First Full Day In Prague, Vol. 1

It is about 2:00 PM in Prague. Our second day, first whole day in Prague has been interesting. First we found out that the traffic noise outside our apartment is much worse than anticipated. Second, a lot of light from the nearby street light shines into our bedroom. Hence Phyllis has a bit of time trying to sleep. These combined with jet lag and seven hours of time zone change made sleeping last night more difficult than desired. We did get some sleep and felt reasonably good this morning.

Also, we discovered this morning that our connection to the Internet did not work, so John spent considerable time trying to figure out why with no avail. We had a light breakfast and set out on a walk around 9:00 AM. We easily made it to Wenceslas Square where all tourists end up. We walked in that general area for a while. Nothing is quite as easy here as in the USA.

We stopped at a McDonalds (there are seemingly hundreds of them here) to use a bathroom. As in most of the world, you are charged to use the bathroom. However we had forgotten that and Phyllis went with no money. But you do what you have to do, and it worked out ok. I later used the facility and paid the lady. While there a British lady also claimed she had no money. How is one supposed to even know what a five crown coin looks like after one day. It is all a bit confusing.

After leaving McDonalds I decided to show Phyllis how well I knew my way around Prague, so we went on a small excursion. However, as I did last September, I got one hundred eighty degrees turned around and we wandered for a while. A young Chinese lady then asked us for directions! That was a mistake on her part. We wandered with her for a while, each of us what with map in hand trying to locate the street we were on and looking for a cross street. The good news was that after about fifteen or twenty minutes, we actually got oriented and parted ways, each on the right course.

We headed for home and stopped at a mid-sized grocery store quite near our apartment and had a rather successful shopping adventure. There are lots of items available here. However, the food is expensive. We filled one plastic, hand-held basket like you could carry around in a USA grocery store and filled it with $60 of food – nothing exotic, just regular stuff. We came home and made a sandwich lunch eating the deli meat we bought (from unknown animal), some kind of white cheese and some kind of deviled meat spread. We now know the word for chicken is kure and will look for that in the future. There are really nice fresh fruits and vegetables available in little shops near us as well as in the mid-sized store that we shopped in today.

I am typing rapidly because I do have the Internet working on one computer but not the second and need to make an experiment to see if my current conjecture about the problem is true. However, I dare not change anything until this message is published. We hope to make it to a big (read WalMart-like) store here called Tesco (an English chain), but could not find it this morning. We may look for that later today or just go back to Flora, the really nice mall near us, later today.

I will publish this now. If you don’t hear from us for a couple days then my conjecture on the Internet access problem was incorrect. If you hear again soon, that will mean I may have been correct. All for now.