And you thought the ones in the wrong queue were fuckwits?
Star Wars fans in attempt at Darwin Award candidacy. Marvelous.
Prague – flying and driving
OK, folks. I suppose I better tell you all about it. I could break this post up, but what they hey. If it’s a long one, it’s a long one (fnaar).
First off, thanks to Derek and his Mrs for the bed on Thursday night. We were flying out of East Midlands so it made sense for me to drive down on the Thursday evening and crash at his as we had to be at the airport around 9am. The glow-in-the-dark stuff around the light in the spare room was a nice touch. I’m assuming that wasn’t just for my benefit.
Friday started off well enough. If there’s one good thing about airports, it’s the fact that the bars are open round the clock. A couple of beers before boarding the plane was just the right way to start a holiday. Until you remember that once you’re on board you can’t use the loo until the pilot’s decided it’s safe. Or until he reckons someone is about to burst. I wonder if they have little numbers rackets going as to how many exploding bladders they can cause before they switch off the seatbelt sign?
On arrival, the taxis were a bit ****** up because one of the drivers (we needed two vans for the 13 of us) had crashed on the way there and had to go to hospital. Which filled us full of confidence. One of the VW Passats that seemed to pass for 90% of the remaining taxis was driven by a right penny-pincher. In the queue for pickups, he was rolling it along by hand! Sadly, we couldn’t stay long enough to watch him try to get it over the speed bump as a replacement driver arrived. He was dropping another passenger off in the same sort of area, so it made sense for use to use that van.
After what seemed like an age (and was maybe 20 minutes) on some of the bumpiest road I’ve ever been on, including Nigeria, we were stopped by a police roadblock. They were looking under every car with mirrors before letting it pass. Weird. A quick look outside said that we were outside the Luxembourgian embassy. Who the hell wants to blow up that up? Hell, the country itself is so tiny if you were that bothered, you could annihilate the whole place with not much more dynamite.
Then one of the lads spotted a stars ‘n’ stripes up ahead. Ah – the yanks. “****, if I’d known we were passing there, I’d have bunged some Semtex in my bag and changed my name to Abdul Jazeira for the weekend”. Hey, it was funnier after a few beers.
We pulled up just shy of the building itself and the Mysterious Stranger in the front said to the driver, “That’s fine, man. That’s mah hoteyul over thur.”
A yank.
I think he was deaf, scared or just hadn’t noticed – but I’d only been in Prague 20 minutes and already I’d almost caused an international incident. As soon as he clambered out of the van, everyone collapsed. ****, if I’d had known I’d have tried even harder to wind him up, dammit!
The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful (though the scenery was nice). The other bus apparently had an altercation with a pedestrian involving much screaming and threats in Czech. Which is OK, but hardly as good as nearly starting WWIII.
More tomorrow!
Imagine your comments in the bus were cause of more bladder bursting hysterics than the pilots holding on the seat belt sign… lol
I love Prague… and 60p/pint! You wuz done! We paid 30p for black Starpramen – far superior to the white stuff they charge £2.50 for over here!
Lessons you learn on your first trip to Prague: Don’t take taxis.
Cost of taxi from Airport to Hotel: 7quid
Cost of a weeks worth of public transport, including bus to and from hotel and underground to and from bus stops: 5quid
I love Prague. It’s fantastic. And not just because you can go out, buy two pizzas and get thoroughly mashed on Budvar and have change from a fiver.
When did you guys go? Don’t forget that exchange rates change! We got taxis from the airport as it was cheaper than getting a pass – there were thirteen of us and the travel passes had to be bought individually. The only other taxi we got was at 3am and cost about as much as three packets of crisps.
Virtually everywhere sold the “blonde” beer – it was actually quite hard to find anywhere outside of the restaurants selling the dark stuff.
But yes, I was impressed at spending a weekend there and coming home having spent less than £75 including accomodation!
Ah, okay. There was only the two of us in our taxi, and it was a fair distance out of the town centre on the other side to the airport. We went last summer; don’t know what the exchange rate is like now, but we spent a week there and spent about 175quid each including accomodation – but we did go to nearly every single tourist attraction in the city for that, too. The National Technical Museum was fantastic, I could have spent days in there. And the Museum of Communism was brilliant – a wonderful dark sense of humour pervaded the whole place, and the parallels with the current climate of fear in the US were all too apparent.