Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Three rules  of travel.

One: Any people more than a couple people and the progress of the  group slows to a crawl.

Two: Distances are deceptive

Three:  Every time somebody  comes  to Prague, if I just follow what  they  want to do, go  and see the things they’ve heard about, I will  discover new things.

After checking the  gang into  their B and B,  we  decided  to stop  at  the restaurant downstairs for drinks, but some people ordered  food  so everybody ordered food.  The restaurant (Globus in Karlin) has pretty good food, and although I sometimes think  their prices  are a bit high,  when  our total  bill  was produced, it wasn’t so bad.   But, the  service was slow.  So, a second  round of  drinks was ordered because the food was slow.  Then, Helena came just as we were finishing up and she ordered a meal, so a few people were on  their third drink.

Most didn’t have a clear plan, but Russ wanted to see the Dancing Building, so that became our  goal.  I suggested  we  walk along the river  to get there, a nice walk a bit  cooler  by  virtue of being near the water, and not beyond reasonable walking  distance.

Turns out it was  well  beyond reasonable walking distance, and the older members of our party (I would say I’m the youngest of the oldest) were all totally beat, but we went up to the terrace at the top of  the  building for a drink, and I must confess, in all the time I’ve been  in  Prague, I’ve  never  been  up there.  Lovely  view.

I still think it’s an ugly  building.  But,  that’s one  we can  tick  off the list.

Multiple screw-ups, but a nice day, and all’s well that ends well.  We went out to the airport to pick up  our friend arriving  from Portugal and it turned out the flight was arriving at 10:55 in the evening, so I  felt pretty stupid, but he never said p.m. in his e-mails, and Helena pointed out that this could  have been avoided by  using European time, i.e. 22:55.
So, then we went to Florenc to pick up  the  rest of the  party, couldn’t seen any  bus  arriving from  Vienna at just that time, took  a quick  walk  around  to see, waited a few more and then sent a message saying  we were waiting at the station, fortunately he answered back  right away “You’re 24 hours too  early.”
whoops.
Anyway, we had a relaxing afternoon and just got back from the airport,  flight  arrived on time and all is well.

Today was the last day for another class, the lads at the technical school in Prosek who I only taught once every two weeks, and it was an easy class, we talked about films.

Tomorrow, all of our guests are arriving, we have to go out to the airport in the morning and then back into town to meet everybody else at the bus station, so it will be busy.  First day, I don’t know we’ll get much sight-seeing done, the main thing will be getting everybody settled in, only one is staying with us the first few days.
We’ve got no set itinerary.  Whenever people come to Prague, they come with things in mind, things they want to see, things they’ve heard about, and so we’ll go with that.  One of the party has never been here before, so we will do the standard tourist tour at least one day.
We may or may not take a day trip at some point, Konopište maybe, we’;ll see.  I’ll keep the daily blog going, and I’m sure there will be interesting tales every day.

In political news, I’m glad to see the White House press corps is not letting this issue of separating small  children from their families at the border just slide by.  One after another, they ask the same question, and some are pointing out, quite clearly, that there is no law that forces the Trump administration to do this, that’s just a lie.

I have one Facebook friend who, in the time I’ve known her which is probably about a year now, has threatened to leave Facebook on an average of about every goddamned day.  Today’s post was about how she actually left but kept getting hints to post stuff to Facebook when she was at other sites, but apparently she was complying, or still just using Facebook, because there was her post.
I have another who periodically bitches about how often he’s been blocked by Facebook, but it’s never been for such a long period of time that I noticed he was gone.  Could happen.  There are so many people, far more than I ever communicated with regularly in real life, and sometimes somebody will just stop appearing and it takes a long while before you say “Hey, haven’t heard from old whatsisname for awhile.

But, I wonder what he does to get blocked.  His political views are considerably less radical than my own, and I’ve never been blocked.  He often posts poetry, some of which is his own and some of which is by famous poets he admires, and he posts works of art, and he has one artist he really likes that I’d never heard of who he posts constantly.  He doesn’t tend to use bad language.

Who knows.  There will always be people  who are way too petty about enforcing the rules, there will always be people who try to push the envelope, and there will always be a point where they meet, and clash.
But, also, I suspect he may be exaggerating a bit.

It’s late and we’ve got guests so I’d better get this blog written so everybody can get to bed.  It’s been a hell of a day, and the flat is in a bit of disarray, we’re going to have to move things just to lay down.  Helena’s Dad and cousin are here and they painted our flat, which is a huge improvement, and we bought a new (new to us) couch from the neighbor to replace ours, which I  thought was unnecessary but it had been  clawed up pretty good by the rabbit, we’ve had it for years, and the new one is considerably larger.  So, we took the old one to the recycling center, which took two trips because it wouldn’t all fit in  the car at once.
We’re sending Fifi off to the cottage for the summer, so the new couch will get a bit of a grace period, but we’re going to have to figure out some kind of rabbit proofing come September.
I guess that’s the deal.  You can have pets, or you can keep your furniture intact, but it’s hard to balance the two.  Such is life.
Anyway, I’m not going to worry about that now.  It’s high summer, the trees are as green as they ever get, the sun is hot, we’ve got guests arriving, a trip  to Croatia is planned, and within another week or two my class schedule will have dwindled to nothing.
From now until September, my plan is to enjoy every single moment.