Tidbits from Prague

Memories from the past few days:

-Walking into the four star Le Meridien Picadilly at midnight with my jeans and backpack and getting to say that yes, I'm a Platinum member, may I have my room please?
-Showing up at Gatwick and having there be NO security line at all. (Was last night a dream? Am I at the same airport?)
-Getting a short history lesson about Prague from the man on the bus next to me from the airport into town.
-Grabbing dinner and a few (large and extremely cheap, but good) beers at a local pub with a guy from London I met at my hostel.
-Waking up at 4am every morning the past few days and reading the book I haven't been able to put down, "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri.
-Walking around most of the Prague sites in about 3 hours before lunch and then going back to the hostel to collapse for 4 hours of sleep (I'm still pretty sick with a bad cold).
-Buying my ticket to Vienna at the Prague train station and hearing that the price is 1841 CZK ("that's a lot more than I was expecting" I think), but I pick out a schedule and hand over my credit card. Turns out I heard incorrectly; it was 841CZK instead, only about $37USD.

Even after my four hour nap, I'm not in the mood to do much of anything but read and drink tea, so I'm heading out to the local Tesco to pick up some fixings for dinner to make in the communal kitchen at the hostel. This hostel is great - comfy beds, friendly staff, free Internet, a kitchen, close to a Metro stop, and about $18/night. Maybe later I'll try to figure out what I'm going to do in my 3 day gap between Salzburg and flying out of Venice. I hear Venice only requires about a day, so I might opt for a hop over to Florence or Milan first, depending on train schedules.

[Back from Tesco]
I always find it really interesting to check out other countries' markets, whether they be outdoor stalls, supermarkets, or individual shops specializing in each type of product. Tesco appears to be the Safeway equivalent of Western Europe, but nevertheless, there are things that probably make this one uniquely Czech. For one, the entire aisle of various sausages and the like, and also the bread aisle. You know how French style boulangeries and bakeries have the back wall of baskets filled with all the different rolls, baguettes, and loaves? Well in this Tesco, there is an entire aisle just like that, and most of the baskets were empty, so I'm guessing that it replenished daily. I saw several people with bags of 6 or more loaves and rolls. There is also a neat bread slicer machine that I watched someone use; it's about the size of a huge deli meat slicer, but freestanding. You put the loaf on top, press the "go" button, and the whole thing kind of shakes for a few seconds before your sliced bread comes out the bottom like you won the lottery.

I inevitably managed to make a few more purchasing blunders, although this time, my excuse is that nothing was in English, other than a very few products that had all the information translated on the back into about 10 different languages (like the Orange Juice I ended up buying). For many of the products, I spent time reading the labels, looking for words that I might recgonize with my knowledge of English or French, and of course relied on the pictures. For just over $8USD I bought a large bottle of water, a bag of pasta, pasta sauce, hamburger meat, a parmesan cheese wedge, a head of garlic, a red bell pepper, a box of tea, yogurt, and a banana. Although when I started opening things and cooking, I realized that the water was carbonated (which I like anyway) and the 'tomato sauce' was actually tomato juice. Yuck. At least the hostel had some communal butter, and with my parmesan I didn't really need the marinara.

Adventures in cooking and traveling will continue tomorrow with my train ride to Vienna. It's about 4 hours, 30 minutes and at least in Austria and Italy I can start using Euros, not these Czech crowns that I'll have left over.