Peaceful Prague
This morning I spent almost six hours at Schiphol, Amsterdam’s huge airport. The sunrise was spectacular right when I arrived at 7:30, and the airport was already packed. Northwest has two business-class lounges there, and one was so full they weren’t letting anyone else in, and the other was crowded too.
And the departure gate for the KLM Cityhopper flight to Prague was a zoo — the escalator went down into an area that was already packed shoulder-to-shoulder with dozens of passengers waiting for the security check, so people had to barge into the crowd in order to get off the escalator and out of the way for those immediately behind. Everyone was laughing and taking it well except for a group of muscular young German guys who seemed to think it was everyone else’s fault that the line was moving so slowly; they showed us who’s boss by pushing through the crowd with no regard for who had been there before them. Very sweet.
I got in a nice catnap on the flight to Prague, which was much needed after not sleeping on the flight to Amsterdam because some guy behind me had a digital alarm that went off every hour and he couldn’t figure out how to stop it and I didn’t actually take it away and smash it to pieces, although I lay there with my eyes closed for a couple of hours fantasizing about doing so. Anyway, on this Prague flight I woke up just in time to see a Soviet-built nuclear reactor near Prague spewing steam into the cold sunny afternoon sky, but by the time I got my camera out the clouds had covered it up. Damn, it looked cool.
The contrast between Prague’s airport and Schiphol was striking. I don’t think I’ve ever been in such a deserted airport, not even in the middle of the night, and this was 3:00 in the afternoon. I have no idea whether that’s a typical Sunday or what, but I was the first person off the plane and walked alone through most of the airport, only seeing an occasional security guard and not one other passenger until I got to baggage claim. Here’s the crowd at baggage claim:
I walked out front to a deserted sidewalk with a long line of cabs waiting, and hopped in a taxi for the drive to my hotel. The taxi driver was very friendly and turned on a country music station, seemingly for me. It was nice to listen to happy Czech people singing “Kiss an Angel Good Morning,” “Please Release Me,” “Oh Suzannah” and other Yankee favorites while driving across the high plain west of Prague and then down into the Vltava river valley.
We passed many parks, all full of bare deciduous trees, old folks on benches, and lots of roller-bladers and kite-flyers. Lots of graffiti, too, including a few words I recognized (TRICK, SPORT, FUCK EMI) and lots of strings of consonants without enough syllables. Then we crossed the river and drove along it for a while, where the crowd was younger: jeans, leather jackets, tattoos, and more rollerblades. Some cities have bicycles everywhere, and it looks like Prague is all about rollerblades instead.
Jiri the bellman here at the hotel told me all about how to catch the subway from across the street into downtown, but that’s not going to happen on this trip. Right now would be my best chance, but my throat’s a bit sore and I need to catch up on sleep — this will be a long trip, and I’ll be doing most of the talking. So I’ve spent 20 minutes writing this up instead of taking a couple hours to go downtown and back for some pictures.
Here’s the view from my room on the 15th floor of Corinthia Towers:
Nap time … zzzz.
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 25th, 2007 at 7:14 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on March 25, 2007 at 11:19 am Megan wrote:
Prague is one of my favorite cities in the world. The combination of incredibly ornate old architecture (unfortunately I know nothing about periods–I just know there are a lot of gilded spires, and a cool macabre clock with Death as cuckooo), dreary Communist construction, and cool modernism (check out the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers building) is great.
I hear the prostitution is really awesome, too.
The last time I went to Prague Cody was doing a writers’ program there, and I went to freeload for a week. I arrived a day before he did, so I stayed in a cheap hotel on the outskirts of town and wandered around by myself for a while. Public transportation is easy.
In my wanderings, I saw the worst transvestite ever. I mean Emily Howard bad (if you haven’t seen Little Britain, please do). He was apparently South East Asian, with a Saddam Huseein mustache, an Edith Bunker outfit, and hot pink ill-applied lipstick. He was walking around in a deserted bureaucratic/industrial neighborhood with a couple other young Asian guys. It looked like some sort of hazing stunt.
Ah, good times.
on March 25, 2007 at 2:50 pm Doug wrote:
Hmm, now you’re making me want to get some work done before the sun comes up and go out and snap a few pictures!
This hotel is one of those cool modern structures: 25 stories of shiny steel and glass, and not another modern building like this anywhere in sight.
on March 25, 2007 at 8:26 pm Tom wrote:
That shot of the airport, because it’s so empty and so primary colored, looks more like something out of Second Life. Are you sure you actually went anywhere?
on March 25, 2007 at 10:24 pm Doug wrote:
Tom, I’m losing track a bit myself. I had some weird dream that was work-related but set in SL. May need to see a shrink soon … in SL, where they’re surely less expensive.