Day 2: Stretched okapi, anyone?
I was waved through the German exit point and entered the typical two-point entry of Eastern Europe - first a very bored guard takes a look at your passport and waves you past, then two meters later another equally bored guard looks at the same passport and waves you past. If they ever do ask a question, you know it's just something they do because they've been told to; there is absolutely no element of actual checking in anything they do. But they're uniformed, they're armed and they're bored, so you answer their questions politely with an endearing smile and thank them profusely for taking up your time with inane chatter. The only people that get any kind of actual attention are those with cars or looks of a decidedly southern type - mainly Rumanians, Yugoslavs and Albanians. These always get pulled over, questioned and have their bags searched.
A few hundred yards inside the border, there were signs telling me I had to buy a sticker, (or "vignette" as they curiously call it in Eastern Europe) to confirm that I had paid the appropriate road tax. I stopped at a gas station and managed by a series of grunts accompanied by hand movements that would probably have gotten me beaten to death by anyone familiar with actual sign language, to convey that I wished to purchase a sticker. These came in different time categories ranging from ten days up to a year. I got the cheapest one and attached it to the inside of my front window, cursing the governments of the world for their seemingly endless creativity in coming up with ever new ways of sucking money out of me.
If anything, the traffic here was even more insane than in Germany. The Czechs think nothing of overtaking one another while going over a hilltop, around a bend or entering a tunnel. They will sometimes happily do this while the car they're overtaking is, in fact, in the process of overtaking another car. At first, I thought this strange, seeing as the Czechs are the least religious people in the world and would therefore be careful with their lives, having little hope of reaching any great Autobahn in the sky. However, I soon came to the conclusion that I had gotten the cause-effect backwards. The Czech population is so unreligious precisely because most of those with a belief in the afterlife have already perished on the nation's roads. Judging from their driving, there should be no religious people left in the Czech Republic by 2010, at which time it will also be safe for a westerner to drive there.
After driving for a couple of minutes, I got another shock to the system. I was still not mentally up to speed from lack of sleep and having spent so much time behind the wheel, so when I passed a couple of girls with heavy make-up and skimpy clothing dancing outside a small structure I idly thought "well they sure start partying early on Fridays in this country". Turning a bend, I noticed several more small structures lining the road on both sides. Almost all had dancing women outside them, and reality suddenly dawned on me. For several kilometers, literally hundreds of prostitutes were offering themselves to passing motorists in broad daylight. Besides the small structures clearly built for a single purpose, almost every little bar, inn and hotel along the way had someone standing outside. You could probably tell the quality of the place by the looks of the girls. The more upscale establishments sometimes had more than one girl, and usually young, pretty ones at that, wiggling their assets heartily at passing cars, while the worn down places had some 40-50 year old standing idly by the door, smoking and looking bored.
By the looks of it, these women were almost all foreigners - Russians, Baltics, Rumanians, maybe some Poles and Yugoslavs. To them, the Czech Republic was a rich country, a place where they could make more money in the sex trade than they could ever hope to make doing normal work at home. There didn't seem to be much of a market this early in the day, but most of the cars I saw parked were German. I imagine the place would be teeming with Krauts later in the evening, but I didn't stick around to find out.
As I drove out of this rural red light district, I noticed that the landscape and the buildings looked more worn and poor than they had in the former East Germany. New structures were few and far between, concrete 50s slabs seemed to be the preferred fashion. Still, every now and then, up on some remote hilltop could be seen an old castle or fortress - built centuries ago, yet sure to be still standing long after the last communist structure has crumbled to dust.
I drove on towards Prague and after an hour or two, the road widened into a proper 4-lane motorway, although of decidedly poorer quality than the German ones. I soon began amusing myself by reading aloud the various road signs and trying to translate them into either Norwegian or English. When driving in a country with such a decidedly different language, this can be an endless source of entertainment and I highly recommend it. You often have to stretch the similarities a little bit, but it's still good fun. I passed signs with words looking eerily like "vasectomy" and the wonderfully absurd "Stretched okapi". So that's what they call giraffes in this country I thought, snickering like a madman.
I knew from my Danish guidebook that the Czechs are ardent hitchhikers, and just outside Prague, they stood in droves, lining the motorway. Quite a few of them must have been westerners, judging by looks, clothes and backpacking equipment. Normally, I would probably have stopped and taken in some poor souls, but I was feeling so tired and worn out by now that I couldn't stomach it. Just an hour or two south of Prague I stopped at a decrepit looking motel and got a room for the night, even though it was still only afternoon.
