Ahoj jsme v Praze - Hello we are in Prague

I am writing this several days after we got back to Strasbourg from Prague but I took some notes while we were there.  Hopefully this will bear some resemblance to the truth.

Prague is a wonderful city.  I don't want to cast aspersions on Strasbourg because Prague is just a much bigger more cosmopolitan city (yes I used the word cosmopolitan).  Two of our group got up early in the morning and went out to Strasbourg Airport and flew to Prague, we call them the advance party.  Four of us got in a car and drove the 6 hours across Germany to Prague (9 hours when you count getting a bit lost around Nuremberg trying to locate a burger king (don't worry, we found it)).  The retard party (don't get all huffy, I mean in contrast to the advance party, I think it is the right word to use in French it means delay) arrived about 12 hours after the advance party.  We were pretty tired but met with the apartment owner's brother and got squared away.  

The apartment was great although the parking space in a local garage that was supposed to be included didn't work out.  Tadious (or vacav, mirche, paco, or bubba as I was likely to call him) who was the brother of the owner told me he would come with me to park the car because it is a block or two away and it is difficult to navigate old town Prague.  ::::Let me take a moment to describe driving in Prague: Imagine if you will a corn maze out in Iowa and this maze takes up about 200 acres.  You cannot turn around in any branch of the maze and many arms of the maze come to a dead end (or in this case a sign that says no entry).  If you try a strategy of making one right had turn after another, you will eventually end up making a trail that resembles a lolly pop (and I am speaking deeply from experience here.  So you try to go down a few one way streets the wrong way and guess what, you end up making the exact same lolly pop trail that I described earlier.  So finally, you take a short cut through a hotel court yard, back up along a canal tow path, drive up the steps to a bridge, take the escalator in the enclosed downtown mall (the escalators are wide enough to fit a small car), then eventually you end up in the drive through land of Burger King and exit at the parking garage to your hotel.  And this is all with the assistance of the GPS which is set to speak English with an Australian Accent.  But wait there is more, after we arrived at the parking garage, it turned out the door to the garage (looked a bit like a spiked door at the end of a draw bridge entrance to a castle dungeon) would not open.  Bubba told me to approach the door slowly in the car (and make sure to show no fear because the door can sense it).  After doing that several times with no response from the door, He said let me run back to the apartment and get the remote (now I'm thinking to myself....that would have been a good thing to have at the beginning of this experiment) but I would have been wrong, because the remote didn't work.  So Mirche said "I will go inside and hit the switch" (which i thought would have preceded running back to the apartment to get the remote) but the switch didn't work so Paco so I will talk to the garage attendant (now I think he is just putting me on).  Vacav comes back and says the garage attendant says the door is broke, or as you Americans say, it is broke.  Actually at that point I used several American words and none of them were "broke".  None the less we made another excursion to a public parking garage that was only 2 blocks (and 14 miles by car on streets) away.

The rest of the trip was wonderful.  we went to visit the cathedral, we had dinner on the bank of the river, we visited museums, I found the Deloitte offices in Prague, I found the offices of several law firm clients in Prague, we took the funicular up to the top of a hill in the city ad took in the view (with a camera) from there, I learned several words and phrases in Czech and even got one person to understand what I was saying.  Mind you I wasn't saying what I thought I was saying but he understood what I did say and he laughed (in Czech of course).  The weather was great, we got hit with one brief shower but we were headed into the castle and cathedral tour anyway so it was great timing.  I  stole two paver stones from a cobble stone street as souvenirs (don't get in a huff, they were tiny slices of the cobble stones that were being discarded), and besides it doesn't compare to me taking a small quartz stone today from the Maginot Line Museum.  I think someday I will be able to build a garden wall out of the stones collected from around the world.

I have taken at least a thousand pictures on the trip so far and a few videos.  I will post some of them to this blog at some point in the next week and I will post a few others to facebook.

So back to Prague, it seems like we were there for about 55 minutes but in fact it was almost four days. I guess if you figure it took me 24 hours just to get in the parking garage when we arrived, that makes sense.  The burger kings and McDonald's in Prague I have to say are a bit better than Strasbourg but for that matter they are all pretty much what you expect.  I have gone to some great restaurants in Strasbourg and Prague as well because Ginny and the others seem to like having properly prepared food some of the time.  I owe them a lot for letting me go off to Mikey d's for coffee and eggs and burger king for the Big King or Woper.  When we left prague, we made a quick stop at a little hill top village called Leuchtenburg (or berg, can't remember) it had an old castle like ruin and it had a nice little Catholic Church.  As important to me it had a tiny German bakery (but they had a German name for it). and they had some great pastries.  Then it was back on the road for the 6 hour drive to Strasbourg (and that is with the autobahn where you can sneak up to 95 miles an hour or more if the car can do it).

Prominte, (excuse me), it is getting late and I have to take a break from writing.  I'll write again soon.