Prague and Kusadasi, Turkey

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I started writing this blog in Prague, but am finishing it weeks later in Stuttgart. So the contents have been edited to fit the time of posting.

I arrived in Prague Thursday morning, April 19th (I think), after taking an overnight train from Frankfurt. I’m not totally sure that I arrived that Thursday, but at the time I thought it was a Wednesday and looking back Thursday makes more sense. This time my overnight train experience was much better because most of the time I had the whole cabin to myself and was able to spread across the chairs and put my feet up. Although, I did keep waking up with various limbs asleep because of the contorted positions necessary to get comfortable.

I decided to stay at the Boathouse Hostel outside of the city because it got excellent reviews and my Frommer’s guide book said staying outside of the city is ok because it’s cheaper and public transportation is good (the metro here is really simple, but I have yet to find a good map of the tram system). Finding tram 17 was a bit difficult from the train station, but I eventually found the hostel and am not sure if the benefits of this place outweigh the bad location. After checking in, I walked around Old Town and decided to see a Black Light Theater show, Aspects of Alice. It was supposed to be Alice from Alice in Wonderland growing up, but really it was the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen on stage. It was weird music, actors miming, florescent backgrounds floating, and projections of strange illustrations and other random clips. It was like an acid trip, except shorter and more expensive. (And, no, I did not take acid to make that analogy, but I do confess some knowledge about market price.)

The next day I walked around the old Jewish section and visited a synagogue, the old Jewish cemetery, and some Jewish museums. The old Jewish cemetery is about the size of a city block and has over 20,000 bodies buried there. During the mid 15th century in Prague, that was the only place Jews were allowed to bury their dead and the gravestones are placed so close to each other you could not walk through most sections. My guidebook says the graves hold 12 bodies vertically. It was sad to learn about the history here. One of the museums showed old propaganda the Christians used to blame the Jews for societies ills. There were old drawings of Jews poisoning the wells that they claimed caused the black plague and holding barbaric rituals.

On Sunday I went on a group tour to Kunta Hora, and got to see a Bone Ossuary. It was common practice throughout Europe to empty out old graveyards to make room for the newly dead, and at this particular Ossuary an artist came in and arranged the bones in 1870 to make a chandelier, garlands, and lots of sculptures. I would definitely recommend seeing the Bone Ossuary, but not the group tour!

The next couple days I walked all over Prague and met a lot of cool people. The weekend of April 27th I planned to meet up with Elicia somewhere, so I decided to take an overnight bus back to Frankfurt. I told Elicia that I would leave Prague Wednesday and get there Thursday, but being that I’m a disoriented tourist I accidentally left Tuesday and totally surprised her on Wednesday (I seriously need a watch with a calendar that automatically adjusts to different time zones and Day Light Savings...but I suppose investing in a normal watch with a calendar would help a bit too).

Friday the 27th we went to the airport to see if we could find any last minute deals somewhere fun. We ended up getting a ticket to Izmir, Turkey for the weekend, but it didn’t leave until Saturday. So we made our way back to the hostel in Frankfurt that we stayed in before our trip to Spain. Here we met a nice guy from England, and ended up going to dinner with him. The only reason I’m mentioning him is because I have never really thought about how the English justify the monarchy. This guy explained that the monarchy are just figure heads and have no political control anymore, but they are good for tourism and therefore good for the country. I suggest he does a Cost-Benefit Analysis before stating tourism as the sole reason to keeping the monarchy, but I guess that’s just a silly rational response.

