And so, it was that time again that all men good and true picked up their swords and cross-bows and went to (re)conquer the Holy Land – or more to the point: time for me to throw a few T-shirts in a bag and hop on a plane to Prague.
Every calendar year I spend at least three (sometimes four) months in that most majestic and beautiful of cities. I used to live there, many years ago – I met the girlfriend there – and, through an old friend, I still have two rooms in the Žižkov area that are mine whenever I want to come to Prague.
Prague has always been good to me. I like its relaxed attitude, its beautiful, old stones, its many parks and countless little bars and restaurants, its suicidal trams and cabs, its wonderful beer and incredibly beautiful women. The only drawback I could think of would be the millions of tourists that also flock to Prague but then, they stick mostly to the centre, so you hardly ever see that many of them anyway.
Of course, one of the most wonderful aspects of life in my Prague rooms is a complete absence of a certain animal. I pay my Dutch neighbour’s early teen daughter a minor king’s ransom to feed the bloody cat in my absence. She claims the job is even harder than it would be to baby-sit Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes fame) and I know that that’s most likely true, so I pay her without complaining all that much. Any options other than killing the little pest would be much, much worse.
So, I suffered through the indignities of modern travel. Paying through the nose to get a ticket on the plane, with less free legroom that galley slaves enjoyed – after hanging around for almost two hours at Schiphol airport for security reasons. Then a rattling Prague bus, a boring underground journey and one tram stop later I was back home again.
To the right of me football stadium FK Viktoria Žižkov and one of this city’s many parks; to the left of me a pub with a very nice, enclosed back garden - what rested of the journey just a two minutes’ walk to my apartment, taking me past two other bars, three restaurants, one wine cellar and two small evening shops. I was back in Prague indeed.
On the third step of the four-step entry of the building where I lived sat something unspeakably vile. It was cleaning its nails and looked at me with an air of proprietorial disgust:
“What took you so bloody long?” it asked.
(To be continued.)
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