Ahoy! (Pirate OR Czech Greeting...You decide.)

Last Monday, my mom and her friend Natalie came to visit me in Regensburg. We had a lovely three days there together before heading off to visit Prague, a long-time travel dream of my mother's.

The four and a half hour train ride from Regensburg to Prague was, well, not exactly what we had bargained for. Having lived in Germany for the past few months and knowing what I do about regional (not ICE) trains, I knew that our transportation wouldn't be quite top-notch. We did splurge for the first-class tickets, which got us a whopping five seats to a compartment (instead of the usual six) and a skinny rectangle of aged carpeting (instead of the usual cracked linoleum). Our direct line to Prague was destined for adventure, however. About two hours into the ride, our train came to a screeching halt in a small Czech town just across the border from Germany. A bellowing female (I think) member of the train staff knocked loudly on our compartment door, gesturing for us to get out. In very broken German (English was a no-go) she said that a truck had overturned on ze tracks and vee vould haff to take zee bus to anahzer station. Zhen vee could get on anahzer train und go to Praha. So the three of us lugged all of our suitcases off that train with the other passengers and clambered up an unpaved road in the rain to board large buses in an unfamiliar land, heading toward an unknown destination with people who didn't speak our language. We were sure, of course, that we were being sold into the Eastern European sex trade.

After twenty-five minutes of driving along twisting back roads, listening to Linkin Park blasting out of the bus's Communist-era radio and laughing nervously at our predicament, we arrived at the promised "next station" and boarded the train. The train left immediately (what if we had stopped to go to the bathroom? There was no process to make sure all passengers were safely transferred from the first train to the bus to the second train). 

We arrived in Prague about an hour later than expected, and set off to find a taxi that would take us to the Prague Castle Hotel. The first cab driver we talked to assured us he had good prices and a meter, and after we schlepped everything down into his car and buckled up, he held up a laminated card (his 'meter') that said he would charge us 980 Czech crowns to get to our hotel. That is just under $50. Luckily we knew better, because Natalie's guidebook had warned us of cab scams and told us that a cab shouldn't cost any more than 200 crowns inside the city. We had better luck with the next guy, and arrived at the hotel around 4pm for just 186 crowns. Not too shabby.

That night we had dinner at Alchymist, an upscale restaurant recommended to us by our French compartment-mate from the train (who lives in Prague). The decor was certainly impressive (think candelabras, mirrored mosaics, lots of velvet) but the Mediterranean fusion food didn't wow me. Maybe I've just been spoiled by my mom's saffron rice. :)