Prague October 2009

In our quest to change the fate of the world and overcome global warming we took our challenge to Prague in October. The weather was expected to be similar to England but could our presence influence this? – we had four nights to test the theory.

MONDAY

We traveled from Derby on the Monday on an evening flight from East Midlands Airport; we arrived in Prague and passed through the airport smoothly. We had a new experience in that there was a man at arrivals with a sign displaying our name. We had booked a car from the airport to the hotel and had not yet paid for it so it was a relief to see him. We got into a smart car and we set off – we were now confident that we would not get mugged unless it was by our driver – he was huge. We quickly spotted the castle and, as explained, the hotel was just below it. We were able to pay off the driver – think Giant Haystacks on steroids – for both journeys in sterling and he gave us a voucher for the hotel to airport journey at the end of our stay.
We had been allocated the Hotel Neruda which was four stars – rather better than we might have chosen – and we installed ourselves in our room. I have no idea how stars are allocated and I wouldn’t know if all the rooms have to meet a standard but our room caused us some questions.
There was a real WOW factor to opening the door and seeing the room, there was a huge bed central in the room with stylish covers and large cushions. On both sides of the room there was a sloping ceiling which made it obvious that we were in the roof-space. The windows on either side of the room were dormers which opened to views of the road up to Prague Castle. The furnishings were high quality and the bathroom was large with stylish fittings but there was a shower and no bath, to Julia’s dismay.
The downsides to the room were the lack of real electric light in the hallway of the room this made using the wardrobe a lottery as dark garments hanging in a dark space defied the eyesight of anything other than an owl. The large double bed spread had two separate single duvets below it and this often created an icy expanse in the centre of the bed. We were disappointed with the TV in that it only had two channels in English out of only five channels available they were CNN news and Eurosport not the most balanced diet of viewing.