The girl at the reception desk spoke almost no English, but through my highly personal use of the German language (which I don't speak); I managed to get a room anyway. The girl seemed thrilled to have an actual guest, even a westerner at that, and was nervously making cooing sounds as I forked over the twenty Euros she translated the sum quoted in local currency into. I got a terrible exchange rate, but was in no mood or shape to start arguing, so I meekly followed her up to the room.
The motel was of a somewhat less than western standard, but clean. The room was tiny, hot, and had only a narrow bed and one chair. No table, no desk, no closet, no sofa, no phone. The bathroom was very narrow, but ran the entire length of the bedroom. Again, spartan but clean. I opened the window to let some fresh air in, and ignoring the thundering noise of the highway traffic outside, fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
I awoke a couple of hours later, famished. I splashed some water in my face, put on some clothes and ventured downstairs to my first meeting with the Czech cuisine. The employees all seemed nice and service minded, and they at least seemed to have the brains to be ashamed of their lack of English skills, unlike the Germans, who will merely see it as a reason to hate you even more. Using my English, my pidgin-German, some French and a word or two in Russian I was able to order a meal. The restaurant was about half full, with a dozen truck drivers sitting in a corner and a few couples spread out around the room.
My Danish guide has this to say about Czech food: "The art of cooking in the Czech Republic and Slovakia will leave you full, but with a very few exceptions it is not very refined." As in so many eastern European countries, almost all the several items of a course is ordered separately, which means that theoretically it's no problem to have asparagus with your ice cream. The food is usually heavy - meat, potatoes and lots of fried & fat stuff but sadly lacking in the sense of spices and actual taste. I settled for pork and fries, with pancakes & cream for dessert.
Motel food is seldom a great experience at the best of times, and the pork steak I had wasn't too bad at all - a little hard to chew in places, but ok in taste. The French fries were fine once I had drowned them in tomato ketchup. As expected, the vegetables were not fit for humans, but I didn't see this as a big problem, as I'm really a meat eater. The pancakes were a big disappointment. It looked very promising - several pancakes bathing in cream on a huge platter - a whole meal in itself. Sadly, there was no sweetness in the pancakes, the warm fruit inside them were more nauseating than tasty and the cream was so bland I'd might as well been eating shaving foam. Time and again, I would observe this: Eastern Europeans just don't know how to make otherwise good food TASTY. Still, I'd had so much and so heavy food I could hardly walk when I was done. I had also consumed a couple of bottles of Coke, and all at the ridiculous price of 7 Euro. I was once again being ripped off in the conversion from the local Koruna the food was priced in to the Euros this gringo tourist was paying in, but I was so happy about the price and the very attentive service that I added 2 Euro, a handsome tip in these parts of the world (actually a VERY handsome one, seeing as the Czechs usually don't tip more than a few cents).
Sitting at my table digesting the food, picking my teeth and making small content noises I slowly delighted in a sort of twilight zone feeling. By now, the place was almost full, people were chattering all around me - and I didn't understand a word they were saying. I turned my attention to a TV placed up in a corner of the room. Some intellectual looking old goat with a smirk was being interviewed by a very meek young journalist looking impressed and nodding his head off every time the goat finished a sentence. At the other end of the room, the truck drivers were getting raunchy. You could hear from the tone of their laughter they were talking about something dirty. Every now and then, they would break out in song.
At nine, the news came on. I still didn't understand a word, but from the pictures, I gathered what the main story was about. Apparently, a female journalist had been able to sneak into an airport, and actually enter an empty airplane and then sneak back out again without anyone noticing. It had all been filmed with a hidden camera. After the tapes were shown, the news presenter turned his attention to some official looking man squirming in his seat in the studio. To increase the unpleasantness of the situation, the cruel bastards had actually placed the journalist on a higher level than the guest, looking down on him. Watching with ever-greater fascination I witnessed what must surely have been one of the harshest public crucifixions ever.
The poor man was sweating and squirming, his eyes bouncing around in their sockets, while the journalists tone of voice went through the motions from inquisitive and querulous to angry and mocking and then back again. You didn't need to speak a word of Czech to know that someone would soon be looking for a new job. Having completed his butchering, the presenter turned to the camera with a very visible smirk and continued with other news.
