Monthly Archives: July 2007

Visitor from abroad

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After my stupidly late night / early morning I had to force my eyes open at 9:45 to check out of the hostel and move all my stuff to a hotel a 15 minute walk away. Viv, a friend of mine from back home, was having a weekend in Prague as a break from life’s daily grind and we’d opted on sharing a hotel to keep the costs down and to make things a little nicer for her. After all, this was a holiday!

The new place was quite nice but the evils of free internet meant that I didn’t get a nice 2-hour nap as I’d planned. Instead I replied to mails, got depressed with the news back home and walked down to KFC on the corner to console myself with a Zinger menu. I then jumped onto a Metro, transferred to a bus and arrived at the airport to catch Viv arriving on her (early, amazingly) flight.

As ever, it’s good to see a friendly face from back home and we sat and plotted the conquest of Prague with the guide books she’d brought with her. A quick stopoff at the hotel to drop her bags, and off into the sunshine for an explore.

Between my hostel and the hotel is a brick structure being built for charity. It’s 1000 Crowns per brick, and you can draw or paint anything you like on it. I vaguelly recall this just starting when I was in Prague a couple of years ago. There are now three or four structures, one double-layered, with many crazy designs on. Superb idea.

Picking a street at random – or so Viv led me to believe – we ended up walking past and then into the Sex Machines Museum. I swear she had this planned. As it happens, Talia had begged me to go there and get photos of the corsets they have on display so I grudgingly agreed to walk around (ahem) and we spent a little over an hour in a fairly enjoyable walk, giggling like schoolkids at some of the items on display. I think Viv walked off with a silly number of ideas and a mentally dwindling bank balance for when she got home.

The aim of the weekend for Viv was to relax, so we just took a stroll over the beautiful Charles Bridge in the baking sun and around the Old Town Square. A huge crowd had gathered around the Meteorological Clock to watch the figuers pop out on the hour and we joined them.

We pretty much spent the afternoon walking around admiring how beautiful a city Prague is. Everything’s so clean, but also now quite expensive. I swear things are pricier than they were when I visited for Colin’s stag party.

We picked a nice-ish restaurant for dinner and sat watching the passing people. Ice cream and a baked pastry doughnut kind of thing were munched as we walked around. Prague changes “tone” later at night as the more risque nightclubs open up. Stag parties trailed from one to the other as I was – for once – roundly ignored by the scary men trying to convince lone males that they really really wanted to part with a huge sum of money for one beer and a semi-naked wrinkly woman gyrating on their lap. It’s handy have a nice lady with you so you look like a couple!

Amazingly, despite the silly lack of sleep the night before, I made it to 1:30am before the need to sleep crept up and coshed me violently over the back of the head. I’ll get him for that. Ow.

Prague – again

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I was here a couple of years ago on a stag do, so I kind of knew my way around. This helped when we arrived as nobody else had a clue where we were going. The two Scots met three girls from England who they’d had a night with in Krakow and together we headed for the hostel I’d booked for myself, a short(ish) walk from the station. Everyone looked bleary-eyed. I think I got more sleep on the trains in India – at least you were only bothered by ticket inspectors once in the journey there.

Everyone else grabbed a room at the Apple Hostel with me and we dumped our bags (far too early to Czech in haha) and jumped on a Metro and then a bus to Pilsn (or Pilsner as the Germans called it). My aim was to climb the church tower, go down into the tunnels, visit the brewery and walk around the brewery museum. But this was not to be.

For starters, we got there later than I’d hoped. And half the places were shut – it appears that July 5th is some kind of holiday. The bus dropped us of a fair walk from the brewery, so we hopped in two taxis to get there and then paid for a tour each. It turned out to be one of the more interesting brewery tours I’ve been on, partly as the Pilsner Urquell company invented lager as we know it. The main company was formed by a conglomeration of several separate local breweries and the first “golden beer” was sampled in 1842.

Sadly, this technically means that crap like Fosters, VB and Special Brew are all their fault. But I’ll forgive them as their own beer’s pretty damn good. One of the best parts of the tour is, of course, the tasting. This one is rather special as the beer sampled can only be drunk on this tour and nowhere else. To ensure that modern brewing methods don’t mess up the taste, traditional methods are used in small quantities. Huge barrels are stored in underground catacombs and this brew is compared regularly against that which comes from the 125-or-so 16.7million litre metal vessels now used. The barreled beer isn’t filtered so it’s cloudy and it tastes delicious. Mind, so does the modern finished product. Which we sampled a lot of in the bar upstairs afterwards. At around 50p for half a litre it would have been rude not to.

