I spent the weekend in Prague, hanging out with some friends from work. This was my first visit to the Czech Republic and I was very impressed – certainly, Prague is very different from what I had expected in my slightly naive post-cold war vision of parts of Eastern Europe. In fact, it was a very cool weekend indeed.
I arrived on Saturday morning on the 06:35 KLM flight out of London into Amsterdam and then caught a (09:something) connection out to Prague with CSA (Czech Airlines). I didn’t bother with sleep on Friday but just ran on coffee instead – got more work done too. We spent the day on Saturday wondering around the town, occasionally stopping for food. During the course of the day, we climbed a tower in one of the old churches (hundreds of steps, no handrail, traffic in both directions) and got an excellent view of the city. We had food in a nice little restaurant for around $10 and took an elevator to the top of the TV tower (ugly building, but the tallest in town and you can’t see it from inside itself) for a night time view.
After an excellent night’s sleep in a nice little hotel near downtown, we headed out for breakfast (eggs, coffee, fat and greese on a plate just like I wanted) and then took a tour of the Jewish Ghetto area of town with a tour guide who turns out to be studying Jewish immigration into the US in history. I don’t know a lot about the Jewish faith beyond what I’ve briefly read, so I enjoyed donning a kippa and wondering around various museums and even a cemetary. Most shocking of all was seeing the lists of the many thousands who were murdered by Nazis painted onto the walls of one of the museums we went to. They’d repainted the walls following the flooding in 2002 which had basically destroyed the innards of buildings in parts of the old city – they now have portable flood barriers that can be mounted in re-inforced mountings fixed into the ground throughout town.
I’ll upload photos from my cellphone camera later (I left my digital camera at home) but suffice it to say that there’s a lot to look at in Prague. It’s a cool place and I look forward to visiting my friends there again, perhaps over the summer.
My usual Heathrow rant
When I arrived at Heathrow for my outbound flight, I was again asked to go through a millimeter wavescanner device (imaging systems that store “naked” images of you for indeterminate periods of time in giant government databases you have no access to – that’s what I’m opposed to, the lack of regulation of these hysterical “teworwists are everywhere” people, not very short term image scanning per se.). I again refused, since I’m a British citizen, was in the UK, and they can’t legally force me to go through one of those (yet). This time, I was very firm and quite vocal in front of other passengers (but civil and complicent with legal requirements) and immediately showed them membership cards from several human rights organisations. This time, I wasn’t given a degrading experience. So, that’s how to handle them.
Heathrow was as annoying as usual on the return with the typical delays I have come to expect going from one terminal to another to finally reach a bus that would take me home. At the bus station, the lines were again confusing and I decided to explain this to one of the staff but alas, my words fell on deaf ears. Apparently, the only people who use this bus are regular passengers, so it’s entirely ok to have missleading signage that’s confusing to visitors – despite the fact that I witnessed a bunch of people getting confused first hand. Typically British.
Jon.