Prague is the jewel of Eastern Europe. In fact, it is the only city in Eastern Europe that is worth visiting. It is the type of magical city that I vaguely envisioned city when I first visited Europe in 2010. It is hard to pinpoint the exact source of Prague's charm. It has more statues and churches than one could hope to visit in an entire week. It is full of parks. It has a giant variety of squares, pedestrian-only areas, historic monuments, and architectural styles. And it is full of surprises. While strolling down the street, one often finds oneself unexpectedly walking next to a museum or university building that looks fancier than any other building in Europe east of Budapest. Prague is full of energy and movement; its atmosphere is the direct antithesis of Budapest's. It is such a pleasant city that one walks its streets involuntarily smiling, uncertain that anything else in the world exists outside of Prague's city limits.
It feels like it has been ages since I begun my day. I left Brno at 10:37 AM, arriving, fortuitously, at the train station some ten minutes before the train was set to leave (The line-ups there are so small that it only takes a minute or two to buy a ticket. Moreover, travel through the Czech Republic is so cheap that one can traverse half of the country for ten Euros.). The scenery just outside of Brno was impressive - one does not have to go to Ireland to see endless, rolling hills of green. I fell asleep soon after leaving Brno, though, as I had woken up feeling incredibly drowsy. One of my mistakes in planning this trip was not to bring a back-up supply of nasal spray (which I take for my allergies). I had decided against taking any extra because it usually seems to run out quickly when I travel; if the amount that I had brought had been enough for the whole trip, I would have won out in the end, as I would not have needlessly lost (through leakage of some sort, I suspect) a bunch of nasal spray from a second bottle. To make a long story short, I got a one-off prescription for a similar product when I saw the doctor the other day and have started using it, with positive results. Antihistamines, it turns out, do not make me at all somnolent; it is the lack of them, rather, that does.
I was unhappy when the train pulled into Prague, as I had been sleeping well and would have liked to continue sleeping for hours. It was not long, however, until I was swept up in the joy of being in Prague. It is so jam-packed with cultural relics to make even Vienna look tame, though it might only seem that way because Prague's old city is more concentrated than Vienna's. I did not see anything close to the entire city center today: having both discovered that there was a giant amount to see in the city and that excessively-zealous sightseeing is exhausting, I decided to focus on seeing the part of the city that is just on and outside of the border of the historic center, which I will visit tomorrow. I saw enough Russian tourists today to decide against bothering to see Karlovy Vary, which is a spa town full of Russians, as my main motivation for seeing Karlovy Vary would have been to look at Russian tourists, and it turns out that I can do that here. My plan is to see the rest of Prague tomorrow, Karlstein and a famous monastery on Thursday, Cesky Krumlov on Friday, Pilzen on Saturday, and Kutna Hora on Sunday; I am, essentially, visiting sites in and around Prague from most to least interesting. There is a Communism museum in Prague that sounds interesting, and which I could almost surely find time to visit, but I may not bother, as entrance (even with the student discount) costs 150 crowns, or about 7 Euros. I would definitely visit the museum for 3 or 4 Euros, but 7 strikes me as excessive. If I end up with time to kill after one of my excursions over the next several days, I may end up just watching a movie at the hostel, an activity which is both relaxing and free.
It turns out that I had more to say than I expected. My initial impression was that one often has more to write about negative experiences, as I did in Hungary and Brno, as it can be hard to find language for exceedingly-positive experiences. While I regret, as a result of my impatience to see everything at once, that I will not have time to see much more of Western Europe or any of Southern Europe on this trip, I am having an amazing time and should continue to do so for the next several days, even when I visit slightly less-interesting places on the weekend (perhaps the train rides there and back will be nice; perhaps the cities scheduled for those days will surprise me). One cannot always tell, based on descriptions of cities in tourist guides, which destinations will turn out to be worthwhile and which will be disappointing. While I now consider Eastern Europe a disaster zone and feel that my time spent there (now that I am back in a cultural hotbed and can look back on the wilds of Eastern Europe) was a bit of waste, one sometimes discovers that destinations that sound tantalizing in the tour guide, such as Luxembourg, are unappealing, while less conspicuous cities, such as Kosice, can be surprisingly-enjoyable (though Eastern Europe still sucks overall). It turns out that my scheduling too much time in Prague may not have been so great a mistake, though I could have stood to spend the weekend somewhere more interesting. The lesson of the day is not to schedule too little time in extraordinary areas, such as Salzburg, and not to schedule too much time in lousy areas, such as all of Eastern Europe. I hope to make good use of this lesson in future years.
