3: Prague Diary

Friday 13th Day Two.

We woke on the alarm the next morning to streaming sunlight. Excited by the promise of a hot day after months of our bleak midwinter we went out onto the balcony to investigate. If Russ was writing this diary he’d that it was red hot, something that he repeated often throughout the week. I’m more reserved because anybody who knows me also knows that I was a reptile in a former life. Anything below eighty to eighty-five degrees to me is cold. It was gorgeous though. The sun was brilliant and already warm at nine in the morning. I had a cigarette on the balcony and smiled at Mr Sun and the world in general.

We were both excited because we were going to the Roger Waters concert that night. I had a quick wash and threw on a sun dress. This was to become my ‘Breakfast dress’ because I put it on every morning for convenience because I didn’t get my bath until we’d gone back to the room. I did wonder if after a few days the other guests were commenting that I’d worn the same dress all week. Maybe that’s the reason that we had the table to ourselves.

The hotel breakfast was fantastic but like most things Pragian it was seeped in its own quaint little weirdness. The hotel had forty six bedrooms we were in room forty four. That’s, on average, ninety two guests to feed every morning. The food was fantastic and plentiful, but, although most things were set out and ready you had to brew your own tea and make your own toast. No problem, until I explain that there was one mini kettle and one two-slice antiquated toaster.

Anybody who has travelled abroad knows that nobody does bread, sausage or bacon like we do. Why do Brits moan about everything so much? I love trying new things as long as they’ve never been near the sea. The sausage was those frankfurter things that are like spicy hotdogs, the bacon was some weird basdardised ham. The toasting bread was that stuff that looks as though it could do with a good infusion of yeast and you needed good choppers to eat it but, it has to be said that Pragian poached egg is much like its British counterpart. Despite not being like our full English, the full Prague was damned tasty. But our breakfast didn’t end there. Any country that does the clash of culture and mixes full and continental breakfast gets my vote. The spread was wonderful. We had….

Beverages: tea, coffee, apple, orange and tomato juice, bottled water and, get this, champagne. We never bothered with it but if we’d wanted to we could have drunk ourselves into oblivion at nine o’clock every morning on cheap champagne. How cool is that?

Then there was muesli, cornflakes and several other varieties of cereal. We had a full selection of yogurts and a wonderful bowl of fruit salad. For the first two days I had a bowl of muesli with fruit and yogurt topping, lovely. Then we were offered a full cooked brekkie. There were platters of several different meats and cheeses to choose from and four kinds of crusty rolls. Bowls dotted the room with various little pots of jams and chocolate spread, cheese spread and marmalade. There were those cracking little caramelised ginger biscuits that you get in posh coffee shops with your latte, and perhaps the oddest thing on a breakfast buffet, a selection of different cakes… very odd.

After eating that first morning and being traumatized by our starvation of the previous night, I went into instant, times-are-hard, blitz, mode and insisted that we made up some butties for later with the crusty rolls and fresh meats and cheeses. Damn, those buns late at night after a bellyful of vodka were amazing and the making up of the supper butties to put in the min bar fridge became a daily ritual.

Another loveable little foible of the hotel is their love of Geiger. Geiger doesn’t do a lot for me, I flatly refuse to be shocked by his pictures. His style is best described as mutant, mechanical, humanoid and out to shock and disturb. I suppose in his day he was quite the radical Doctor Frankenstein of art. His pictures depict fantasy babies that have bulbous heads and odd monsters with human faces. They are mostly colourless and are quite grim in shades of grey. Across from our table in the dining room was a five foot tall print of an armless, legless, naked woman’s torso. She looks kind of metallic and part woman-part drainage system. Her stomach is transparent and you can see her partly digested food. A tube connects from her gut to her mouth where she perpetually regurgitates and circulates this stomach full of food. It’s bizarre. I must find out if, like Kafka, he’s another Son of Prague. If he is then outside of our hotel they certainly don’t seem as proud of him. Give me Escher any day.

