The Man Behind the Iron Curtain

After a few days showing Max Barcelona, the two of us had three days to kill en route to Berlin. With no deficit of ideas on where to spend this time, ultimately we whittled it down to someplace we could get a cheap, direct flight to from Barcelona, where we could then find affordable passage to Germany. Italy might have been the top of both our lists, except we agreed there were too many different parts of the boot to choose from, and that this country would require more like three weeks on a later visit, preferably with our girlfriends, as opposed to scruffy each other. Krakow was too complicated to get to, and Moscow too expensive to stay (did you know it’s currently the most expensive city in the world? Even more than New York or London. crazy).

So we found another Eastern European destination: Prague. Admittedly, we knew very little going in. For example, what is their currency? The Crown, or Kroner… even after three days there we’re not sure, and still have trouble adjusting to the exchange rate. What’s the name of the river their famous bridge, the Charles, crosses? The Vlatva? Something like that. And who is this Charles, and why is his name so simple when every other word on the map features long strings of consonants and bizarre shapes over some of them?

So we entered the center of Bohemia blind, stumbling through what is essentially a small city, trying to comprehend just how quickly this country, which had been oppressed in turn by the Nazis and Soviets, had turned things around so rapidly to have become a very Capitalist place, with fancy restaurants and Cosmopolitan interests to go with the occasional provincial attitude. Basically, tourism has had a lot to do with it. Coming out of college I remember hearing stories of $5 hostels and 20-cent beers. Though still cheap by European standards, the cost of living has quite compensated for the years of grey quasi-communism.

We did find some cheap beer, and shrugged our shoulders anytime one of the impossibly tall, beautiful, high-cheeked girls would ask us questions in incomprehensible syllables. Ultimately, the joy of the place whittled down to some crazy, creepy castles and churches, evidence of some bitter winters I suppose.

I wish I could say that I learned a lot about the Czech Republic, but it was about as foreign a place as I’ve encountered since Japan, and other than a souvenir bottle of absinthe I have taken away fairly little of it. I did, however, get a good amount of work done. It’s an exciting life, isn’t it?