Hold on to your wallets...

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Well, when you travel as much as we do you're bound to have a bad trip now and then...and apparently it was time for us to have one. This trip was doomed from the beginning and we should have just turned around and stayed home but we really wanted to see Prague. This was just going to be a short trip...leave Friday evening and return home on Sunday evening so we had a lot to cram into two days. We didn't get to see much...here's why.

Matt and I went with our friends Dan and Ali who were visiting for several weeks. They had rented a little itty bitty Ford car that ran on diesel so got GREAT gas mileage and volunteered to drive their car the 5 hours out to Prague. We had just gotten our travel guide (borrowed from a friend) right before we left so we started reading up on the city as we started out. About an hour or so into our drive I read that a lot of rental companies won't allow you to take their cars across the Czech border. So we stopped the car, called Hertz, and they confirmed that their insurance will not cover the car in the Czech Republic. This was our warning to GO HOME!! But, or course, we didn't pay attention. We turned around and went back to get our car and started the drive over. This put us way behind schedule and, while we would have arrived in Prague around 9pm if we hadn't had to turn around, we didn't actually arrive until midnight. We stayed at Old Town Apartments and got a great deal on a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment for 83 Euros per night for all 4 of us. The apartment was really wonderful so at least we got one thing right!


Saturday, January 5th
The boys ran out and got milk, cereal, and juice from the grocery store in the morning and we had breakfast in the apartment before we started out to go sightseeing. We walked the 10 minutes or so to the tram station and bought our 24 hour tram tickets, validated them, stepped onto the tram, and it had barely started moving away from the tram station when Dan realized his wallet had been stolen! So, we got off the tram, went back to the tram station, got extremely unclear directions (unclear because she spoke very little English and we spoke no Czech) to the police station, and started walking towards where we thought the police station was. Along the way, Dan started looking for his wallet in the trash bins on the street and actually found his credit cards! Not his whole wallet, but at least now he had the numbers on the backs of all of the cards to call and cancel them. We couldn't find the police station so we went back to our apartment and Dan called all of the credit card companies (I would hate to be him when he gets his cell phone bill...his cell phone is Australian and he was calling Australia but he was in Czech when he was doing it. Talk about roaming!!). He discovered when he was canceling his cards that they were already buying stuff online with the numbers so it's a good thing we didn't go to the police station first. Then we went to the apartment office where we had checked in and got much better directions to a police station where they would be likely to speak English. It took Dan about an hour and a half to file the police report and Matt, Ali, and I waited for him in a restaurant across the street. Lunch was good, at least, and I had goulash and potato pancakes 😊 After Dan finished with the police and inhaled some lunch we went back to the apartment for him to call his travel insurance and begin the claims process for the all of the cash he'd had in his wallet.

By this time, it was around 4:00 and everything was closed or closing. We were able to walk around see the sights and got some good pictures but we were in pretty low spirits. We did get to see Charles Bridge (built 700 years ago and still standing!) and we walked through the palace courtyards and took pictures of the guards (they're like the guards in London...they don't move a muscle!). We also walked through the Old Town Square, which was really pretty. Something that we did want to see that wasn't open (and had planned on seeing on Sunday when it opened back up) was the Jewish Quarter. It's supposed to be pretty amazing but was closed on Saturday because it's the Jewish Sabbath. We stopped at a cafe later on to warm up and got ripped off on our bill, which just added to our sour mood. Actually, they tried to charge us double what they should have and we called them on it. Then he adjusted the bill and, even though it was still a little bit too much, we paid it because we just weren't in the mood to argue anymore.

The highlight of the trip for me is that our apartment was down the street from a T.G.I. Fridays so we had Fridays for dinner!!! Our service was WONDERFUL...probably the best service we've had since moving to Germany, and the food was great. It's funny now how excited we get when we see American restaurants over here 😊

Sunday, January 6th
Our plans for today were to head out of Prague and go about an hour east to a small town that has a bone church. Apparently, the outside of the church looks normal but the inside is made up the bones of 40,000 people and has a chandelier made up of every bone in the human body. It sounded too gruesome and unique to miss. Unfortunately, it started snowing during the night and was still snowing when we got up. The roads weren't very good at all and we didn't know how long it was going to take us to get home so we decided to leave well enough alone and started back to Germany. I found out later that the roads to the bone church are not main roads and probably wouldn't have been plowed so I think it was a good call.

I've heard of lots of people that have had great trips to Prague, but that just wasn't the case with us. Anyone planning to go to Prague should be very careful with their belongings. Rick Steves warns in his book that there's very little violent crime but lots of petty theft and that really seemed to be it. We never felt unsafe...just wary of our wallets. Ladies, hang onto your purses. Get one that goes across your body with a flap over the opening to the purse, and turn the flap so it's against your body and keep your purse in front of you. That will make it hard to pick and hard to snatch off of you. Also, don't set your purse on the chair next to you or hang it off the back of your chair in restaurants. When Dan was in the police station a British woman came in and hers had been stolen this way...and she had both her passport and her husband's in their as well. Men, honestly, you might think it's dorky but put all of your credit cards, ID, and the majority of your cash in a money belt under your clothes. Keep some spending cash in a wallet in your pocket so that if your wallet turns up missing it's not such a big deal. And also, clean out your wallet before going on vacation, no matter where you're going. Do you really need all those membership cards that you usually keep in there? Not really...and those are just more things that you'll need to replace if you lose your purse or wallet. Just be careful and I'm sure your trip will be a lot better than ours was!

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Photos

After the police station
Poor Dan! I don't know how he can look so cheerful after such a rotten day!

Prague by night
The long white building is Prague Castle, St. Vitus is in the background, with the Vltava River and Charles Bridge in the foreground.