last bits of prague

View just beneath the Charles Bridge

Yeah, re-entry sucks, but I had only two days of work this week, mostly spent cruising while happily giving out chocolates (a traditon in Israeli offices when one returns from a holiday outside of the country) and making people smile, and now it's the weekend!!

As the memories already begin to fade, a few remnants of a great getaway, and then I promise to let it rest:

• getting burned by a taxi driver the first night. i didn't have a map yet and couldn't figure out where we were, but I knew we were just 5 min. walk from our hotel, if we could only find it. got in a cab with a driver who seemed to know no english , but knew immediately where our hotel was. the meter ran the crowns up quickly as he flew up and down one-way streets. the fare ended up being 280K, about $10, probably five times what it should have been. not a really terrible sting ... except to the ego. after that, our biggest cab ride was 100K, which we agreed on in advance, for what would have been at least a half-hour walk. we'd been warned never to get in a cab without agreeing on the fare in advance, but we got burned anyway, thinking that the cabbie wouldn't understand us, and just thankful he knew where we needed to get to.
  
• my aching legs, especially one spot that i'd never noticed before, on the outside of my leg just below my knee. it was killing me for 2 days, and then miraculously disappeared as if i'd whipped it into shape. walking in prague was much more exhausting than I'd expected, maybe because of the cobblestone streets and sidewalks, which are uneven, like textured mosaics, and after a while tend to make walking hard work, and make flat, boring pavement look really attractive.
  
  
• pashminas: beautiful scarves of 90% cashmere and 10% silk. they're sold all over the city, in a variety of solid or mixed colors, and I bought one of each. man, that's soft. after i bought the first one, i never went out without it, as the weather could go from hot to cool at any moment, depending on the clouds, and it was lovely to have that fluffy softness around my neck. the price is not fixed, by the way; I saw the same item range from 249K to 580K (around $10-23), depending on where it was sold.
  
  
• tourists on the Charles Bridge, madly pushing each other to touch the famous statue of Prague's Saint John of Bohemia with his five-star halo; the legend is that anyone who touches it will have good luck and return to Prague; I think they just wanted to say they'd touched the famous statue, but they were as rude as bloody -- well, perhaps that's best left unsaid. but there's another interesting factoid I picked up along the way: the origin of Bohemia was here in the Czech Republic, which is divided into Bohemia, Moravia and (in case you didn't know -- I didn't! -- it hasn't been called "Czechoslovakia" since Slovakia became a separate country -- capital, Bratislava -- in 1993)
  
  
• our hotel, Novotel City -- aptly described as "clinical" in one of the city guides I picked up that summarized the robotic front desk staff very well. the place was fine, but had no soul. for sleeping, though, it couldn't be faulted: great mattress, well-controlled room temperature, and complete silence.
  
  
• and once again, the drivers. every time I get on the highway, to and from work, I get incensed at how badly we drive in this country; it makes commuting so much more difficult when people hog the left lane (ALL the time) or weave around the lanes without signaling as if they were alone on the road, or take absolutely every opportunity to cut in front of you if there's so much as half a carlength of space between you and the car in front. before prague, for some reason, I'd almost become immune to it. now the comparison is painful.
  
  However, it is our country, for better or worse.

Terezin (Theresienstadt) Cemetery ... hundreds buried here died AFTER liberation of the camp. They never left, as a result of the typhoid epidemic that was raging when the camp was liberated.

Many other graves are unmarked, containing bodies found in a mass grave.