Day 6- Prague

We arrived in Prague. Well, it wasn’t really Prague, it was a train station associated with the city. It was more like a field somewhere in the Prague area with train tracks running next to something that appears, upon arrival, to be some sort of long, elevated picnic shelter. Of course, some guy hawking rooms swept in as soon as they saw blue jeans and backpacks. I can’t really complain too much, the guy was relatively friendly, though he, of course, only had one room left and darn it, we’d better get going if we wanted it. Rob and I were naturally suspicious and didn’t want to even take anything he was offering for free. Troy was friendly and accommodating, he has the bad habit of being friendly to people, thus frustrating our efforts to get the heck away from the guy, which we eventually did manage to do.

However, we were forced to get the assistance of another room hustler (they speak English) when we were buying our train tickets into the city proper because the machine selling the tickets only had directions for operation in Czech.

Spanish, I’m sure, most everybody can deal with. We all grew up on Sesame Street, we all know what agua is. French, a little more exotic, but still occasionally readable, "Bonjour mademoiselle". Now German, I personally have seen a few times in my life. If I had to, I could at least pick out a word here and there and get by. Then there is Czech.

Imagine being a foreigner coming to Columbus, Ohio, hoping to fulfill your lifelong dream of making burritos at La Bamba’s. Moderately sized city, lots of signs, that sort of thing. Now, imagine that you cannot read a lick of English. Further, imagine all these signs saying "Parking" or "Public Transportation" (this is an imaginary situation, after all) are written exclusively in English. This obviously isn’t the hard part to imagine. Imagine further that everything is spelled phonetically. That was my first impression of Czech.

Slavic languages are not Romance languages. They do not share a Germanic ancestry as English does, so you (okay, maybe not you, but I) would think that the only thing more confusing than their spelling would be their pronunciation. However, you (I) would be incorrect, these industrious little Slavs decided to make their spelling equally, if not more, confusing than their pronunciation. I have distinct recollection of 4 different accents that could be used at any given time, usually with at least 2 different ones being used a total of 3 to 5 times in a word approximately the length of a street name. There were regular accents, back-accents, double accents, and an upside-down caret. I cannot recall if there were double back-accents or regular carets, but I’m sure they were in there. I seem to remember there were a few other interesting variations, but I don’t want to throw out too much conjecture. As an additional note, these accents were not limited to being located over vowels. Nope, consonants were also fair game for pronunciation change. I can only imagine how they make their typewriters, they either have to be the size of beach blankets or have vertically stacked keyboards.

We jumped onto the subway for downtown Prague and then we hit the streets.