BFT23 - From Irsina to Prague

 

I’m not really sure why we chose to go to Prague on this trip.

We have no particular connections to the city or to Czechia – a recent rebranding of the Czech Republic, which in turn was one of the component pieces of Czechoslovakia back when I was younger. Things change, including the fact that I am no longer young, alas. We have no family heritage in Prague the way we do in Italy and no golden memories of our own to revisit. A few friends and family have been there and enjoyed it but that covers a lot of places really. There’s a lot to do in Prague, as we found out, but there wasn’t an overriding sense of “This is something we must see.” It was just a place that ended up on the list of possibilities when we put it together that night at the trivia contest – one that I may have put there myself, if I remember correctly – and everyone basically said, “Prague. Yes. That sounds interesting. Sure, let’s go there too.”

So we did.

We woke up in Irsina to find the valley below us obscured by a fogbank that crept slowly closer as we watched from the balcony of the apartment. It was lovely, but the thought of driving down the mountain on those twisty little roads through dense fog was a bit daunting. Fortunately the fog stayed on the other side of where we were and let us get on our way with reasonably good visibility. The drive was pretty uneventful as that goes, as we’d had several runs toward Bari at that point and knew mostly what to expect. It’s surprising how quickly you get used to even the most outlandish things.

Things got more interesting, in the liberal arts sense of the term, the way three-headed frogs are, well, interesting, when we got to the airport.

For all of its wonders, GPS can be a blunt tool sometimes and even a half-second delay can be tricky when the roads are small and the turns come up quickly. We got to the airport in Bari just fine but the signs were just ambiguous enough to give us a bit of hesitation and the turns came up just quickly enough to make that hesitation a problem, and this is why we ended up circling around a bit to get to the rental car drop off. Fortunately Bari’s airport is not that big, so this didn’t take long. Eventually we found the drop off lot and how to get into it, drove around the place for a while in increasingly tight spaces until we got to the little shed where we could return the car, and completed the paperwork to give the Speck back to its rightful owners. They seemed happy to see it.

And then we had to get to the terminal.

The lot was entirely ringed with chain link fence and it was big enough and crowded enough to make finding the exit rather confusing. At first we looked for an exit on the way to the terminal – which was clearly visible in the distance as a beacon to the lost – but after a while we just started looking for any exit at all on the theory that once we’d made it out of the parking lot we could orient ourselves toward the terminal from there. We found a gap in the fence eventually and from there it was simply a matter of heading toward the big building where all the people were and walking until we got to the front door, but for a while we had visions of being the Lost Tourists of Bari, forever circling the rental car parking lot, dragging our carry-on suitcases behind us and making that rattling noise that carry-ons make over bumpy pavement like Marley’s ghost rattling his chains. This is how mythology and legend begin, after all.

We got to the airport with a fair amount of time to spare, because we knew we’d need it. We were flying Ryanair, after all.

If you’ve never had the Ryanair experience, you can think of it as Spirit without the frills but with a much better record of actually getting you to your destination. At least that’s been our experience. We did this once before – as with this time, the only Americans on the entire flight – and they promise that for a small ticket price and a host of hidden fees they will deliver you and your luggage to your destination safely and on time, and both times we have flown with them they have delivered. They make no promises about comfort, convenience, or amenities of any kind, and they do not offer such things though they will sell you lottery tickets in flight if that’s your thing. But in stark contrast to my experience with Spirit earlier this year, Ryanair does deliver on the things it says it will deliver.

Ryanair is one of the two main carriers in Italy now that the Italian flagship airline, Alitalia, has collapsed – the other being ITA, which we avoided on the way to Italy on this trip thanks to the kindness of the Delta person at O’Hare – so if you’re going to fly into, out of, or within Italy the odds are good that you’ll be on Ryanair. It’s an experience. So is getting hit on the head with a line drive.

The Ryanair counter was a large island in the middle of the terminal at Bari, one that was clearly capable of being staffed by two dozen people or more. When we got in line, there was exactly one Ryanair person working there and we took some time to determine that yes, this is where we needed to be since we had to check baggage there. The line got longer and longer and started to snake through the terminal. It did not move forward. People with earlier flights than ours began to panic. Foot traffic through the terminal came to a snarling halt. The one person at the island tapped away on various computer keys that might have been accomplishing something but it was hard to tell from our distance. Eventually a very angry man in an airport uniform walked over and started speaking in urgent and clearly unfriendly tones into his radio. Even for someone with the limited Italian that I have it was obvious that the person on the other end of that conversation was whoever was in charge of Ryanair operations at the Bari airport and the first man was telling him that if he didn’t ramp up the staffing levels at his airport there would be Consequences. You have to imagine this conversation in Italian, which is an expressive language in both vocabulary and gesture when it comes to this sort of topic.

New staff rapidly appeared, and the line slowly began to move forward.

Meanwhile we’d noticed that there was a McDonalds across the way, and since it was now getting closer to lunchtime and you’re not going to get food on a Ryanair flight in the best times, we decided that we’d take advantage of this in shifts. Hey – sometimes you’re in the mood for a crappy American burger, what can you do? And I have to say that when my turn came around it was unreasonably good. Maybe they’re just better in Italy. Or maybe we were just glad to have anything. Hard to tell. It was quite possibly the slowest McDonalds I have ever been to, though, right up there with the one we went to in North Carolina before going to my cousin’s wedding – if they’d been moving any slower they’d have been going backwards, as my grandmother used to say – but even so I made it back to the Ryanair line with plenty of time to spare.

More or less.