My only observation about Czech food so far is that the Czechs (despite being terrible at having a functional transport infrastructure) are great at making stewed meats, by which I mean not meat in stew, but meat that has been marinated in something at least somewhat liquid, as it grows so tender that one can easily cut it, fiber by fiber, with one's fork. The only dishes that I have had so far, besides today's meal of stewed pork, bread dumplings (good, but not like what one can purchase in Austria), and sauerkraut (which is, obviously, borrowed from Germany), were a fairly standard soup (in Brno) and some other sort of main dish in Brno. Prague is a good place not to be sick. While I am still getting over my illness, I now feel confident enough to eat most foods, and I plan to take advantage of my improving health over the coming days. I came across a fantastical bakery full of pastries of every size and shape on the way from the train station to the hostel in which I am staying, and I am staying in a hostel that both offers complimentary breakfast and is located close to a couple of grocery stores, which will enable me to furnish at least partial lunches (and, probably, a few dinners; one cannot eat out every night, and I will have tried the staples of Czech food within a few days) for a good price. Prague is a good culinary break from Brno, which had something like negative five restaurants in total. In Prague, one is never out of sight of at least a few different restaurants, with such a wide variety of choices that I have decided to exclusively visit restaurants that the owners of this hostel recommend to me. The meal that I had today was the best that I had since I was in Salzburg and cost me only 9 or 10 Euros, including the tip; my hopes for the next few days are high.
My final notes are scattered. Dogs here often have muzzles, which may be due to some law about having dogs in public places, rather than a result of their being poorly-trained and, therefore, aggressive. In the tour through the larger caves at Skalny Mlyn, people acted the same as they had in Hungary: they ignored what the tour guide said and talked amongst themselves, except on a tour that consisted of only seven people. This is interesting to me because people in the ice caves in Austria shut up and listened to what the tour guide said, although the group there was no smaller than the one in the bigger caves of Skalny Mlyn. I found it repulsive to hear people in the group talking at the same time as the tour guide, which is almost surely a direct result of my having been educated in affluent parts of North America; it is interesting that disapprobation of speaking over people is so thoroughly inculcated in us that we have an almost visceral reaction to people's doing so in setting resembling those of the classroom (i.e., in which there is one speaker and many people listen - speeches, tours, &c.). My only other point is that the streets of Brno were so empty when I entered the city that I thought that the city was a ghost town. I probably already mentioned this, as I recall having said something about the national holiday. Why is it that people in the Czech Republic - or, at least, in Brno - stay off of the streets on national holidays? Are they so depressed that they do not even want to get out of bed? Do they know that they live in a dump and that their local government lacks the muster to organize a parade or festival? Or are they smart enough to leave the country entirely for fairer lands whenever they get the chance? Prague is nothing like Brno. Its streets are full of locals and tourists, who are easily distinguished from one another because most of the locals look stressed out for some reason. Maybe life in the capital is more stressful than life in the provinces.
I only have three more weeks of travel left before my flight back home! Time flies fast when one travels, which is nice except for the fact that my three weeks in Vancouver will go by in a flash. My coming year at the University of Arkansas might not be as miserable as my first year there, but it is certainly not something worth looking forward to. Given that being there enables me to travel for two months of the year, I probably should not be complaining. I was suspicious of Prague when I first got here, as I thought that its modern train station and its street signs (of which Brno had almost none) were a mere imitation of German city design, but I quickly discovered that, as Budapest is not really a part of Hungary, Prague has next to nothing to do with the rest of the Czech Republic, which is a country that, like Russia, has invested all of its money in its capital city. There are a few reminders in Prague that one is in the Czech Republic: there are homeless alcoholics everywhere, many buildings here are dilapidated, and I saw someone urinating on the street; but one is otherwise in a totally different world. It will be curious to see if the transport system here is also better than in the rest of the country. The main goal of drivers here, like in the rest of the Czech Republic, is, as far as I can tell, to run over pedestrians, but they are not very good at it, and pedestrian traffic is ceaseless. This is a city of fathomless cultural treasures in an impoverished, hopeless country. My next few days promise to be interesting!
