Click here to buy
View swim gear

This has to be some kind of record: within minutes – minutes – of arriving on the streets of Prague, we’d been booked by the coppers.

Wandering confused and bemused from corner to corner, looking for an address that we couldn’t be sure was really there, we’d stepped obliviously onto a pedestrian crossing against a red light.

“Excuse me, sir and madam,” said the copper, a portly bloke, sweating and exuding odour in the early summer midday heat, in very broken English, “you have just broken ze law.”

At least some good came of it: as his partner completed the paperwork for the 100 kopecs in fines (c. $A6.25), we got the copper to show us where our target address was on the street map. He was obliging and pleasant. Czechs seem to enjoy displaying their capacity for foreign languages. In this sense, Europeans are much more broad-minded than Australians.

Prague is different from conventional European destinations: the Czech language is Slavic, which means the formulations are completely alien to us spoiled westerners who think that a familiarity with restaurant French and g’day in three or four Latin or Germanic tongues reflects linguistic competence.

The opening of the former Eastern Bloc has changed all that. The needs are much greater now that tourism is more readily available from the Czech Republic and Poland through to Russia. But most Australian’s don’t get to Europe all that often and are yet to catch up.

You can’t rely on recognising names on a map, or on hearing them pronounced, for the clues that allow you to complete the jigsaw of understanding. And you can’t trust the reliability of western Europe, where trains run on time and ticket machines perform as promised on their displays.

Being booked for crossing against a light hardly is a criminal offence, but it means a lot to someone – my partner – whose worst act to date had been inadvertently setting off a fire alarm in a hotel (steam from a very hot shower) – fretting that this compromised her status as “a good citizen”.
And a $6 fine is hardly the ruin of a holiday. Yes, yes, there is more to travel than the practical things, which all can be managed.

But the practical things condition the environment for the more important, spiritual side of travel. Not the spiritual side by which going to church in a different country means obeisance to a deity in slightly different colours; but the spiritual side by which experiencing the different opens the mind to greater understanding.

If the practical things aren’t right, then the spiritual quest is compromised. Indeed, the practical side sets up the scenario for the spiritual side.
In the Czech Republic, a truly independent state for less than 20 years, the practical aspects of travel are challenges that are all the more important given that Prague seems to be this season’s vogue destination.

In the early stages of the European Tour ’08, we’d been through Singapore, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Dresden before hitting Prague, in early June and well before the intense part of the tourist season. Our hostel rates, indeed, still were at “shoulder” level, not heading to “peak” until the end of June. Experience tells us that the tourism season really gets under way when Americans go on holidays, and that’s from July 4.

And whilst all our prior cities had been uncongested, Prague already was jam-packed, mainly with Americans. An amble across the Charles Bridge was like a Roller Game final. Law-breaking was rampant. If those two coppers set up office by the pedestrian crossing by the bridge, they could finance the entire Czech Republic.

They're coming to get you, Mdme Sparkle ... for crossing the road against a red light!

Once we’d learnt to obey the law, then we had to master the transport system.

Remember this: ticket machines at railway stations do not take notes, unlike western Europe, and they don’t necessarily give you tickets in return for your money. They don’t necessarily wait until you’ve deposited all your money before confiscating what you have inserted and resetting for the next customer. And they certainly don’t necessarily give you change.

And station staff do not have the capacity to control them, or to understand them. At one machine in central Prague, with just enough coins for two tickets home for the night, the machine reset after one coin had been entered. The station manager, a helpful young chap with good English, advised us to try again. We headed back up to the street, found a tobacco kiosk, bought a newspaper and a better street map, and headed back to the machine with our new coinage.

The station manager still was there, and we got him to stand with us as we tried again. A similar thing happened. He shook his head. “Sometimes, zey do zis,” he said, as perplexed as we were.

The best he could offer was to “provide you wiz documentation and you can write to ze (railways people) and in about a monz you could get your money back”. It was a 20 kp coin, or about $A1.25).

Next day, we sought day tickets which, in principle, make things so much simpler. The station office doesn’t sell tickets, and without the coinage, a different station manager sent us upstairs to a cigarette kiosk for tickets or change. But the kiosk had only single journey tickets and wouldn’t give change.

So we went to McDonalds – something we won’t do even in Australia, other than, as Barry Jones said of pubs, at the point of a gun – and bought an orange juice as a subterfuge.

We got the change, headed for the machines and, on a whim, thought we’d try the newspaper shop next to the station master’s office. Yes, they do sell day tickets, spoke some English, and off we went.

Travel is an art. You learn what to rely on, and Prague is no different to the west in the need for a good street map, with tram, bus, rail and ferry routes, including stops. If you can master all this, get your tickets, and not break ze law, then Prague’s immense spiritual opportunities lie before you.

Ah, but for money changing ...

Yrp is much more interesting than banal Stray'a.

The wonderful thing about ATMs, credit and debit cards, and the euro -- the single European currency -- is that it has killed off dodgy foreign exchange operators. The ubiquitous bureaux under illuminated signs saying “Cambio”, “Change” and “Wechsel” largely have disappeared. Once you get used to the euro in your first country, you’re right.

Membership of the single currency, however, means a state must meet a series of benchmarks in economic management, and the Czech Republic and other former Eastern Bloc countries aren’t there yet. So in Prague, it’s back to kopecs (crowns).

What’s worse, many restaurants, hotels, etc, don’t take cards, so the Cambios flourish in Prague.

The travel guides warn you off the private bureaux. They tell you to change your money only at major banks. The guidebook we used (Lonely Planet’s Europe on a shoestring) didn’t tell us about street operators. Perhaps they thought this was a matter of commonsense.

But when some bloke with an accent approaches you outside a bank and offers you a better rate than the banks, your mind rolls through “dodgy”, “crook”, “Danger! Danger!”, but also “Opportunity!”

The rate he offered was about the same as the theoretical exchange rate, that is the median between the official buy and sell rates. It wasn’t offering us cheap land that might flood at high tide. And he showed us the money; let us hold it before we gave him ours.

But when we came to pay for a cuppa in the café nearby, ordered deliberately to test our new money, they wouldn’t take it. As they didn’t anyone’s Hungarian currency, worth less than ten per cent of the Czech notes they purported to be, and nothing if no-one will take them, which they wouldn’t. The top note – 200 kp -- had been Czech, but the lower ones, the bulk of our 2,600 “kopecs” -- 100 euros -- were worthless.

Travel does broaden the mind.

A metaphor for what used to go on in Prague, perhaps: a couple of Soviets peeing on the Czechs.