That was a matter of some confusion, but it all worked out in the end. The only downside to getting through security was that I had been wearing the hat that I had purchased against the sun in Rome (rather than trying to find a place to pack it) and when I put it through the scanner it disappeared from my mind and I never thought to pick it back up. I’m not much for hats in warm weather and I can’t say I miss the hat, but it seemed a shame to abandon it like that.

I left my hat in Bari. It’s almost a song.

We all met up at the gate and rested for a while before waiting in another long line to board the plane. Kim’s phone had almost but not quite survived its salt-water rinse and it died one of its thousand deaths just as she was about to hand it over to the guy for her boarding pass – fortunately I had her pass on my phone too – and then we walked out onto the tarmac.

Ryanair is nothing if not efficient – they want you in and out as quickly as possible because every minute you spend doing something is a minute they’re not selling your seat to someone else for a higher price – so they board you from both front and rear. Honestly I don’t know why every airline doesn’t do it this way. You walk out, you climb up the stairs at one end or another of the plane – we boarded and left from the rear on this flight – and everyone is on board in half the time. It’s great! Every airline should do this.

And then you sit down and wait for the flight to begin.

It was a pretty uneventful flight but you couldn’t tell that from our fellow passengers. We were surrounded by what appeared to be one large Italian family on their way to their summer vacation – or perhaps just a large assortment of random Italians who acted as family – and they spent most of the flight hopping up and down to talk with each other about what may well have been their first flight ever to judge from the reactions they had to things. The ones behind me were doing well until the end when the plane began a series of slow turns and started descending toward Prague. Every time the plane would turn or get noticeably lower they would startle and tell their compatriots that they did not want this to happen, in very expressive ways. I’m not really sure what the alternative would have been, though. The plane went up. It had to come down somehow. Gravity: it’s the law. They were very relieved when we actually landed.

We got off the plane, found our bags, and made our way to the bus stop outside. Prague has some of the best public transportation in the world, as near as I can tell. They have a subway system that has stops all over. They have buses. And they have an astonishingly good trolley system, though they insist on calling them trams. You can get anywhere in Prague on the trams and we did just that – they’re reliable, frequent, and clean though you do have to know the trick to get the doors to open (there’s a big button you have to push on the doors, which we figured out by watching people do it). Also, people read on public transportation in Prague – actual books, in fact. I can see why Prague has such a large expat community from all over the world. We spent most of our visit on one tram or another, and it was lovely.

Having spent half a century under Soviet occupation, more or less, Czechs also have very little patience for the current Russian invasion of Ukraine and you see support for Ukraine emblazoned on pretty much everything there. Even the trams.

We found the ticket machines at the airport station pretty easily but unlike Rome you can’t buy a pass for a week – they’ll only sell you three days at a time. We did the math – it worked out well for us, given our later plans – and bought our tickets.

The 119 bus comes fairly regularly and we got on board. It rolled through a long series of pleasant neighborhoods before dropping us at the metro station at the end of the bus route. We went in and spent some time debating which side of the station our subway would be arriving on. This is tricky because none of us actually speak Czech. I can usually get the gist of things in Italian – especially if it’s written rather than spoken. It’s a Romance language, there are English cognates through French (thank you, William the Conquerer), and I remember enough of my 40-year-old Spanish classes that between these things I could usually figure things out. But Czech? It’s a Slavic language and all I know of that entire language family are the words for a few food items. Most people in Prague speak at least some English, though, and many of the signs are also translated (though not all). And really, there is only one subway line through that particular station so we stared at the big map until we found the station that Google Maps said we had to go to and then got on that side.

Getting down there was an experience, though. The Prague Metro is located not far from the center of the earth and it is a long way down. But the ride is nice if somewhat disorienting because they angle the posters along the escalator so it looks like you’re level even though your body is telling you that you’re losing altitude (or gaining it, coming back), and you don’t really need to look at a schedule – if you miss a train, the next one will be along momentarily.

We got off the metro, climbed back up the surface of the earth, and looked for our tram. This was somewhat more complicated because there are a lot of trams, some of which went to the station we were looking for and more of which didn’t, and there were several different places to wait. Eventually a couple of guys sitting on one of the benches came over and told us we were in the right place, and when our tram in fact did come by a few minutes later we got on board and took it to the stop about a block from our apartment.

We were supposed to meet Tatiana there, but we ended up meeting her mother instead – Mrs. Tatiana – who was a friendly person who welcomed us to Prague and gave us the tour of the apartment, which took less time to complete than it did for you to read this sentence. It was an exceedingly compact and efficient place, but clean and comfortable and more than enough for what we wanted. It was a nice place to hang out in after being out and about in the city.

It was on the fourth floor and the bar patrons hanging out in the entryway by the street were always polite to let you through. You could either walk up the stairs or take an elevator that was big enough for two people or one with a suitcase. Be sure to remember to close the door and hit the timed switch for the hallway lights! When you got to the apartment you came in at the middle. To the right was one bedroom, where Oliver and Lauren stayed. To the left was another – a converted living room that overlooked the street – where Kim and I slept. It also had a table and a refrigerator. Directly in front of you was a kitchenette about 1 meter by 2 meters, and a slightly larger bathroom to the left that also had the washing machine. We loved the shower there. It was a stall exactly 1 meter square and if you weren’t careful you’d butt dial up some very different water temperatures without meaning to, but it had the kind of water pressure we’d missed after ten days of exceedingly efficient Italian plumbing.

Mrs. Tatiana went to great lengths to warn us about the neighborhood – it’s good if you turn left, but not if you turn right, she said – but after six days there we never figured out why. It was a lovely place in either direction and we had a grand time walking around pretty much everywhere there.

We dropped our stuff, took care of the various loose ends for the rental, and then – since the day was still young – we headed out into Prague.