It feels like it has been ages since I begun my day. I left Brno at 10:37 AM, arriving, fortuitously, at the train station some ten minutes before the train was set to leave (The line-ups there are so small that it only takes a minute or two to buy a ticket. Moreover, travel through the Czech Republic is so cheap that one can traverse half of the country for ten Euros.). The scenery just outside of Brno was impressive - one does not have to go to Ireland to see endless, rolling hills of green. I fell asleep soon after leaving Brno, though, as I had woken up feeling incredibly drowsy. One of my mistakes in planning this trip was not to bring a back-up supply of nasal spray (which I take for my allergies). I had decided against taking any extra because it usually seems to run out quickly when I travel; if the amount that I had brought had been enough for the whole trip, I would have won out in the end, as I would not have needlessly lost (through leakage of some sort, I suspect) a bunch of nasal spray from a second bottle. To make a long story short, I got a one-off prescription for a similar product when I saw the doctor the other day and have started using it, with positive results. Antihistamines, it turns out, do not make me at all somnolent; it is the lack of them, rather, that does.
I was unhappy when the train pulled into Prague, as I had been sleeping well and would have liked to continue sleeping for hours. It was not long, however, until I was swept up in the joy of being in Prague. It is so jam-packed with cultural relics to make even Vienna look tame, though it might only seem that way because Prague's old city is more concentrated than Vienna's. I did not see anything close to the entire city center today: having both discovered that there was a giant amount to see in the city and that excessively-zealous sightseeing is exhausting, I decided to focus on seeing the part of the city that is just on and outside of the border of the historic center, which I will visit tomorrow. I saw enough Russian tourists today to decide against bothering to see Karlovy Vary, which is a spa town full of Russians, as my main motivation for seeing Karlovy Vary would have been to look at Russian tourists, and it turns out that I can do that here. My plan is to see the rest of Prague tomorrow, Karlstein and a famous monastery on Thursday, Cesky Krumlov on Friday, Pilzen on Saturday, and Kutna Hora on Sunday; I am, essentially, visiting sites in and around Prague from most to least interesting. There is a Communism museum in Prague that sounds interesting, and which I could almost surely find time to visit, but I may not bother, as entrance (even with the student discount) costs 150 crowns, or about 7 Euros. I would definitely visit the museum for 3 or 4 Euros, but 7 strikes me as excessive. If I end up with time to kill after one of my excursions over the next several days, I may end up just watching a movie at the hostel, an activity which is both relaxing and free.
It turns out that I had more to say than I expected. My initial impression was that one often has more to write about negative experiences, as I did in Hungary and Brno, as it can be hard to find language for exceedingly-positive experiences. While I regret, as a result of my impatience to see everything at once, that I will not have time to see much more of Western Europe or any of Southern Europe on this trip, I am having an amazing time and should continue to do so for the next several days, even when I visit slightly less-interesting places on the weekend (perhaps the train rides there and back will be nice; perhaps the cities scheduled for those days will surprise me). One cannot always tell, based on descriptions of cities in tourist guides, which destinations will turn out to be worthwhile and which will be disappointing. While I now consider Eastern Europe a disaster zone and feel that my time spent there (now that I am back in a cultural hotbed and can look back on the wilds of Eastern Europe) was a bit of waste, one sometimes discovers that destinations that sound tantalizing in the tour guide, such as Luxembourg, are unappealing, while less conspicuous cities, such as Kosice, can be surprisingly-enjoyable (though Eastern Europe still sucks overall). It turns out that my scheduling too much time in Prague may not have been so great a mistake, though I could have stood to spend the weekend somewhere more interesting. The lesson of the day is not to schedule too little time in extraordinary areas, such as Salzburg, and not to schedule too much time in lousy areas, such as all of Eastern Europe. I hope to make good use of this lesson in future years.
