To all who wish to know more about Prague (which, by the way, is in the Czech Republic, formerly Czechoslovakia, for those of you who might not know....), here are some possibly interesting stories:
We (that is me, my Irish friend Lisa and my roomate Natalie) left from London for Prague bright and early on an October Wednesday morning by first getting a taxi to Stansted airport (nice and new and nearby--all you can ask for in an airport!) and then by catching a Czech Airlines flight for Prague. Two hours later we were landing at a nice bright spacious airport, where we noticed Prague was suddenly called "Praha", which is how the locals refer to their capital city. Don't ask me for pronunciation assistance as I am afraid to say the Czech language pretty much eluded my (rather feeble) efforts at speaking it!
For those who are interested, Sorry is Pardon (nice and easy, I could do that one), and Help is Pomoc! (always helpful to know how to say help in another language). As my guidebook assured me, there would be lots of police about although to ask the ones wearing blue and gray would be useless as it is not their jursidiction to help tourists, however, to ask the ones wearing all black would possibly get you assistance.
The c is pronounced like "ts" though, so one should say Pomots, Pomots!!, or no help would arrive anyhow. Provided there were black clothed police that is….! (:
Anyways, after making our way through the practically deserted airport (well, with a guidebook enumerating obscurity after obscurity, perhaps that is not such a great shock...!), we found the bus stop and with Natalie's able navigating skills we worked out that we needed bus 100 so we could get to the furthest flung metro stop called Zlicin, (and don't ask me how to say it, I've devised my own version of Czech by now and can't learn it properly anymore....).
Turned out the airport is no small distance from the city, and after exclaiming over various buildings and things we soon realized that we were going PAST those buildings and perhaps that wasn't Prague after all. So after awhile we just waited till we got to the metro stop before making anymore such assumptions! It was a good 20 minutes later that we were indeed at last in Prague, right at Zlicin station itself, where we promptly hopped on the metro in order to get to the stop nearest our hotel.
After gazing at all the Czech people getting on and off the metro and realizing that really they looked just like anyone except with perhaps a bit of an individualistic dress sense and a rather Eastern European sort of profile (whatever that is), we decided instead to pay attention to which stop was what so as not to miss it. Fortunately our stop had a nice short name (Andel) rather than something like Nadrizi Holesovice, and we soon arrived there some 20 minutes down the line.
Again, Natalie assigned herself navigator and dragged us up and down streets trying to decipher street names letter by letter so as to match the map she had in hand. Happily, the street signs were bright red! Sadly, the letters were teeny tiny and you needed to be practically underneath it to read it. This made progress a bit slow and all. However, Natalie did indeed get us there without even one wrong turn, and there we were, on the right street!
However, WHERE was the hotel!? All the buildings were flush against the sidewalk with not a sign to be seen anywhere. The only differentiation between any building would be the colour: hmmm, pale blue? yellow? pink? green and yellow? It was anyone's guess. I myself favored the blue one, but wouldn't you know it, it was the yellow one, with the teeniest little bronze plaque on it that was really (obviously) the hotel sign. The Artesse it was called! I could see it quite clearly when I stood right beneath it!
The doors didn't open though, and there was a buzzer to get in (looked really like a list of apartment buzzers), and so picking one at random, suddenly, magically, the doors opened silently and smoothly by themselves!! Feeling slightly strange, we walked in down an ornate hallway with flickering electric candle chandeliers to the end of the passage, not sure really where to go, when suddenly!!! There appeared some lady at the end of the passageway in the depths of the gloom saying....."Do you have a reservation?" I was totally expecting a different sentence, such as "All who darken these halls step into a place from which they shall not escape!!", but no such luck.