TUESDAY

Breakfast was provided in the hotel so we emerged from our room by 10.00am and went downstairs to eat. Our first problem was that the only water available for tea was tepid when all English people know that boiling water is required. The fruit juice was poor also – I cannot hazard a guess as to the fruit involved – leaving us drinking water. The bread on the other-hand was excellent, there were many varieties and they were all very tasty. There was a heated container with compartments for bacon, sausage and rubber fried eggs. We made ourselves bacon sandwiches and felt ready to face the day. By some organisational error, whichever table we chose for breakfast there was never a laptop provided but everyone else seemed to have one.
After breakfast, in cold drizzle, we set out towards the town centre, with a plan in mind. Guided by the map we found Charles Bridge and crossed it into the Old Town. We walked alongside the river up to the next bridge and there turned into town. We found Wenceslas Square to be the end of a long shopping street and not impressively square at all but certainly impressive. Overlooking Wenceslas Square is the National Museum which had been our aim for the rest of the morning as: a) it specialises in Natural History and 50% of us have an interest in that and b) it was raining on and off all day. Sadly it was closed for renovation process which was going to end later the week that we were in Prague and Julia had her lust for fossils unresolved.
We decided that a quest for a cup of tea would fill some of the time between then and a walking tour of Prague which started at 1.00pm. We found a café which offered pancakes and more importantly to us tea, we ordered Hot Tea and specified Black rather than Green (Indian v Chinese?) and when a mug of boiling water and a tea-bag each appeared we dunked in the bag and tea began to form in the mug. We felt more human after lingering over it and an accompanying pair of pancakes but we hoped for better tea before returning home.
As 1.00pm approached we returned towards Wenceslas Square and bought our tickets for the walking tour – nothing seems cheap in Prague – the tickets were 600 crowns each (£24). We also spotted an Irish pub for future reference as we needed to find somewhere to watch the international football on the next day and up to that point we had not noticed many/any sports bars.
Whenever we had chosen this week away we had carefully avoided both weekends with a view to also avoiding the British stag nights we had however not checked the World Cup qualification schedule and on the Wednesday of our visit the Czechs were at home to the Northern Irish. Irish supporters were everywhere but always it was good humoured.
We joined our tour group by the statue of Wenceslas mounted, our group consisted of a female guide, SuzzannHA, who stressed the end of every phrase as if she feared that we had dozed off listening to her, and, to my best memory, a Californian couple, an Australian couple, a German man, a young couple from Chicago, a couple from Teesside of about our vintage, ourselves and two blokes over from Manchester to support the Northern Irish. As we set off from the base of the statue the rain came on heavily and we had to take shelter in the doorway of a store. I was next to the couple from Middlesbrough and although I was a similar age to the man we seemed to have no friends or acquaintances in common; this is another illustration of my aversion to every time someone says “it’s a small world”.
We set off down the main street and saw several sites of interest in terms of the communist control of Czechoslovakia as it was before the amicable partition into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. SuzzannHA shed some light on her own distinctive pronunciation of the English language when she explained that when the communists lost power in the Velvet Revolution the school system switched from Russian being the compulsory language to English but the only language teachers available were Russian or German. She also told us that before the revolution the fact that a quarter of the country was liberated by the western forces was not acknowledged in their history lessons.
From the New town we went on to the Old Town and in the old market square we saw the astronomical clock which was impressive.
Our next stop was the Jewish quarter which only survived the war because Hitler had decided to make Prague the Eastern capital of this empire and the Jewish quarter was going to be a museum exhibit of an extinct religion. When I was told that it brought home to me something my father said. He remembered that after the war people were disappointed not to have made the world a better place but he countered that anyone who had fought with that intention was misguided, they should have been content that they fought to avoid it becoming a much worse place, which they had.
In the Jewish quarter, which even before the war was the only place Jews could live, there is an ancient cemetery which houses graves from the 15th century, SuzzannHA told us that there are 150000 bodies buried in the relatively small area it occupies and to accommodate that number they were buried in stacks of twelve.
We then used Charles Bridge to cross the river to the castle side which is known as the Lesser Town – Julia had selected this tour on the basis that it finished at the castle and we would be close to our hotel. Halfway over the bridge we were told one version of the martyrdom of John of Nepomuk – both stories agreed that he was the Queen’s confessor and when the suspicious king wanted to know if his queen had been unfaithful he demanded that the priest break the seal of the confession, you can see that refusing the king was likely to make trouble for John and in both versions it did. SuzzannHA told us at the marked spot on the bridge he was thrown in and drowned but the other story was that he was tortured to death and the body dumped into the river from that same point. It makes one wonder how much can be relied on in these tours.
Having crossed the bridge there was a refreshment break where we sat with the Australian couple and bought a bowl of soup in a small café. I imagine that there was a deal between the café and the tour or more personally with SuzzannHA and it was fair to say it was not the mast impressive food we encountered. It was also here that the Californian husband left his sleeveless jacket and was never reunited with it as he could not find the café again while we waited for him to go back. Every nuance of his wife’s demeanor indicated that he should never have been trusted to dress himself in the first place.
We then caught the tram for three stops up the hill to the castle. Although the castle complex occupies a commanding defensive position over the town it is no longer a recognizable castle, it is home to the parliament building and the most impressive structure up there is St Vitas Cathedral.
Although Prague is home to many religious buildings the population is 80% non-religious and this may explain the fact that we were totally free to photograph inside the cathedral. I have been pleased with my camera, a Kodak digital model with a 10X zoom, which was my first retirement present to myself but I found myself totally out-gunned by the Chicago couple, she produced from a backpack a formidable weapon with a lens much bigger than mine but her young husband hauled out an even bigger set of equipment – not for the first time I wondered if size really does matter. Chatting to the couple we elicited that they were both very keen photographers and also it would be colder that Prague when we are in Chicago in November.
Our tour finished at the castle and we were quickly back to our hotel – I would guess before any of the others in our party had got on a tram.
There were many hotels and restaurants close to our hotel and we chose one of the nearest – the food was only average but we needed filling after our long mileage of the day.

Wednesday.

After considerable mileage on Tuesday we decided to stay closer to the hotel with a view to walking to the Irish pub on Wenceslas Square in the evening for the football if we could not identify a nearer sports bar. We had breakfast and set off to Charles Bridge where we had seen some Russian dolls in the colours of soccer and basketball teams. Before making that purchase we took a river cruise in the cold rain. The cost included a free beer and since it was at a time when, had I stayed in teaching, I would have been working we took a photo of me drinking it to maintain a tradition – a bit like a successful escaper sending a postcard back to Colditz. The cruise was good value and this time the guide was easier to listen to than SuzzannHA. After the hours cruise, dolls purchased, we set off back towards the hotel and stopped off at a bar where we had a better cup of tea than anything up to that time. Since it had not got any more appealing in terms of weather we stayed in the hotel reading until we set off early to eat and find a place to watch the football.
We were the first customers in a cellar restaurant and we both had a menu of the day, I had goulash and dumplings which were exactly right for the cold night and it seemed a more reasonable price. After eating we headed across the bridge yet again and never sighted a bar with the soccer on until we reached the Irish bar we had spotted earlier. We entered and followed signs downward until a large area opened in front of us. In the centre there were four large screens forming a cube at ceiling height and other flat screens were all round the bar area. We sat at a table where we could watch both a large screen and a smaller TV. We had two large beers in front of us and we were thawing out well. There was a considerable amount of planning going on as to which match was going to be on each TV and we had opted to watch the Czech v N.Ireland game, England having already qualified. The bar manager came over to us and wanted to know if we would move so that he could place someone in front of the side TV so that they could watch the Poland? game. We moved to equally good seats and he sent over fresh beers on the house – good business on both sides. There was a good atmosphere in the bar albeit smoky and the game was well contested without being a classic. With about twenty minutes gone in the second half about thirty Northern Irish fans appeared in the pub, it transpired that they had been actually at the game but it was cold and miserable on the terraces and they were standing amongst the home supporters so they retreated to where they felt warmer and beer was cold but still in a liquid state. It was a good finish to the day and we got ourselves back to the hotel in a happy state of mind.