My only observation about Czech food so far is that the Czechs (despite being terrible at having a functional transport infrastructure) are great at making stewed meats, by which I mean not meat in stew, but meat that has been marinated in something at least somewhat liquid, as it grows so tender that one can easily cut it, fiber by fiber, with one's fork. The only dishes that I have had so far, besides today's meal of stewed pork, bread dumplings (good, but not like what one can purchase in Austria), and sauerkraut (which is, obviously, borrowed from Germany), were a fairly standard soup (in Brno) and some other sort of main dish in Brno. Prague is a good place not to be sick. While I am still getting over my illness, I now feel confident enough to eat most foods, and I plan to take advantage of my improving health over the coming days. I came across a fantastical bakery full of pastries of every size and shape on the way from the train station to the hostel in which I am staying, and I am staying in a hostel that both offers complimentary breakfast and is located close to a couple of grocery stores, which will enable me to furnish at least partial lunches (and, probably, a few dinners; one cannot eat out every night, and I will have tried the staples of Czech food within a few days) for a good price. Prague is a good culinary break from Brno, which had something like negative five restaurants in total. In Prague, one is never out of sight of at least a few different restaurants, with such a wide variety of choices that I have decided to exclusively visit restaurants that the owners of this hostel recommend to me. The meal that I had today was the best that I had since I was in Salzburg and cost me only 9 or 10 Euros, including the tip; my hopes for the next few days are high.
My final notes are scattered. Dogs here often have muzzles, which may be due to some law about having dogs in public places, rather than a result of their being poorly-trained and, therefore, aggressive. In the tour through the larger caves at Skalny Mlyn, people acted the same as they had in Hungary: they ignored what the tour guide said and talked amongst themselves, except on a tour that consisted of only seven people. This is interesting to me because people in the ice caves in Austria shut up and listened to what the tour guide said, although the group there was no smaller than the one in the bigger caves of Skalny Mlyn. I found it repulsive to hear people in the group talking at the same time as the tour guide, which is almost surely a direct result of my having been educated in affluent parts of North America; it is interesting that disapprobation of speaking over people is so thoroughly inculcated in us that we have an almost visceral reaction to people's doing so in setting resembling those of the classroom (i.e., in which there is one speaker and many people listen - speeches, tours, &c.). My only other point is that the streets of Brno were so empty when I entered the city that I thought that the city was a ghost town. I probably already mentioned this, as I recall having said something about the national holiday. Why is it that people in the Czech Republic - or, at least, in Brno - stay off of the streets on national holidays? Are they so depressed that they do not even want to get out of bed? Do they know that they live in a dump and that their local government lacks the muster to organize a parade or festival? Or are they smart enough to leave the country entirely for fairer lands whenever they get the chance? Prague is nothing like Brno. Its streets are full of locals and tourists, who are easily distinguished from one another because most of the locals look stressed out for some reason. Maybe life in the capital is more stressful than life in the provinces.
I only have three more weeks of travel left before my flight back home! Time flies fast when one travels, which is nice except for the fact that my three weeks in Vancouver will go by in a flash. My coming year at the University of Arkansas might not be as miserable as my first year there, but it is certainly not something worth looking forward to. Given that being there enables me to travel for two months of the year, I probably should not be complaining. I was suspicious of Prague when I first got here, as I thought that its modern train station and its street signs (of which Brno had almost none) were a mere imitation of German city design, but I quickly discovered that, as Budapest is not really a part of Hungary, Prague has next to nothing to do with the rest of the Czech Republic, which is a country that, like Russia, has invested all of its money in its capital city. There are a few reminders in Prague that one is in the Czech Republic: there are homeless alcoholics everywhere, many buildings here are dilapidated, and I saw someone urinating on the street; but one is otherwise in a totally different world. It will be curious to see if the transport system here is also better than in the rest of the country. The main goal of drivers here, like in the rest of the Czech Republic, is, as far as I can tell, to run over pedestrians, but they are not very good at it, and pedestrian traffic is ceaseless. This is a city of fathomless cultural treasures in an impoverished, hopeless country. My next few days promise to be interesting!
This is an iconic shot of Prague's city center.
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