Getting to Prague

My flight out of Istanbul left at 3:30am. I'm not sure who thought that was going to be convenient for anyone, but I think he should be fired.

I hung out in Istanbul all day, ate dinner on the Asian side, and then returned to the hostel around 10 to read some Moby Dick and wait for the shuttle that, at 12:30 in the morning, took me and a bunch of other tourists, packed into a van like Ecuadorian chickens, an hour or so away to the airport (not the main airport, mind you).

I waited there for hours after checking in, listening to my iPod and falling in and out of sleep, and finally boarded the EasyJet plane around 3:15am. The flight to Basel, Switzerland couldn't have gone slowly enough as I sat in sweet unconsciousness on the right-hand side of the plane.

It's interesting, as much as I loved Turkey, arriving in Switzerland brought with it a feeling that can best only be described as relief.

In Basel, I had to wait like 6 hours for my flight to Prague, so I walked around and found a nice bench where I slept for like 3 hours before I was able to check in. Then I got on the plane around 1pm and slept all the way to Prague.

Well rested now, I arrived at the Prague airport and caught a bus, then metro to the A & O Hostel. It had a high satisfactory rating on hostels.com - a rating that could not be further from reality. This was THE WORST hostel of the trip. The smaller rooms might have been ok, but the dorm was ridiculous. At 1am, backpackers sat with the light on (in this 20 some-odd-bed dorm) drinking and talking. When I arrived there were only two open beds. I opted for one that was a top bunk right up against the sloped ceiling. The bed was the furthest from the door and seemed like a good idea at the time I chose it. However, when I came back at night to go to bed, I discovered that my body was too big to fit under the sloped ceiling. I had to manipulate my body in ways certain to cause life-long back problems if I intended to fit under the ceiling.

And so, I got up and took the one other free bed in the room - a bottom bunk two beds over toward the door. It became readily apparent why this bed, too, was open. It was broken in half. The bed consisted of a thin mattress resting on a piece of plywood. The plywood was completely cracked in half. It managed to work ok as long as I maintained a precise equilibrium of weight on the foot end and the head end. If the equilibrium was disrupted due to any shifting on my part, the bed collapsed. Good times. As I lay there trying to sleep, I determined two things: to write a stinging review of the hostel on hostels.com and to switch hostels the next day.

In spite of the hostel, however, Prague was a beautiful city and wonderful experience. Unscathed from either world war, the central buildings are all very old - and not only are the original buildings intact, but there is also a noticeable absence of modern buildings in most of central Prague. The result is a feeling of stepping back into medieval times. Indeed modern Prague is a hermit crab, scurrying about in the shell of an earlier civilization.

First on my list of things to do, was to see the site of the Prague scenes from Mission Impossible I. I walked down to the river and found a building and bridge that looked like (and indeed were) the scenes from the plot-laying of the film. I snapped some pictures and then moved toward the side of the museum/concert hall that served as the party scene from MI. A relatively long line had formed and, having no idea what it was for, I, like any good sheep, got in it.

After twenty minutes or so, I was ushered into the building and handed a brochure which explained that tonight was Prague's annual Museum Night, in which, from 6pm to 1am, almost every museum in Prague was free. I happened in upon a free orchestra concert in this modern art museum. It was pretty cool. I stayed a few minutes and then crossed the Charles Bridge (where people in medieval dress were dancing to medieval music) and headed up to Prague Castle, where I walked around a bit and then went into the museum of the ancient Prague Castle.

Here, a long-unanswered question from my childhood was finally answered. You know the Burger King crown? Where did they get that design? I've seen lots of crowns from throughout Western Europe and none looked so plain and simple as the Burger King Crown, which looked like it was made of a sheet of gold wrapped around a head and adorned with chunks of jewels. Well, that is EXACTLY what the crown in the Prague Castle looks like. Case closed.

After the castle, I wandered down a really cool quaint street that served as home to a bunch of medieval alchemists. The houses were cozy and low, rising only a few feet above my head. It looked almost like a hobbit town. I would have loved to wander around more, but it was approaching midnight and the metro closes around then and I had found out that church in the Prague Branch starts bright and early at 9am.

And so, I caught a metro back to the main square, where I grabbed a quick bite at McDonald's before rushing on to my hostel.

It is worth noting that during my feeding at McDonald's, I must have eaten something that disagreed with me. And the manner in which it disagreed with me was not like that of a disgruntled Swede, who crosses to the other side of the room, ceases to look you in the eye and remains in quiet sulking until you can gently coax out the nature of his discontent. No, this food disagreed with me like a nationalistic terrorist, launching rockets and mortars with reckless abandon at the slightest provocation.

And so, we add to the discomfort of the hostel bed a ferocious stomach ache.