Prague
Well, where to begin. Prague is indeed a beautiful city: lovely turrets, smashing churches, it's fair share of cobbled roads and so forth. But you know, one's appreciation of the aforementioned prettiness can be tarnished, somewhat, by a hangover. And I've been hungover for, well, five of the last six days. So vast swathes of Prague have gone unobserved by your faithful correspondent, while the ceiling above my dorm bed has received an extensive examination through barely-opened eyes.

Now, I can complain about the bad, bad feelings of being in such a condition, but, as we all know, it is a whole lot of fun getting yourself in that state the night before.. After warming up on Wednesday night, a crowd of us hit town on Thursday, first going to a few very brown pubs then hitting Prague's premier destination for show ponies and sixteen-year-olds. I think even the name, Roxy's, acts as a clear message to it's patrons: this place is shite. But let's be realistic, shall we? Wandering around with a group of eight strangers, you quickly move to the lowest common denominator. And boy did we that night.

But the decor at Roxy's wasn't the clincher -- it was our fellow patrons that sealed the deal in my place. It didn't have cage dancers (that was Saturday night), but we did have one weirdo trying to chat up one girl in our group, and having got nowhere in the flesh, he regrouped for a moment and pulled out of his bag, yes really, a marionette, and began making it dance, give eyes to the ladies, hump the floor and so forth. Quite a hit, as you can imagine. But the scariest part was that he was really, really good at marionetting! He'd obviously been learning for most of his short but rather tragic life. There were also quite a few garden-variety losers, but it's just every crap club you've ever been to, it's just the beer was two dollars a litre. So you can understand the attraction.

So to sum up, I'm calling it quits for Prague. I'm never going to see the day-time highlights at this point, and I'm beginning to feel sick. I'll come back to Prague when I'm 50 or something, when I'm too old to have a good time and then go to the castles and the museums and whatnot. In the meantime, I'm going to go to Cesky Krumlov tomorrow. Just go to a Jazz Club tonight (it is my last night after all).