Things I've Forgotten along the way

** Ely Cathedral, back in the UK was shut down the week after we were there so that they could film the Other Boleyn sister, starring Eric Bana and Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman and due out in February. The Golden Age with Cate Blanchett and due out in Nov. has also filmed there recently.

** On the train to Prague: Ticket checkers, dressed more or less like stewardesses, stop by every once in a while to check our ticket. Then, a rather austere looking man in a police uniform with two guns comes in; D offers the man his ticket. After the man left I said to D, weren't the guns a pretty good give away that he wanted our passports and not our tickets?

** There are TV towers (like the landmark one in East Berlin) all over former communist Europe. You can watch them pop up as the train rolls through the countryside. They were built to jam the transmission of radio free Europe. Radio free Europe was originally broadcast from Berlin. The biggest TV tower in Prague was completed not long before the Czech revolution and ironically is now the home of Radio Free Europe (who had to leave Berlin becasue it was too expensive; the Czech gov't rents them space for 1 Euro/year).

** Because of security concerns luggage lockers are a thing of the past; now, you leave your bags at a left luggage counter, kind of like you would ckeck your cat or dog into a kennel for the day.

** Prague is not yet part of the EU, so they still use their own currency, rather than Euros. On the morning we were set to leave we still had about 200 Czech Crowns (about 10 dollars), so I stay with the bags and send D off to buy snacks for the train with our remaining Czech money. After all, we were to be on the train all day; we'd have to eat something. He wanders around the entire train station, surveying every little shop, trying to figure out where to spend his money. He comes back and has spent all of it but 17 crowns (less than 1 dollar) and wait did he have to show for it---?????????? A bottle of some kind of Czeck liquor. "what's this?" I ask. "I dunno," he says, but they sell it in every store, so I figured we had to have some." The worse part: he didn't even leave me enough money so I could pay to pee and I wait until the train got there. We ended up buying train snacks when we changed trains in Dresden and then could use Euros.

** We were in an Internet cafe in Berlin and D was calling ahead to make our reservations in Ramstein and some man overheard him ask for a space available room. Turns out the man and his family had recently space a'd into Germany from California and was touring Berlin and Prague like we were. So, we swapped "how we got from point A to point B" stories with him.

** D and I most certainly do not look Czech. We were never ever mistaken for locals in Prague like we were in Berlin. In Prague, however, any one over about 30 has a very beat down look to them. I saw lots of mammas on the trains with their 3-4-5 year olds, and you would of thought they were the grandmammas. Now, it's possible that becasue we never got into the work-a-day sections of Berlin, so we simply didn't see everyday folk outside of the tourist district. I've been menaing to look up what an average yearly wage is in Prague, just to see.

Praha

Arrived in Prague (or Praha as the locals call it) Tuesday about dinner time. At first glance, it doesn't seem like much, as drab and utilitarian as Berlin (due to its communist past) but without the energy of a big city. Trains from Berlin don't arrive at the main train station-- they arrive at the small dingy suburban station and while suburban Prague on the outskrts of the old city is safe enough, it's a work-a-day neighborhood with very little aestheitic appeal. Then factor in that the the Czech language is slavic in origin (think Russian) rather than romantic (French/Spanish) or Germanic (German/English) and there are no such things as slavic cognates in English and well, it's a bit overwhelming. The only way we were able to find our hotel was locate where we were on amap and count the intersections as they went past, as there was no way to understand the recorded voice announcing each stop.

Hotel prices drop by half as soon as you move out of the historic central city, so we stayed in a place about a 10 minute tram ride into the major tourist district-- close enough to come home mid day for a rest if we wanted. The hotel has small rooms and although it's western the way we would think about it, the service industry is far less service oriented than we're used to.

Yesterday we spent the morning at Prague's Castle and then simply spent the afternoon and envening walking the historic district. Prague was largely spared durinmg the war, so there was very little rebuilding to do; the result is street after street after street of fabulous architecture and facades. There are four main squares in hte old city each connected by charming old streets, then the castle district overlooks them all.

Today we spent the morning in the Jewish sector and then spent the afternoon in hte shopping district. Ate dinner tonight in Cafe Slavia, home of Prague's 19th century intellectual elite, with a table by the river with a stunning castle view, and we ate lunch yesterday in a monastery.

I won't say there's a lot to do here as opposed to other european cities but there certainly is a lot to see.

We leave for a long day on the train back to western Germany tomorrow (Friday)