Saturday morning Elicia and I searched the Internet for a hotel in Turkey. After an extensive discussion on our options, we chose a cheap 1 star hotel in Kusadasi (pronounced Kush ah da see). I also looked up dangers and annoyances to be aware of as a tourist and one re-occurring warning was “do NOT book tours through the hotels”. Ok, that sounds simple enough, just don’t book tours through the hotel. Well we got to the hotel around 9 PM and our drive seemed a bit remote. We were also a little unsure being American women in an Islamic country right next to Iran and Iraq. When we entered the hotel, there were about 4 Turkish guys greeting us and then one man escorted us to our room on the 3rd floor. The room was really big, and had 2 balconies. Elicia opened the door to one of the balconies, and the man (who we’ve since named Creepy Dude, CD for short) got kind of weird and said “you may want to close the balcony door because of the wind” before leaving. Well right after he left we realized that the door would not shut. At this point Elicia was not comfortable with the situation while I was trying to convince her that everything would be ok. I suggested we ask the front desk if it is safe to walk around at night and if there is a good restaurant close by, but she did not want to leave the hotel. In the middle of this discussion, a different guy knocked at our door to say Elicia’s mom was on the phone (the only phone was at the front desk). While she was talking to her mom, I asked one of the young men if there was an ATM close by. He said, “sure, I’ll show you where it is.” While we were walking I learned his name was Denis and he was one of the few genuinely nice guys I met there (most of the other guys were only nice because they wanted to sell something). He speaks 6 different languages: Turkish, German, French, English, Japanese, and Korean. It was fascinating listening to his stories about people who visit and think he cannot understand them when speaking their native tongue. While walking to the ATM I was relieved to see we were less than a block away from a very busy street with shops, restaurants, and bars. Denis explained that it is totally safe to walk around at night, and I could not wait to get back and tell Elicia the good news. By the time I got back, CD had already sold Elicia 2 tours for the only 2 days we’d be there. I tried to get out of it by saying we’d think about it over dinner, but it felt like I was knee deep in a situation and the only way to make it better was to accept the fact we were being overcharged and just have fun (I got a little bitter the second day because the tour was terrible and wasted too much time).

After dinner we went back to our room and decided to tape the balcony door shut with that sticker the airlines put on checked in luggage. We were woken up at 5 o’clock in the morning (still completely dark out) by that Arabic music the mosques blare 5 times a day! It was kind of creepy, but Elicia thought the door wouldn’t shut because they wanted to force us to listen to it. I didn’t agree, and we have a video of our short half conscious debate over it. Really it is the equivalent of church bells every Sunday morning, except much more intrusive and frequent. Later that morning I decided that if people have achieved great things like inventing computers and escaping from dire situations, then surly I could make a door close. So I examined the problem closer and discovered one piece in the doorframe that was part of the locking mechanism stuck out too far. So I used my tweezers to unscrew it and the door closed. Then we had trouble locking it and CD saw us struggling with the door. He ran to our room with a screwdriver and looked very puzzled to find that little piece from the doorframe gone. I said, “we can’t lock it” and it took him 15 minutes to get it (we think it was locked, but after all that hassle we didn’t want to test them because it would have taken him just as long to lock it again…or pretend to lock it again).

Our first tour was just CD driving us around like a bat out of hell. The first stop was Ephesus, which are the coolest ruins I’ve seen yet! The tour also included a combined 5 ½ hours of sales pitches dressed up as “educational workshops”. The tour the next day only had 1 “educational” sales pitch that lasted less than an hour, but we spent 7 hours on the road to see a hot spring for 2 hours. Turkey is a beautiful place, and I can’t wait to go back…but if there is just one piece of advice I can offer it is, do NOT book tours through the hotels.

We flew back to Frankfurt on Tuesday the 1st, and I contacted the Linsenmaiers (also old friends from Alabama). For those of you who don’t know the Linsenmaires, they are a family of 4 (Andrea, Walter, and their 2 daughters Laura and Romy) from Germany. They moved to Alabama for a few years and while Walter worked for Mercedes. One of the major influences they had on our lives was that they followed German hospitality customs when our families got together, mainly, Barbara and I were offered wine and the glass never went empty. Mom and Dad’s rule was if we couldn’t walk straight (or if we acted drunk in any way) then we would no longer have the privilege to drink wine with them. I was away in high school for most of the time, but Barbara (13 at the time) got really good at being tipsy but acting completely sober.

I’ll catch you up on the rest later…

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