Since there didn't seem to be much of interest going on I soon dragged my tired and bloated body up the stairs and got into bed, where I was lulled to sleep by the incessant roar of semi-trailers and cars going by in the warm April night.
A few hundred yards inside the border, there were signs telling me I had to buy a sticker, (or "vignette" as they curiously call it in Eastern Europe) to confirm that I had paid the appropriate road tax. I stopped at a gas station and managed by a series of grunts accompanied by hand movements that would probably have gotten me beaten to death by anyone familiar with actual sign language, to convey that I wished to purchase a sticker. These came in different time categories ranging from ten days up to a year. I got the cheapest one and attached it to the inside of my front window, cursing the governments of the world for their seemingly endless creativity in coming up with ever new ways of sucking money out of me.
If anything, the traffic here was even more insane than in Germany. The Czechs think nothing of overtaking one another while going over a hilltop, around a bend or entering a tunnel. They will sometimes happily do this while the car they're overtaking is, in fact, in the process of overtaking another car. At first, I thought this strange, seeing as the Czechs are the least religious people in the world and would therefore be careful with their lives, having little hope of reaching any great Autobahn in the sky. However, I soon came to the conclusion that I had gotten the cause-effect backwards. The Czech population is so unreligious precisely because most of those with a belief in the afterlife have already perished on the nation's roads. Judging from their driving, there should be no religious people left in the Czech Republic by 2010, at which time it will also be safe for a westerner to drive there.
After driving for a couple of minutes, I got another shock to the system. I was still not mentally up to speed from lack of sleep and having spent so much time behind the wheel, so when I passed a couple of girls with heavy make-up and skimpy clothing dancing outside a small structure I idly thought "well they sure start partying early on Fridays in this country". Turning a bend, I noticed several more small structures lining the road on both sides. Almost all had dancing women outside them, and reality suddenly dawned on me. For several kilometers, literally hundreds of prostitutes were offering themselves to passing motorists in broad daylight. Besides the small structures clearly built for a single purpose, almost every little bar, inn and hotel along the way had someone standing outside. You could probably tell the quality of the place by the looks of the girls. The more upscale establishments sometimes had more than one girl, and usually young, pretty ones at that, wiggling their assets heartily at passing cars, while the worn down places had some 40-50 year old standing idly by the door, smoking and looking bored.
By the looks of it, these women were almost all foreigners - Russians, Baltics, Rumanians, maybe some Poles and Yugoslavs. To them, the Czech Republic was a rich country, a place where they could make more money in the sex trade than they could ever hope to make doing normal work at home. There didn't seem to be much of a market this early in the day, but most of the cars I saw parked were German. I imagine the place would be teeming with Krauts later in the evening, but I didn't stick around to find out.
As I drove out of this rural red light district, I noticed that the landscape and the buildings looked more worn and poor than they had in the former East Germany. New structures were few and far between, concrete 50s slabs seemed to be the preferred fashion. Still, every now and then, up on some remote hilltop could be seen an old castle or fortress - built centuries ago, yet sure to be still standing long after the last communist structure has crumbled to dust.
I drove on towards Prague and after an hour or two, the road widened into a proper 4-lane motorway, although of decidedly poorer quality than the German ones. I soon began amusing myself by reading aloud the various road signs and trying to translate them into either Norwegian or English. When driving in a country with such a decidedly different language, this can be an endless source of entertainment and I highly recommend it. You often have to stretch the similarities a little bit, but it's still good fun. I passed signs with words looking eerily like "vasectomy" and the wonderfully absurd "Stretched okapi". So that's what they call giraffes in this country I thought, snickering like a madman.
I knew from my Danish guidebook that the Czechs are ardent hitchhikers, and just outside Prague, they stood in droves, lining the motorway. Quite a few of them must have been westerners, judging by looks, clothes and backpacking equipment. Normally, I would probably have stopped and taken in some poor souls, but I was feeling so tired and worn out by now that I couldn't stomach it. Just an hour or two south of Prague I stopped at a decrepit looking motel and got a room for the night, even though it was still only afternoon.
