The Lone Wolf.

So this week I did my first solo trip and after carefully reviewing weather conditions in France I ended up in Prague; home of one of the largest sex industries in Europe - sounds promising no?

Well I didn't actually know that before I went and apart from walking with my new found friends down a few sus streets one day I didn't see much of that side of the city. Prague is very beautiful and there's heaps to do, I highly recommend doing a walking tour so you can get yours bearings and learn more about the place and catching a bus to the small rural town of Terezin was possibly my best decision, seeing one of the least known Concentration Camps in all it's depressing and horrifying glory.

But on a different note I learnt a few new things whilst in Prague - 

1) Barely anyone speaks English or German and even if they do they are unlikely to help you happily. For what it is worth if they do happen to speak english then it will be flawless and you'll probably want to do a double take to check they're not from america/britain or if luck would have it - Australia. However they don't fit that stereotype the French have for being rude to tourists because they are not so much rude as hostile, seeming uncertain of your reasons for travelling to their city and just checking that you're not attempting a takeover - but after the millions of times that poor country has been invaded I can understand their wariness...

2) Smoking is still  very prevalent in the Czech Republic and even allowed indoors. It's easy to say that I was fairly well disgusted at meal times, just peacefully trying to eat my dinner whilst simultaneously coughing up a lung coz some inconsiderate knob to my left wants to have his before, after and during dinner cigarettes and blow the remnants of his lungs back in my face...  Maybe it's just Aussie sensitivity though - I certainly didn't enjoy coming back to the hostel from dinner smelling like an oversized cigar but then I'm coming from Australia where there is no where that you can smoke indoors and it's just generally not that socially acceptable to smoke any more so I'm not used to seeing 12 year olds smoking or people volunteering themselves and everyone around them for lung cancer in the same room as children eating their stroganoff dinner...but maybe that's just me.

3) All the signs are in Czech. Whilst Prague is super easy and super cheap to get around, with no dinner costing me more than 200Kr (like 4 euros including a dessert and drink!) it is hard in a different way. Czech is nothing like english or german and if it weren't for my map being in english I honestly would have epic failed. Restaurant menus, street signs with directions and instructions for buying tickets and things like that are all in a language with seven different cases and no more than four words that are similar in english, add to this the fact that help from the locals comes with a wary death stare and I was often left in a cloud confusion and made some trips down unsavoury streets with signs that could have been advertising lolly shops for all I knew...but I figure it was a learning experience and in three days I managed to work out which streets the strippers owned and learn the words for direction, push, pull and hello - I'm practically fluent now I know...

Hope all is well.