back and sleazed at us a lot more while implying he could get us a compartment to ourselves if we bribed him. We refused that, trying not to laugh in his face, and then he showed us how the compartment door worked. Or rather, he very effectively showed us how it locked. He was less successful at getting it to unlock. This left him trapped in the compartment with us, repeatedly whacking the door to and fro and expecting a different result each time. It continued for probably a whole 5 minutes, by the end of which he was literally backing away from the door until he met the window, then charging the door and kicking it with all the force he could. Constantly muttering under his breath about ‘firma Italia’ – I think, cheeky and I were struggling far too hard not to dissolve into a hysterical giggle fit that I really wasn’t paying attention. Oh, so funny. Eventually, with the help of someone from a different compartment, he got the lock to unjam and escaped. Looking a little shamefaced, and dropping the sleaze, he suggested we move into the next compartment and then vanished totally, presumably so he could pretend that that hadn’t just happened. Which cheeky and I were quite fine with. Deciding that we weren’t going to sleep well on this train and might as well be tired before we tried, we discussed lots and lots of tv and eventually started playing the game that later made it onto the board at biped’s insistence – if 4 fictional characters were locked in this teensy tiny compartment, predict the outcome. It is a lot of fun, especially when you chuck superpowered people or mindreaders into the mix. Hee. That game alternated with shag/marry/push off a cliff, which turned into frak/marry/die by the end of the night. I would like to report that both of us married Mercer Hayes, but we really had no other options. And he is rather charming. Ahem. After midnight, as we arrived in Salzburg, we decided to try going to sleep. Yes… that was a bad idea. Spending an hour being shunted around a station, alternating between having no air conditioning or having a constant thrum from a diesel loco coming through your bed… not conducive to sleep. I think we probably drifted off at about 2am… and woke about 6 hours later, bleary-eyed as we neared Venice.