As you can imagine, it was quite eerie to travel to a country that was once behind the iron curtain. The fact that we drove from Germany to the Czech Republic seemed surreal. The trip was over 500 kilometers from our humble apartment in Plieningen, Germany.
Since the Czech Republic did not use the Euro currency, we were forced to exchange Euros for Czech Crownes. The base did not do that exchange so we were forced, once again, to go to the airport to make the exchange.
Although the trip was long covering lovely German countryside, I was struck with an even greater awareness of communism and the eeriness of traveling to a country that was once under communist control. Driving through the checkpoint without having to stop and show our passports was weird to me. But I wasn’t about to complain.
Our hotel was in Old town. As you can imagine, parking is limited in old cities like Prague. The streets are narrow and can barely fit traffic let alone parked cars. Many of the streets are one way making it even more difficult to get to where we needed to go. Our GPS (affectionately known as “Julie”) finally took us to the parking location. Unfortunately, we didn’t know it was on the back side of the hotel, so we went wandering around with luggage in tow.
By the time we found our hotel and checked in, it was 9 pm. Our room was on the fourth floor. We took the elevator up to the third floor and had to hoof it to the fourth floor because the elevator didn’t go that high.
We decided to go to dinner and finally found an Argentinian restaurant and ate, then walked back to the hotel at midnight! Yikes!
The next morning, we had breakfast in the hotel which was like all the breakfasts we had in Germany and other European cities. But the kicker was that we did not realize that the elevator that we took the night before was not an elevator that you’d take in the U.S. hotels. No… this one was on the exterior of the building and perched on the side of the hotel with thin poles.
When I saw how it was attached, my heart was in my mouth every time we got on it.
Was this a hint of what was to come? Hopefully the trip would get better. Stay tuned to part 2 of our Czech Republic adventure.