Thursday.

When we came down for breakfast there was a break through, the usual girl serving was replaced by a man who offered us tea and returned with a tea-pot of boiling water, we soon had the tea bags in and brewing! We took this to be a good omen for the day’s plan.
We intended to find the funicular railway up to the miniature Eiffel tower which overlooks Prague, and take in the whole vista. Although the tower is a smaller version of the Parisian tower it is actually one metre higher when you compare it to sea-level. To do this we stayed on the Lesser Town side of the river and walked parallel to it looking for any sign of the station, our Czech is non-existent so we were hoping for a picture type sign or two. After a couple of false starts we found ourselves at the start of the railway, I went round to the front of the structure and the garage type doors were open, a train was in and there seemed to be activity which I took to be passengers boarding. We rushed round to the other side of the building only to find that the operation was closed for two weeks in October ie when we wanted to use it. The rain was quite hard and there were flurries of snow so a long walk up a hill order to look down on a blizzard seemed like a poor idea.
Our not much better idea, was to cross a small bridge onto a island, which had been so unattractive in the past due to the risk of flooding and constant involvement with the city’s sewerage that it had only housed the most foul industries like slaughterhouses and tanning works along with a prison, now of course a riverside development had taken place and there are now plush restaurants and fine apartments. Having said all that in 2004 the river level rose two metres and flooded pretty much everything not on high ground – a good case for not choosing a ground floor flat.
We found the watermill which we had seen from our river trip and from the bridge, the wheel was turning but something we were not prepared for was also there. Apparently it is tradition for couples to declare their undying love to each other by attaching a padlock to the fence and throwing the key into the mill stream. In these modern times I ‘m surprised that there is no method whereby in the event of break-up you can send someone to your coded lock to cut it off and throw it after the key. We had come shamefully unprepared and totally without a padlock of any description so we missed our chance to make this touching gesture.
We went back to the hotel and, on the way, had another cup of tea at our favourite bar rejecting the Earl Grey tea bags without hesitation, if I wanted a drink to taste of talcum powder I’d add it myself, and choosing the English Breakfast.
The weather notwithstanding, we felt obliged not to waste time in a beautiful city hiding in our hotel room watching a limited choice of television which we could do better at home. Incidentally CNN covered the escaped balloon with the six year old trapped inside story in minute detail, we watched, live, a balloon floating along on the off-chance the small boy having chosen to get in and launch himself would choose to get out and plummet to his doom. Was I the only person in the world yelling at the TV that it was a publicity stunt?
We set off into the town centre and narrowly missed the astronomical clock striking the hour before returning to the Jewish quarter where we refused to pay the admission charge for the cemetery and Jewish museum of death. Once again we returned to the hotel having made an important decision about our final day – Friday.
It seemed that the weather was not only affecting us – when we went out to eat in the evening the small Italian restaurant only seemed to stay open for us but their pasta was excellent and this time we refused the bread which turns up at the start of the meal, blunts your appetite for the main course then they charge you for it.
Afterwards we regretted that we never ate in the hotel merely because we were not overly impressed by breakfast.

Friday

Breakfast went well now that we knew about their tea pots and the boiling water, we made ourselves clear to the girl serving and we even used our own Tetley Everyday tea bags which we always travel with. Julia stole the makings of a ham and cheese cob for each of us – I condoned her crime by eating the evidence later in the day.
We were supposed to check out by noon but our taxi to the airport was not until 7.15pm. There was no problem about leaving baggage but we did not fancy sitting in the hotel bar for seven hours or on past experience cold and soaked in the city centre. Our solution was to book a bus trip to Terezin a town with a dark wartime past which would occupy us for the afternoon.
It was a hugely memorable experience which I will blog separately.
The plan worked and we were back in the hotel to be picked up promptly on time and taken to the airport where our flight was delayed but still got us to our bed by 1.00am.

Murcia September 2009

As some readers will know the fact that we retired in July actually delayed our summer holiday – it seemed crazy to pay peak prices to go abroad in July/August when we had all the non-school holidays to aim at.

