Alrighty.
Back to the story then.
We switched our brains off. Time passed, and they automatically switched back on again, much much earlier than we desired. Call it jetlag, call it subconscious excitement, call it torture, call it whatever you like - it wasn’t nice.
There it was though, awake at 7:30am, after a ridiculous journey, and in a new country with a whole week off of work, most of which we intended to sleep through. Regardless of the new country, when you’re not working, sleeping in should be high on one’s list of priorities.
Well, given that we were actually alive, and semi-functional (I know so many of you don’t believe that), we figured we might as well go all out on this morning-weirdness and actually have breakfast too. Whoa, hold your horses, I can hear you saying it.
Paul? Renee? Awake at some kind of indecent morning hour? With cognitive functions, and a portion of their motor-skills? And they’re going to have breakfast? Surely it’s some kind of joke, right? I mean, not on a non-working day, right?
I kid you not. These things came to pass. We left our little hostel room and trekked down the mightily wide staircase, all the way down to reception, cast our eyes around and discovered that breakfast was being served further downstairs - in the basement bar area. All the food you can eat, all the coffee you can drink, 100 crowns (or kc, as they will now be referred to).
Understand that 100kc is approximately $7.30 AUD.
This is a few dollars less than one would pay at Starbucks for a medium sized coffee of (some might say) questionable quality, and a slightly heated, but definitely not toasted, blueberry bagel… that may or may not come with cream cheese, depending on how bright the staff are.
We cheerfully paid up, poured ourselves some of the black, black brew, and cast out eyes over the spread. It was right about then that we remembered that we don’t usually eat breakfast, and we weren’t particularly hungry.
This is no insult to the food at Sir Toby’s, it looked good.
Different kinds of interesting European breads, standard white bread, some kind of Nutella thing, actual Nutella, plenty of fruits, and amazing array of cheeses, eggs & pancakes - cook to your liking - and so on… and so forth… until your stomach bursts, with the possibilities forced into it.
Coffee and toast it was, but, strange European toast! Strange European goat cheese on strange European toast, covered in strange European cucumber slices, that were remarkably like normal, Australian cucumber slices, but had an interesting accent and were from some place the name of which I couldn’t pronounce.
Next stop? The garden outside. You may have seen photos of it, a nice place. Lush and a bit overgrown, bricks, plants, sewing machine tables, various bits of pipery sticking out here and there, altogether rustic and unlike any city-garden at home.
Given that we knew we were being taken out to dinner that night, we plotted out our small adventure and bit of exploring to do in the surrounding neighbourhood. After all, we were mightily jetlagged, still had no luggage, and no idea whether it was going to show up there, or with Rudy & Karina, or what exactly.
You see, when I attempted to call the luggage-people that morning, they refused to answer their phone. Several times, at different times, increasingly later times. I damn near assumed “all the time”, but apparently Rudy got through.
We step out into the world and find ourselves in what is actually a relatively boring set of streets. To us though, it was wondrous. A beautiful fairy land of cobblestones and trams, curious new trees, and terribly old buildings. You must understand that these streets were only boring when compared to many, many other streets that wind their way through the older parts of town.
So we walked a few blocks, stopping at stores that were closed - all things out of the centre are closed on Sunday - through a tiny park, right on by what was either a slightly lame scuplture, or the world’s most pathetic playground, and eventually into an Italian restaurant. Yes, we chickened out on a Czech lunch. In our defense, we could read the Italian menu, and a 250ml keraff of their medium-priced wine, worked out at about $3.10 AUD.
It seems in most restaurants, you don’t buy wine by the glass, it is either by the bottle, or by the keraff. Of course, we got one each.
The meal was delicious, the staff were typically grumpy Czech wait-staff - which we are still getting used to - and the wine was alright. The entire experience was essentially nap inducing, hence we wandered back to the hostel, into the useless lift, up the next two flight of stairs, and fell back into bed.
Of course, we woke up just in time to be late for our dinner appointment. So, breakfast strangeness aside, none of you have to worry that we’ve changed too much.
Rudy & Karina had kindly invited us out to dinner at what I remember as being the Staropramen Brewery restaurant. For those of you not in the know, Staropramen is a delicious beer that costs next to nothing over here, and is very expensive absolutely everywhere else.
Getting there involved hopping onto a tram, for the first time, and making damn sure we hopped off at the right stop. A place we’d never seen before, a place not marked out clearly, a place with a name we could barely read - let alone speak, a place on the other side of town, a place we were sure we would never see, as we trammed along on our merry way.
As it turns out, it really wasn’t that hard. A careful eye had to be kept out, but our heads were turned to the windows anyway. This particular tram (the number 12) snakes through Old Town, and by Petron Hill, under the shadow of the Castle, and there are many, many amazing things, as you’ll have seen in the first lot of photos.
There was also a helpful electronic board on the thing, that indicated which stop it was going to get to next, and so we just matched the name to the one in our SMS, once we worked out… how it worked.
We hop off at the right stop, look about, spot some friendly faces, wander over… and lo and behold, not only are our airport-saviours and all-around incredibly lovely new friends waiting for us with their delightful children in tow… but they also have our luggage. Sweet, beautiful black suitcases, their aesthetically less-than-pleasing forms had never been as exciting and desirable as in that moment. I know I wanted to hug mine, and when Rudy passed the handle to me, I was glad to bear the weight. Fresh clothes, phone chargers, shampoo, comfortable shoes, powerpoint converters, such treasures they contained, and more.
The fact that we were going to have to drag them into a rather nice restaurant didn’t bother us at all, they were never, ever going to leave our sight again.
Enter the restaurant, I can’t actually remember what most of it looked like at this point. I know that where we sat was almost more like some kind of bar-dining area than a white-table-cloth-and-silver-cutlery style of place, and that the lighting was suitably tavernesque.
I know that the menu was a curious contraption made of liftable pages, set into wood. I know that the waiter, was the grumpiest waiter we had encountered by then, and possibly remains so. That he was large, and bald, and even R & K found him to be particularly impossible.
Beer was served in the ridiculously large glasses I have gradually come to accept, and Renee drank some. You’ve seen the photos, it’s no lie, this place is changing her… Or the beer just tastes better.
The goulash was delicious, the portions were on scale with the beer servings, the children were amusing, and the conversation was enjoyable.
All in all, it was a delightful evening out in our new city.
The only real challenge left, was drunkenly getting those huge suitcases back to the hostel via the tram. Sigh.
We managed, but it was a minor task, very much worth it though. Let me just say it again: Fresh clothes.
Now of course… I have all the fresh I could possibly want, when we remember to do the laundry.