Oh, I forgot to mention – it was Phil’s 25th birthday. He’s Scottish so therefore we all had to get drunk. It’s a law, or a custom, or an old charter. Or something.

To this end we returned to the hostel and swiftly shower, shaved and… the other “sh”, got on our best togs (well, a partly-cleanish Toon top for me) and headed out for some grub and some beer.

Eventually we settled on a nice looking foodery near the Charles Bridge where we rattled up a bill of around £100 between six of us (plus the two Swedes from Krakow who turned up late in proceedings to add to the bar bill). Not bad, all things considered. But still more than we expected, especially after totalling it ourselves and coming up with something nearer £90.

Of course, the sneaky “service charge”. My menu actually had the part with the charge on ripped out. So beware of this in Prague as it’s hugely common.

From there we crossed the bridge and found a cool jazz bar where we sat (and drank) for maybe an hour. Michael went through a row of shots, the girls tried out cocktails with more colours than a very poorly family of rainbows, and the rest of us supped nice Czech beer.

Next stop, another bar playing U2 and Linkin Park where Tommi started snorting sugar and trying to pour it into beer (it gets very fizzy when you do this) before we moved on to an Irish bar. I settled on Hoegaarden here because I like it and we were turfed out after last orders. It was barely 2am so we walked back to the previous bar and kept on ploughing through the yellow fizzy stuff for another hour until this started to shut up shop.

At this point everyone else was heading hostelwards, but I’d got talking to a Norwegian girl who was slightly bored as both her friends had pulled a Czech guy each. Silly Czech guys – Carina was by far the prettiest of the three girls. maybe they were intimidated. However, I ended up in a taxi to another club which was playing my kind of music and selling beer at my kind of prices.

I ended up dropping Carina at her hostel (a whole 50m down the road) at 6am and collapsing in bed at my own hostel around 6:30am. Big mistake – I had to be up again at 9:45am to check out!

Playing catch-up

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My last full day in Poland and I spend most of it online. The PC in the hostel was free, it was chucking it down outside and I had a bunch of emails and blog posts to get through.

I arranged to meet a couple of the girls in town again to do a last bit of wandering… and again they didn’t show up! They reappeared later in the day as I was internetting away, so at least I saw them before they got on their bus.

Myself, I was on the 22:55 train to Prague so I waved the Dodo farewell at 2200 and went via KFC to the main station. On the train I shared a carriage with two hungover Scotsmen, Phil and Dom. We had a great natter, and had just enough space for the three of us to stretch out (kind of) and kip. A shame we were woken around six times on the journey by passport control and ticket inspectors!

Auschwitz, Birkenau, and curry – and a TIP or two

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A strange combination, but that’s how the day went.

Again, we slept later than was originally planned before our group gathered (the same as yesterday but the ranks swollen with the two Danish girls, the Swedish lass who’d arrived overnight and a German girl and Aussie girl who were travel together). We walked to the bus station and forked over our 7zl each for the 90-minute ride to Auschwitz.

TIP – don’t buy your bus ticket from the Tourist Information. They charge 20zl return, whereas the bus is only 7zl each way.

TIP – don’t get a tour guide at Auschwitz. They’re good, but you will see more if you get a guide book for a couple of Zloty and walk yourself around. Much cheaper and better value for money.

What can I say about Auschwitz? Well, it was the largest extermination camp in the Nazi “regime” during the war. Jews (and other dissidents) were ferried there under the pretence that they were being relocated to a new area. Around 80% of those who arrived were killed within hours; gassed then cremated, their ashes scattered in rivers.

The others – those reckoned as being fit enough to work – were put to forced labour and made to live in the most horrific conditions. Up to 15 people on a bunk designed for one, with three layers. Those below would be covered in the mess from people above as dysentery was rife.

Punishments were frequent and cruel, experiments and torture carried out on prisoners on a regular basis. And the sheer scale of the operation simple mind-numbing. The view from the guard house at Birkenau (Auschwitz B-camp) shows buildings as far as the eye can see, or at least their remains.