The girl at the reception desk spoke almost no English, but through my highly personal use of the German language (which I don't speak); I managed to get a room anyway. The girl seemed thrilled to have an actual guest, even a westerner at that, and was nervously making cooing sounds as I forked over the twenty Euros she translated the sum quoted in local currency into. I got a terrible exchange rate, but was in no mood or shape to start arguing, so I meekly followed her up to the room.
The motel was of a somewhat less than western standard, but clean. The room was tiny, hot, and had only a narrow bed and one chair. No table, no desk, no closet, no sofa, no phone. The bathroom was very narrow, but ran the entire length of the bedroom. Again, spartan but clean. I opened the window to let some fresh air in, and ignoring the thundering noise of the highway traffic outside, fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
I awoke a couple of hours later, famished. I splashed some water in my face, put on some clothes and ventured downstairs to my first meeting with the Czech cuisine. The employees all seemed nice and service minded, and they at least seemed to have the brains to be ashamed of their lack of English skills, unlike the Germans, who will merely see it as a reason to hate you even more. Using my English, my pidgin-German, some French and a word or two in Russian I was able to order a meal. The restaurant was about half full, with a dozen truck drivers sitting in a corner and a few couples spread out around the room.
My Danish guide has this to say about Czech food: "The art of cooking in the Czech Republic and Slovakia will leave you full, but with a very few exceptions it is not very refined." As in so many eastern European countries, almost all the several items of a course is ordered separately, which means that theoretically it's no problem to have asparagus with your ice cream. The food is usually heavy - meat, potatoes and lots of fried & fat stuff but sadly lacking in the sense of spices and actual taste. I settled for pork and fries, with pancakes & cream for dessert.
Motel food is seldom a great experience at the best of times, and the pork steak I had wasn't too bad at all - a little hard to chew in places, but ok in taste. The French fries were fine once I had drowned them in tomato ketchup. As expected, the vegetables were not fit for humans, but I didn't see this as a big problem, as I'm really a meat eater. The pancakes were a big disappointment. It looked very promising - several pancakes bathing in cream on a huge platter - a whole meal in itself. Sadly, there was no sweetness in the pancakes, the warm fruit inside them were more nauseating than tasty and the cream was so bland I'd might as well been eating shaving foam. Time and again, I would observe this: Eastern Europeans just don't know how to make otherwise good food TASTY. Still, I'd had so much and so heavy food I could hardly walk when I was done. I had also consumed a couple of bottles of Coke, and all at the ridiculous price of 7 Euro. I was once again being ripped off in the conversion from the local Koruna the food was priced in to the Euros this gringo tourist was paying in, but I was so happy about the price and the very attentive service that I added 2 Euro, a handsome tip in these parts of the world (actually a VERY handsome one, seeing as the Czechs usually don't tip more than a few cents).
Sitting at my table digesting the food, picking my teeth and making small content noises I slowly delighted in a sort of twilight zone feeling. By now, the place was almost full, people were chattering all around me - and I didn't understand a word they were saying. I turned my attention to a TV placed up in a corner of the room. Some intellectual looking old goat with a smirk was being interviewed by a very meek young journalist looking impressed and nodding his head off every time the goat finished a sentence. At the other end of the room, the truck drivers were getting raunchy. You could hear from the tone of their laughter they were talking about something dirty. Every now and then, they would break out in song.
At nine, the news came on. I still didn't understand a word, but from the pictures, I gathered what the main story was about. Apparently, a female journalist had been able to sneak into an airport, and actually enter an empty airplane and then sneak back out again without anyone noticing. It had all been filmed with a hidden camera. After the tapes were shown, the news presenter turned his attention to some official looking man squirming in his seat in the studio. To increase the unpleasantness of the situation, the cruel bastards had actually placed the journalist on a higher level than the guest, looking down on him. Watching with ever-greater fascination I witnessed what must surely have been one of the harshest public crucifixions ever.
The poor man was sweating and squirming, his eyes bouncing around in their sockets, while the journalists tone of voice went through the motions from inquisitive and querulous to angry and mocking and then back again. You didn't need to speak a word of Czech to know that someone would soon be looking for a new job. Having completed his butchering, the presenter turned to the camera with a very visible smirk and continued with other news.
Since there didn't seem to be much of interest going on I soon dragged my tired and bloated body up the stairs and got into bed, where I was lulled to sleep by the incessant roar of semi-trailers and cars going by in the warm April night.
posted by Ghost of Goldwater at 11:05 PM
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