Today was of course the transit back day. I woke up at 6am because I had a 9:55am flight from Prague to Frankfurt. I got cleaned up and finished off packing and checked out of the hotel around 6:30am. The hotel has a taxi service and I used that to get to the airport. The driver was basically 95% psychopath and 5% criminal but he was also very funny so while I probably should have been scared for my life I actually enjoyed the ride. He told me since I was flying to Frankfurt I could have left much later and he was right. The check-in took a few minutes but the security line was quick and I was in the terminal by 7:30 which gave me two hours till boarding time. I had to find where the gate was but even that didn’t take long. Prague’s airport is 2 terminals and the one that I was in is apparently not that big or busy. The driver said the other is a mess with security and lines.
Inside the terminal I couldn’t find someplace reasonable to get breakfast so I just bought some stuff from the Relay store to snack on. Mainly a chocolate bar, a can of cold espresso (in concept like the canned coffee from Japan but not as good) and bag of potato sticks. I started with the sticks and coffee and that gave me something in my stomach well enough. Later on I had the Aero bar but it had been damaged and was very difficult to eat. The thing about Aero bars is they crumble real easily. It was sort of disappointing. I also spent a few minutes spending the remaining Czech crowns I had left, well most of them anyway. Eventually the plane arrived, maybe about 10 minutes late and disembarked and maybe about 10 minutes late we were able to board. I had a window seat but was next to a very narrow British (I think) woman and her husband was on the aisle so I had plenty of room. It was a short hop flight and not much bother at all. They gave us some Muesli for breakfast as the in flight snack which was odd but ok.
Frankfurt is a large airport and I had to make it from terminal gates B to A63 which was a lot of walking and a couple floors difference. Being insane I took the stairs up to the gates I needed. It was very fast work to go through passport control and be on my way to the gate. No security rescreening at all. I was surprised at that. I had basically 50 minutes to kill before the unofficial boarding time. I chose to just hang out at the gate. I had used my Euros for the cab on the way in so really didn’t have anything to spend except a couple hundred Czech crowns which I am sure they wouldn’t take. The plane did board basically on time and I found myself seated way in the back in seat 53C. By the way, the first plane was an Airbus A320-200 and the second a Boeing 747-400. The flight started off really bumpy when we took off and remained very bumpy for quite some time before it finally seemed to even off around an hour to an hour and a half in. They served drinks and snack first then the meal which I chose turkey with potato wedges. It was on the edge of not bad which I guess is a triumph. As the meal finished I worked on some documentation from work for a bit then they started to show Rio the animated bird movie and I watched that. It was typical animated bird movie stuff but it wasn’t bad. I laughed a few times anyway. After that they showed Just Go With It but I don’t like Adam Sandler so opted to do some more documentation work rather than watch it. When I was tired of that I decided to watch a movie on the computer which was Kick-Ass. I am not fully sure what I think of it. I’ll have to digest it for a bit. It certainly was not typical in any way shape or form and that should be commended. By that I mean that risks were definitely taken in its making. By the time it was over we were about an hour out from landing and I just relaxed while the served the scary pizza I never eat.
We landed basically on time but I think my bag was amongst the last offloaded from the plane. The passport control guy was not in a good mood but I got outside without any hitches. I had figured he had set me up to be inspected by customs but fortunately that was not the case. I had to wait a few minutes for my van and there were 5 people to be driven somewhere on it but fortunately I got split off to a separate van at Ballardvale and was driven home solo which definitely got me there a lot quicker. The traffic up 93 on the first van was fairly rough all the way past 129. I expected it to end at 128 but it continued for some reason. In any event once we turned off to 125 it got a heck of a lot easier.
All in all I liked the Czech Republic a lot. There was good beer and reasonably good food. Things weren’t too expensive and the city of Prague is beautiful. Pretty much everyone there speaks English. I never had an issue with that. My hotel was in a great location. The tour company I used was convenient so I didn’t try any others. I’ve used a lot of Grey Line otherwise but Premiant was closer. I don’t know that the experiences would have been that much different. They all sell the same basic tours. I am sure each company has its own spin on the same motif.
No pictures for today as it was a purely transit day and I didn’t feel like unburying the camera for the couple snack foods in the airport.
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