Czech Out our Prague-ress!

While Joe and I waited for the living-in-Germany-long-term paperwork to clear all the government offices, I busied myself with various crafting projects and research on European travel. I have compiled, and am still in the process of finishing, a list of destinations across the continent that I feel would be fun to visit. Furthermore, I’ve researched the sights found in the cities we’ll be traveling to, and copied down their opening hours and websites. I gathered my information using guidebooks from my local library and then conducted further research online. This has made our traveling easier. Before when we wanted to take a trip, I cast about for an idea on where to go, and then spend hours researching what to do once we got there. Now, I’ve narrowed down the time I have to spend on the internet before we travel.

On September 14 we drove up to Prague, in the Czech Republic, for the weekend. The drive was only about 3 hours from Regensburg and part of it included the autobahn, so Joe enjoyed driving fast. Before we reached the border we needed to pick up a vignette. You place these little stickers on your windshield, and you are permitted to drive in the country. Since our trip was short we only bought the 10-day pass, but there were options for 3 months and 1 year as well. These stickers are available both at gas stations near the border and at the border crossing itself. The Czech Republic is part of the European Union so our passports weren’t checked and our vehicle wasn’t searched, we just drove right under the vignette scanner (like EZ-pass in the states) and continued on our way. Being prone to usefulness, I fell asleep. Wait, I meant uselessness. When I woke up, we were almost in Prague. As we got closer to the center of the city, the highway became crowded with more and more billboards. I don’t mean billboards every 100ft or so, I mean so many billboards it became difficult to distinguish the ads from the signs. From one spot on the highway, we could see 20 or so billboards at once, plus traditional road signs. It’s very overwhelming to be bombarded with so much advertising when trying to find your way in a strange city, though I imagine it’s probably overwhelming at all times.

Beer Tour Brochure!

During the drive, when I wasn’t sleeping, we spent some time with our European phrase book. This book is pocket sized, and we bought it before we arrived because it has almost all the European languages in it. There were a couple times were Joe asked me to look up a word, but I couldn’t find it, because as it turns out the book is mostly concerned with food, identifying it, obtaining it, and eating it. There were also a few handy phrases for getting by, like do you have a fax machine? And where is the nearest phone booth? We settled on learning these phrases to help us: Mluvite anglicky, pronounced mlooveeteh anglitsky, means do you speak English? Dobrý den, pronounced dobree den, is good day. Ahoj, pronounced ahoy, means hello and is incidentally my favorite Czech word. Joe had trouble with every phrase except ahoy, but he claims it’s because he didn’t have the opportunity to read the phrases like I did.

After a couple (possibly illegal) u-turns and some vague directions from our British GPS system we arrived at our hotel, the Best Western Bila Labut, which means white swan. The woman behind the front desk was very helpful and spoke fluent English, so unfortunately we didn’t have an opportunity to use the Czech phrases we had been practicing in the car. There was also a brochure stand. I love brochures! They make my job easy. Since we arrived near to 6pm, all of the attractions I had bookmarked for our visit were already closed, but the brochures identified a beer tour starting at 6:30 and decided that touring microbreweries would be a great way to start the weekend.