Prague Scams

2022

25 October, Tuesday 

The taxi driver was waiting in the airport as arranged. No hassle. A presentable lad in a good car, he smiled and shook my hand in response to a decent tip. Once checked in, I had two pints downstairs in U Medvídků. No more orders taken after half past ten put a stop to unwinding. I walked then to the Old Town Square and back. An awful lot of foreign youngsters roamed the cobbled streets.

This truly is the smallest hotel room I’ve ever had (€104 per night, out of season). I’ve walked into bigger wardrobes.

26 October, Wednesday 

In Prague, the chiselling is official. The country’s largest bank (Česká spořitelna) forces conversion charges on cash withdrawals by foreign cards at its ATMs. It’s a completely legal scam. The dreary rain came as I crossed the Charles Bridge and headed uphill. I stopped off in the Church of St. Nicholas to film the ceiling.

The minor tourist mob at the metal detectors kept me out of the Castle. Up there I instead went to find the Black Ox (U Černého vola). The lovely waitress looked very like someone I used to know but this one was a little bit shorter, a little bit curvier and a little bit prettier. It was a long afternoon but I got out of it by six, having paid no more than €25 (equivalent) for a simple lunch plate and a load of pints to pass the time. The Czechs are an unsmiling bunch in the main but this was the only place I heard anyone laugh. The waitress, the man at the taps, a couple of regulars, it was a pleasant sound, in the otherwise general absence of charm. 

27 October, Thursday 

I got scammed by the driver of a taxi the hotel called at my request this morning. The swarthy greaseball didn’t even step out of the car to check for any baggage but I was tired and my antennae weren’t up. Lesson to self: don’t be too tired to deal with the unexpected. This wasn’t going to be as smooth as my arrival but I’d naturally presumed the hotel would use a reputable taxi firm, with or without prior arrangement. “The cab company with the best reputation is AAA Taxi,” says the Pocket Rough Guide to Prague. Evidently the very rough guide.   

For example, the thousand crown note that I had for the fare (an ample amount) disappeared after I handed it over and turned to reach for my bag on the back seat. He insisted I’d handed him a hundred. For another example, he then loudly and falsely insisted 900 crowns were worth €70. By then I was too tired and confused to go, “What?? No it’s f***ing not!” Given I had no more Czech currency, I paid him off in euros to be rid of him. That’s somewhere crossed off. I did Prague and Prague did me. The poster in the hotel breakfast room had already explained what was expected of tourists.

An Sneachta Mór (‘The Big Snow’)

2018

This is about Ireland (south coast), though I’d booked a trip to Prague for a couple of nights in early March. Three friends of mine had decided to come along and I found us a hotel in the Malá Strana district below the Castle. This was the Hotel Čertovka, named after a finger of the Voltava river (‘Devil’s Stream’). I also bought the Pocket Rough Guide to Prague and continued to learn some Czech off the web, such as:

Velké pivo, prosím (‘A large beer, please’);

Už jsem zaplatil (‘I’ve already paid’);

podvod (‘scam’);

Došlo k nedorozumění (‘There was a misunderstanding’).

There were several of the pretty and historic locations I particularly wanted to see. These included the buildings in which the Thirty Years War was hatched, both in the planning and attempted execution of the Catholic imperial messengers who were shot out a palace window, and also the balcony where, on a snowy morning in 1948, Klement Gottwald emerged to emcee the communist take-over for a massive crowd below. The latter moment provides the anecdote of the un-purged hat that opens one of the shady, slippery Milan Kundera’s philosophico-sexual entertainments, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Gottwald was later voted the worst-ever Czech in a TV poll, part of a light entertainment format imported and licensed from the BBC.

I wasn’t too pushed about taking in the Kafka museum. The insect fancier Vladimir Nabokov once spent an entire essay wondering exactly what kind of beetle Gregor Samsa had turned into in Metamorphosis but the real answer lies in the equivalent of the birds-of-a-feather proverb in the Irish language. Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile (‘A beetle recognises another beetle’).

23 February, Friday

All day it felt a bit like snow. There seems to be Siberian weather on the way. I picked up my order of Czech crowns at the bank (2,500 of them for €104). Two of my travelling companions were in a nearby café. P. mentioned a story about an inebriated NGO type crashing his new NGO jeep into a Bosnian brothel in a snowstorm.

25 February, Sunday

An east wind has been blowing for days and there’s no frost tonight but they seem to be promising us some kind of repeat of White ’47 for the coming week. At the moment Thursday looks like the worst of it but we’ll see. A lot of snow may be under the bridge by then.

26 February, Monday

The worst of it is forecast for Thursday evening to Friday morning and I’m hoping we can get up and away before that. So far, it’s cold out but nothing drastic. Plenty of people in town this afternoon went bare-headed.

27 February, Tuesday

A flake or two swirled as I arrived to pick up my father from the day centre at half past three but it was an hour later before the first sprinkling of snow. Around six there was a real shower of it that left the roofs and plants white for a starry night.

28 February, Wednesday

Still starry at half past five this morning but by half nine a thin blanket had fallen. The sun was shining then, as it did on and off, between snow showers, or during them. Sights of the day and night:

(1) empty wine shelves in Frank’s supermarket (N. told me one woman went off with a crate of it);

(2) a snowboarder down the quay, towed by a car (a fall didn’t deter him).

I knew our hopes of travelling were snookered. I went into town tonight so I could take photos, including one I have of the old bridge, even though it’s not Charles (Karlův Most).

1 March, Thursday

Half past six, it was snowing in the dark. Up at half eight, I knew we’d be going nowhere but looking online was still a formality. On the south coast, we just couldn’t risk a 400 km round trip in this weather for a likely flight cancellation.

A large green tractor noisily swerved in at Frank’s but a bank girl emerged from the shop (“They have no bread or milk in there!”), whereupon the tractor roared off down the road again. There was no milk in the local Spar either.

Our scheduled 13.40 Ryanair flight got away from Dublin after all, at 16.27, thirteen minutes inside the three hours needed for a delay refund. It may have been the last of the few planes to get off the ground today. Before dark I walked to town and took more photos.

2 March, Friday

An awful lot of snow has fallen. I don’t remember anything like it before. Some of us may never see it again.

Those cheeky Czech chappies are not only charging us for both nights plus an extra little cut of three euros – city tax, I guess – but now they have also told Booking.com that we were a no-show after I’d flagged a weather problem a day in advance and then emailed early yesterday to let them cancel the airport taxi pick-up in good time. Kipling has an answer for countries that claim they are not in Eastern Europe. East is east… Anyway, I was out photographing more of the best of our snowy settlement. This place here really should market its old town, its Altstadt (or Staré Město), snow or no snow.

Then I slipped into Downey’s for an hour or so. The young chap who was the sole customer there before me said he had left one of the pubs on the town square when the messing got too much (“lads dancing… fellas firing snowballs in the door…”). Then it turned out that he too should have been away in Prague this weekend, with a stag party.