A Trip to PRAGUE |
April 1999 |
![]() To get there we took an all-day-long bus ride from Copenhagen, passing around Berlin and through ex-DDR Germany and downtown Dresden, where we could really see the dreary aftereffects 50 years of communism. It was 10:00 at night when we got to Prague, to a "boat-hotel" on the Vltava River, about 3 km south of the city center. We had a fair sized 2-bed room with own bathroom, clock radio & tv, there was a resturant where we ate free breakfasts every day--pretty luxurious for a couple of old hippy campers like us. Anyway, you should SEE that city--it's old, and has been under 50 years of communism just like Dresden, but doesn't look like it. It's obviously been cherished and fixed and reconstructed and polished, and then gracefully painted with gold trim all along the edges. I'm not kidding, gold trim everywhere. Prague is a BIG city--1.5 million people--and the downtown area(s) are full of fantastic old buildings of every conceivable architectural era, baroque, renaissance, art nouveau, modern, classicism, neo classical...etc. And the building blocks are hollow, so that there are passageways into and through them, with shops, resturants, whatever, like a Mall in every block--so if you want to see them all...well, you simply can't, there's too much, too many. There was also "culture" everywhere: we were constantly handed leaflets announcing today's classical concerts here or there in town, so we went to one when it was raining. Two pretty young women performing Mozart Bach etc on piano & flute, flawlessly, ostensibly trained in some music conservatory where the old Soviet disciplines were maybe good for something. We observed that the concerts were mostly due to the efforts of young people, those who handed out leaflets would then go inside and perform the concerts themselves, their own little cottage industry. But since it costs about $5 US per show, no one can afford to see them all, so the concerts are only about half full--they're not really raking in huge profits. ![]() There are also resturants and bars everywhere, so many that it's amazing they can all survive, but they seem to do just fine. And they were all cheap and good: we ate great meals in the most amazingly elegant places for what would be about $3 each, complete with ½ liter 12% beers. Czech food is a lot like German food--Wiener Schnitzels, gulasches, wursts, lots of potatoes, strudels for desert. And then there's every other kind of resturants: Pizzarias, Chinese, Indonesian... and uncountably many McDonald's and KFCs (which we avoided only because they were too familiar--they were otherwise really cheap). There's even a "Planet Hollywood" downtown (which Copenhagen doesn't have yet). But you can only sit and eat and drink so much, no matter how cheap or good it is, and then you're out on your feet again. We were there 7 days, and almost walked ourselves to death. That's what you do in big cities, same in Paris or Rome or wherever. We bought 7-day passes for the public transport system (cost $1 per day), which was great for the long distance stuff, but you still want to see everything close up and end up on foot in the streets, shops, museums, castles, churches, parks, up & down hills...I'm wearing out just thinking about it. I'd never been to Prague before, and had not much concept of Czech culture or history (uh...Kafka was Czech...right?). Marianne had been there in 1974, while they were still Communist and under the Russian thumb. Back then she thought the city was beautiful, but was uncomfortable about how jealous the people were of her clothes and her freedom, how waiters in resturants wouldn't serve them sometimes, how obvious the repression of the Czech people was. ![]() Of course there is also a down side to the scene, it's not all goodness and prosperity for everyone: when we drove into the Czech Republic, over the mountain pass at the Dresden border, we were shocked by all the young prostitutes standing beside the road. Shocked at the sheer numbers of them; a group of 10, another of 6, another 10, 5 more, then 12, on and on for 50 kilometers down from the mountains toward Prague, standing beside the road in dirt parking places where the cargo trucks could stop. Also shocked by their extreme youth, some of them had to be in their earliest teens. All wearing mini-skirts, showing lots of cleavage and skin, all holding themselves and shivering in the cold mountain air. There were so many that one had to wonder: is every girl in the country a hooker? However, we never saw them in Prague--I'm sure they're there, but it's much more discreet in town, and we never noticed any more prostitutes. The young girls we did see close up or meet in town were those involved with classical concerts or tourist trade, and they were all so pretty and educated and generally appealing that one had to wonder: are all those prostitutes as nice as these girls? There were also a lot of old people begging or peddling junk on the streets--they've been the real losers in the change from their stable and secure Communist system; after a lifetime of working for The State they've ended up with nothing except the rug pulled out from under their feet. And those few who do have jobs can be seen in the museums and public buildings, where things are still run with a soviet flair--stiff, ponderous, overcontrolled institutions. In the Museum of Modern Art, for instance, (a horrible white block of Russian architecture with huge empty rooms and no windows) these old people sat upon tiny stools everywhere, jumping to their feet when we entered, to check our tickets again and again, on every floor, in every room of the Museum. One of them smiled a little, but most of them looked frightened that we might try to steal a painting, and none of them spoke anything but Czech. We were warned that there's a lot of crime in Prage, pickpockets, thieves, taxi swindels. But we never met any of it. One of our tour guides practically tried to scare us away from the central train station, but we had no trouble there either. However we did talk to a young man who'd been robbed in the Youth Hostel, so it does happen. ![]() I'd read the historical details in our guide book on the drive down, so by the time I got there I knew that all the stuff happening in Jugoslavia is just a continuation of the same old story in the Balkan states, but the Czechs have broken that pattern. Not only have they dismissed their Communist leaders, but as Czechoslovakia peacefully separated into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, civilizedly avoiding exactly the kind of mess Kosovo is in today. So it would seem that Prague is the success story of the emerging Eastern lands. A side trip out to another town 75 km away, Kutna Hora, was to be a break from the exertions of being in the big city, but we started out the wrong way from the train station and it became another walking marathon. Still, we got to see some of the small town life, which was nice. ![]() But I've done that in Copenhagen instead, and actually, after a week of walking around it was nice to come home and relaxing to go back to work. I guess that's why we take vacations. 3R |