The theory is good but for over six weeks we both felt that we were on a usual summer holiday from school and had not been able to organize ourselves to get abroad. We were further delayed by my commitment to play in the final County Over55 match v South Wales on the 13th of September. Consequently we booked to travel to Murcia in Spain on Monday the 14th returning on Tuesday the 29th. The economics were on our side the whole holiday was less than half it would have been in August but the tennis fixture was cancelled and we could have gone a week sooner.

We traveled from East Midlands Airport to Murcia which provides a contrast in that Murcia is basically at the same stage of development as EMA was ten years ago. Our flight arrived early to a typical Ryan Air fanfare and my battered old Prince kit bag appeared first on the luggage reclaim however the car-hire was busier than we had ever known it so it took 45 minutes to find ourselves in a Ford Focus and heading to our familiar haunt of Verdermar near to Villamartin.

It was late evening when we were settled in our rented villa so we retired to be ready for the two weeks of “Scorchio” that we had been promised.

The following morning we did a supermarket shop to equip us for at least a week. My tennis for the day was to be the men’s practice at Orihuela Costa scheduled for 5.00pm to 7.00pm when it would still be hot but not like the middle of the day. A thunderstorm started by noon and washed out all possibility of playing. The rain continued on and off for the rest of the day and we ate out in the evening as power cuts are common in the area when there is rain.

Julia and I were resolved to play tennis together the following day but the courts at Orihuela were flooded although the sun was out by this time, we returned to our estate and planned our next move.

When we stopped at the local shops I was hailed by an English voice. It was Richard Harrison, a very good player from Duffield, a rival tennis club in the Derby league. It emerged that he had owned an apartment in the area for five years, he had almost given up on getting tennis at anything even close to his standard but he was happy to turn out for a friendly doubles later in the week before going home on the first Sunday we were there. We exchanged phone numbers.

In the afternoon Dave, our host, joined us for tennis at the Montepiedra Sports Centre, which is higher ground than Orihuela and better equipped, with three artificial grass courts. After all three of us hitting together, Dave and I tried to play singles but the heat was truly astonishing and after three hard fought games we were both struggling for breath. We had paused to consider how we could retreat gracefully when the sky darkened ominously and the heavens opened again. We were not the first place to get the rain storm and as we returned to our estate there were several streets running with water seeking its way to the sea. The rain continued for most of the day.

On the Thursday things became a little more typical in terms of weather, Julia and I played tennis later in the day although the courts were still flooded in the morning. The weather never reached “Scorchio” but we did manage a brief dip in the pool during the middle part of the fortnight.

On the Saturday Richard joined me and the two best Orihuela players in a doubles, Derbyshire beat Orihuela convincingly 6-1, despite Richard borrowing a racket to play and not having played for several weeks. There was a small appreciative audience to the event but I was frustrated to tweak my back early in the first set which limited my movement. I completed the three sets, one with each partner, but I really had hoped to emerge with better results than the two Daves it was not to be: Richard won all three sets 6-1!

That was the best of the tennis although after two days I was fit to play again but mainly concentrated on Padel Tennis, a cross between tennis and squash which I had successfully resisted on my previous visits, I enjoyed the challenge and, having played squash, I found myself competent quite quickly. It is said to be addictive but I’ll reserve judgment until I’ve played a few more times. I was fortunate to get some coaching from the resident coach at Montepiedra, Gareth Pritchard who had just been selected for the British Padel team.

As the second week progressed we were running sort of euros so it seemed sensible to pay for a meal with my MasterCard – it was refused. We were in a German restaurant in Spain so communication was not easy, we paid in cash and the following day I tried to buy petrol at an English speaking petrol station – it was refused again. I phoned my bank and was put through to the Fraud Department and they confessed that they had blocked my card based on its use to top up my mobile phone. I was livid as this is a perfectly normal transaction appearing on every statement that they send me but they wait until I am abroad and decide this is reason enough to cut off my card. I am currently trying to get this point over to the firm but they are not getting it. I dread being in the USA moving between three states and paying for hotels but by their track record that will pass for perfectly normal spending!

The holiday finished as it started with 48 hours of thunderstorms and flooding making the coast roads particularly frightening to drive. At some points Julia found herself waiting on top of the large speed-bumps waiting for the lake of water ahead to settle before proceeding. Where we knew that there were pavements they were now invisible making the stream of water downhill at least a foot deep. We were comfortable in the villa with just some mopping of the sun porch and we did at least feel that retirement had started.

The journey home on Tuesday night was uneventful but we were told that it had not rained in Derby since we left – this may become a theme.