After breakfast I had my first Jacuzzi. Talk about luxurious. The water was boiling and it was wonderful and only heightened my feeling of buoyant good mood for the day. I dressed in denim shorts and a pink ribbed vest with a rose tattoo print on it. I put my hair up in pig tails to get it off my face. I wore my black pumps because I knew that I’d be on my feet for hours that day and topped up my painkillers.

The nearest tram stop into the city and beyond was only two minutes from the hotel. We had to cross a very busy road considering we were in some weird backstreet and then we had to go through a daunting and depressing underground tunnel. This brought us on to a street with a row of shops, bars and restaurants and the little kiosk where we could get our travel passes and where I bought my Superking cigarettes at just over a pound for twenty for the rest of the week.

Those travel passes were the best bargain of the week. We paid two hundred and eighty crona each for them which is about six pounds. They gave us unlimited travel on all the buses, trams, trains and the underground tubes. We used them constantly and more than got our money’s worth out of them. We’d been told by other guests that the golden number to be remembered at all times was the number eighteen. That was the tram that would take us into the heart of the city. Nobody seemed to be able to help us out on finding the best route to the Sazka Arena where Waters was playing that night.

Armed with our travel passes and with most of the day still ahead of us we decided to get on the number eighteen and just see where it took us. We had this half-plan of getting in the vicinity of the Sazka as early as possible, and then we were on hand for the concert that night.

It was more or less a straight road from Albertov where we were staying into the center. Prague is so beautiful. Once you get out of ghettoesville I can see why people rave about it. The architecture is spectacular in a mix of German and Russian influence; it’s baroque and ornately pompous. They love swirls and spires, bridges and inlay. The tram on that first ride took us right through tourist central. We saw the river in all her abridged splendour. The sunlight was glinting on the water like a million sparkling diamonds and I was instantly in love with the place, though the hospitality of the locals had yet to win me over. A specially organized tourist trip on a bus would have cost us thirty quid a piece; we got to see all of Prague’s highlights on our first tram ride.

We left the city and only when we seemed to be disappearing into hickseville again did we get off. By then we’d seen a boat trip that we wanted to take at some point and had earmarked several good places to visit.

Armed only with the name of the arena and a very confusing map we set about finding a route to where we wanted to be. We asked a tram driver sitting on a station bench if he could help us. He wasn’t very friendly but he wasn’t out and out hostile either and with much sign language and our poor pronunciation of the Sazka Arena we finally understood that he was telling us to get a number three tram and to get off again after three stops. Well, we think that’s what he said, seemed easy enough.

We didn’t have to wait long for a number three tram and again we managed to get seats and had not yet had the delights of giving them up to surly and ungrateful older people, nor had we experienced the Prague, standing up on a tram, method of human torture. These trams seem to have no speed limit and hurtle along at a hell of a speed, everybody in Prague is in a hurry.

We met up with two lads on the tram who were also going to the Waters’ concert. The Pink Floyd shirts were a dead give-away. They told us that far from reaching journey’s end after three stops, it was only the stop where we exchanged tram for metro, the underground railway. They weren’t going straight to the arena and had plans for the day so, feeling part of some great brotherhood by being both British and Waters’ fans, we said goodbye to them and headed off for pastures new.

This place was also bleak. We asked several people how to get to the Sazka with no success so changed tactic and asked for the metro. Russ does an insipidly camp impression of a train going underground, luckily though, the man, unlike me, didn’t seem to think that Russ was offering him a blow job. He mumbled something to his mate and they waved us off in the direction of a daunting section of main roads and over-and-under bridges. It wasn’t easy but we finally found the subway station. Now we had to work out which train to get. We asked and asked and asked, finally a man with a smattering of English kindly wrote down the name of the suburb we wanted for the Sazka and told us which tram to get. Once we knew where we were and where we wanted to be, it wasn’t difficult. The ride was much the same as a tube ride in London, the only difference was the strange names of the destinations.