The Good, the Bad, and the Cesky

I'm back, and before you have time to ask me how my trip was, I'm going to sum it all up nice and simple.

The Good:
Prague is legitimately cool. Sort of like what "Main Street, Europe" Disneyland would aspire to if there was any more room to expand in Anaheim. Just an amazing collection of old buildings and unreal sights that makes the place more foreign and exotic than anywhere I've traveled in Europe.

The Bad:
This amazing collection of buildings is clogged with 2.3 million tourists. I know, not all while we were there, but it felt like it. Walking around the Old Town on a summer night is like hitting Landsdowne Street 20 minutes after the game lets out. Which is fine for a couple nights. Then you want to start killing people.

The Good:
Prague food. Here I was told boiled cabbage and gray meat would be the norm. Not so! Great thin pizza, hearty pastas, and the ubiquitous Caprese salad kept us very happy everywhere we went. There was also this truly fantastic Cuban restaurant serving authentic mojitos, huge green salads with nuts and fruit, and slabs of steaks spiced expertly and slathered with avocado pieces. Didn't taste like Communism. (Except: I guess that is how Communism tastes in Cuba. Huh.)

The Bad:
Prague food. Somewhere along the way once of these delicious meals held my future pain and suffering, in the form of a vicious stomach bug that consumed the last two days of my trip and from which I am only now recovering. I will never know which one--best not to judge. The sketchy medicine, called Cloroxinum, prescribed to me by a quaint looking Czech pharmacy, also not the best thing about the experience. (Upon arriving home and talking to my doctor, was told "you probably don't want to put anything with 'Clorox' in the name in your body.")

The Good:
Getting away. Being able to have long, extended conversations with James on a wide variety of interesting subjects that never once drifted to the following topics: laundry, bills, car problems, scheduling, grocery shopping. It's really nice to remember all those things besides being married that you have in common.

The Bad:
Trying to get home. Woozy, in serious pain, and under the influence of Eastern European medicine, I was completely unable to contribute to the "get out of town" effort when our last day came. James had to pack my suitcase (only one or two important things got left behind in our hotel room), carry all of our bags, and shepherd my groaning self through sixteen and a half hours of air travel to get back to our blessed apartment.

And the Cesky:
Cesky Krumlov is a picturesque, medieval and apparently sublime town in the Czech countryside that about 37 people told us we "had" to visit once they found out we were going to the Czech Republic. For months, everywhere we turned it was Cesky Krumlov, Cesky Krumlov, Cesky Krumlov! We started calling it "f--king Cesky" (pronounced, in our expert opinion, "Chessky") For one thing, we didn't want to go. We didn't have a lot of extra time and we really wanted to explore Prague to the fullest. On the other hand, we didn't want to miss out on the life-changing experience that was presumably Cesky Krumlov. So we debated for weeks, looked into hotels, three hour bus trips, and rental cars. Cesky became a noose around our necks that we finally shrugged off only three days into our trip, deciding not to go and able to breathe easier as a result.

For the remainder of our trip, "f--king Cesky" worked well as a catch phrase for anything we felt we lacked adequate English words to describe, kind of the way "smurf" functioned for me in the early 80's: the ridiculous gift shop prices in Old Town, Cloroxinum, the interminable security check process at the Prague airport (about 8 minutes per person), the alarming number of bachelor parties run amok on the streets, a 25% automatically included gratuity at a restaurant that will go unnamed, all of our tv channels being dubbed in German, and the utter inability for any Prague citizen to know the whereabouts of Charles University (the oldest university in Europe and my conference venue that I searched for on foot for 1 1/2 hours). Oh, and Cesky means "Czech," so best not to throw about that little epithet too audibly next time you're in Prague.

I guess wherever you go you can make a list of both the good and the bad. That's traveling--the only way to avoid it is to stay at home in your own snug bed and eat your own organic, non-parasite-y food. But that would be missing out. So, as an alternative, you can just, as I chose to do, hitch up your sad rumpled traveling pants when things don't go your way and curse the locals. Good times.