Some of the exhibits are really harrowing. The 2 tonnes of human hair. The countless thousands of shoes and suitcases. I couldn’t even bring myself to look at the huge collection of childrens’ clothing.

So in all an educational but depressing day. But like so many other similar places I’ve been, it does drive home how damn lucky we are to live how we do today. And that we shouldn’t forget the past – we should learn from it. So if you find any Holocaust deniers, give them a clip round the ear and force them to see sense so we can prevent this kind of horror in the future.

Away from all that, we returned to Krakow and arranged to have dinner at a recommended Indian restaurant with some Geordie girls I got talking to. Unfortunately, with everyone on different schedules, people wanting to shower, some wanting to eat sooner and so forth, our large group ended up whittling down to myself, Tommi and Michael.

Well, it was everyone else’s loss. The food was superb and very reasonably priced. So if you’re in Krakow and you want an amazing curry: Bombaj Tandoori is the place to go. Michael and I had a madras and a vindaloo respectively (“as hot as you can make it”) while Tommi settled on a more mild tikka masala. All were top notch. And the waitress was a cutie, to boot.

We were supposed to meet the girls in town later, but they didn’t show – I assume Laura was navigating… Instead we went back to the hostel and – for a change – drank beer before going to bed.

More Polish meanderings

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Today is another day where I will forget people’s names for which I apologies profusely in advance. You have the email address – pester me if I’ve forgotten or mis-spelled yours and I will correct it!

I slept later than I’d hoped (a theme in Poland – must be the water) and fell in with a small group who were walking into town for some sightseeing: Tommi and Michael from Sweden, Laura from Mexico and a lovely girl from Singapore who’s name escapes me as I write this. The Singaporean girl was so short, the hostel had to give her a ladder to get into her bunk as the beds didn’t have one attached!

Mondays are free entry to one of the areas of the castle, but only until midday and we were too late for that. Instead, we walked the streets and enjoyed the free areas of the castle grounds. There’s a good view over the river from the battlements and the weather was very favourable.

A word of warning – never let Laura try to guide you anywhere. How she gets around Mexico City astounds me because at times she ended up walking exactly the opposite direction from that which we needed to go. Tommi and I gave up and just let her wander until she realised we weren’t following any more.

From the we walked to the Jewish area and into the new cemetery. Laura tried to find the entrance for us and located a car wrecking yard instead. Back in the opposite direction we did find the way in and walked around the graveyard for maybe 20 minutes. It’s quite a creepy place – in a good way – with many atmospheric cobweb-encrusted flaky tombstones. I’m not sure if anyone would appreciate that being said about their relatives’ resting place, but I liked it. Some of the walls have been made of bits of broken old tombstones.

We decided to eat and catch a film, so walked from there to a nearby mall (by way of the rest of the Jewish area) and picked our various foodstuffs from the food court, then had an ice cream. There was still a good while to kill before the film started, so the Swedes produced a small football from their rucksack and we played kickabout for maybe thirty minutes. On the top floor of a shopping mall. I can see why Mexico are no longer a world force in footie, as Laura almost had the ball over the railings twice and did succeed in punting it down the up escalator once.

We went to see Fantastic Four 2 which was… passable. About as good (if that’s the right word) as the first one. Mr Lee – stick to Spidey, please. And another Blade would be good.

On the way back to the hostel we stopped off at a small bottle shop / market and I picked up a frozen pizza for dinner. And some more beers. We sat in the garden under an awning in lashing rain while we ate and drank and chatted. Ania suggested we go into the “chill-out room” as it would be warmer, but there were no lights. It’s supposed to be all candlelit, but someone had neglected to actually buy any. This problem lasted 10 minutes until she returned with a huge bag of tea-lights and we all hunkered down on the comfy mattresses and chatted.

I confess I was wrecked after the two previous nights with little sleep, so despite free wine from our kind hostess I headed up to bed quite early. A few people snuck in while I snoozed, including a girl from Sweden, until Tommi and two Danish girls came up to pinch some bedding so they could snuggle up downstairs. Tommi… can’t hold his beer too well, but he’s a funny drunk. Which was why I didn’t mind being woken up as he shouted “hello new girl!” at the snoozing Swedish lass. At four in the morning. As the Danes apologised, explained he was drunk and ushered him back out.