Lost

Prague is a city of infinite variety and even after living here for 15 years I still find myself, at times, in neighborhoods I have never been to before.  It’s one of the most interesting cities to be lost in in the whole world, and I’ve been lost in London, Paris, Bangkok, Jerusalem and many others.

Today I got royally lost but, since I was on my way to a new class, it was a bit of a pain in the ass.  Interesting, though.

Watch Your Step

We left plenty of time in case we got a bit lost.  We, because the Iranian embassy school had asked us to provide two teachers for classes at the same time.  It would have been much more convenient if they could have had the classes back to back and one teacher could have done it, but the customer is always right, so Annie and I met up at noon and set out.

The first part went smoothly enough, metro and tram and we got into the neighborhood with a half hour to spare, and I thought my little hand drawn map, which I’d copied from  the internet, was perfect.  The first surprise was that what looks like a nice 3 block walk on the internet proved to be straight up a long flight of ice covered stairs.

The problem started at the top of the stairs.  The street we were supposed to be looking for wasn’t there.  Now, Prague is notorious for not having a lot of street signs.  You can sometimes walk for blocks and not see an identifying sign.  To make matters worse, locals often don’t know the names of the streets, navigating more by landmarks.  Also, the locals don’t particularly care if anyone who is not a local is lost or not.

So, I took my best guess (she was more or less following me, which was a big mistake on her part) and we set out.  We asked directions frequently, and the responses ranged from ‘don’t know’ to  ‘I think it’s sort of that way’ in varying degrees of certainty, but one encouraging sign was that everybody who said ‘I think it’s up that way’ was sort of pointing in the same direction.

They were all quite mistaken.

We eventually did find it, after a few phone calls, and we were only about 10 minutes late.  The lessons went well, and they were pretty understanding about it so, in retrospect, it was a lovely 45 minute walk.

After the class, I picked up Isabel from school and we were almost late for her tennis lesson.  I’m worn out.