Praha

There's nothing like twelve hours of sleep, followed by some leisurely coffee drinking, to make you feel brand new. So, Prague: I saw more of the city than I intended on my first day there - I took the train from Berlin and tried to follow the directions my hostel gave me from the train station, only to find that the directions were apparently written by someone who had never been to Prague or who just liked sending weary travelers to stops on the tram that do not exist. So I tried to work out my way there using the map in the train station and ended up walking around for about two hours, turning my tiny map around in mostly vain attempts to orient myself and asking people for directions every few steps. A nice woman at an internet cafe finally got me heading in the right direction.

I hadn't slept well the night before (I don't usually sleep well on the night before trips, and I'd also been to dinner with a friend until about midnight, which didn't help), so I was hoping to get to bed early. What I didn't realize, though, was that my room was only a few doors down from the hostel bar that was blaring American pop, and that most of the other beds in the room were being occupied by a group of girls who, though they seemed very nice, were also the sort of people who seem to have shrieking conversations at all hours and who need to search through their bags ten times, zipping and unzipping every pocket, in order to find their toothbrush. I realize that staying in a hostel means dealing with these sorts of things, but I was tired and not in a mood to be reasonable.

So, for the first few days, I was walking the city on little sleep. I feel like I don't have much to say about the city itself. I think my expectations were a little high going in; I'd heard from other people about how beautiful the city was, and I got there and sort of had the feeling, "Well . . . yeah, it's nice. I guess." It is quite a lovely city, with all sorts of interesting architechtural mixes, a nice place to get lost in. I did go up into the palace, which wasn't very impressive. The most exciting part was seeing the window where the 1618 Defenestration of Prague took place, but it was still only a window. I also went into a few museums that seemed like a triumph of advertising over content; they were housed in really neat buildings, but had confusing layouts and really vague captions that weren't always very well translated into English. I feel like there are some cities, like some people, with whom you just have more chemistry. When I first came to Berlin and to Rome, I felt like I wanted to stay. After about a day and a half in Prague, I wasn't desperately unhappy, but I felt like I would have been okay with going home. I'd already paid in advance for both my hostel and my train ticket, though, so I stayed.

And I ended up being glad I did. That night, the group of girls moved out and a bunch of new people came. All of them were traveling singly and inclined to be sociable, and they came from all over - a few Australians, a French Canadian, an Italian, a French guy, and various others. It was a really nice group, and we ended up going out the next few nights to the various jazz and other music bars near the hostel. So, I didn't get any more sleep than I had for the first part of the week, but I was in a better mood about it (and of course we were all as quiet as possible when we came back to the room late, and made sure beforehand that we had our toothbrushes handy). In deference to the linguistically challenged Anglophones, everyone spoke English. One thing I've sort of gotten to like, both with the assistant teaching and with doing some traveling, is hearing English spoken with different accents and all the different influences that go into them. The Frenchman, for example, had the sort of typical French accent, but he'd spent two years working in Ireland and had also picked up some typical Irish vocabulary: "Hmph, and I told 'im, I don't give a fuck about zat!" So that was quite funny.

Oh, and there were also a couple good bagel places near the hostel. It's hard to find good bagels in Berlin, so I pretty much lived on them while I was in Prague. Probably as a result of not spending much money on food, I came in under budget and actually changed money back to euros. A lot of Prague was pretty cheap, and even in the touristy areas, the prices were really only equivalent to what they might be if there were in euros at a normal price, not a tourist-trap price. So that wasn't too bad.

Anyway, like I said, I had a good week - as you've presumably gathered, though, more from the company than from the city itself. Today will be a grocery shopping day, since I have nothing back at the apartment (dinner last night was a bagel I brought back with me).