You Can’t Expense the Mortgage (nor $$$ souvenirs)

I’ve been in Prague for a few days. It has been a terrific experience but completely draining. I taught a class on Friday with simultaneous translation, which is about 4000X harder than I ever imagined. I barely made it through the first hour without crying. Imagine every little bit of mumbly, deprecating self talk you do when things aren’t going well being translated into Czech. As you say it.

Such as:

“This worked last night when I rehearsed.”

“Hmmm. Love it when that happens.”

“Oh-my-fucking-god-I-suck-at-this-kill-me-please”

I should have worn dress shields. By the third class, I was tempted to light up a smoke. It would have been the forth cigarette of my life. The good news is that nobody would have noticed it was weird since the Czechs smoke e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e.

My final night in Prague is a Friday. I have very little currency left after the ATM fiasco upon my arrival and I want to save it for Saturday morning when I have a few hours to shop at the flea market**. So with frugality in my heart and a spring in my step, I head out to wander the old town and get a bite to eat.

I stumble into a shop that sells matryoshka dolls. Embarrassingly enough, I’m a savvy collector of these precious nesting dolls, so I know that they aren’t made in the Czech Republic. They are made in Russia. However, they are hard to find in the US outside of catalogs and maybe it would be cool to have one that was hand painted with scenes of Prague. So I head in.

I am constantly disappointing people with my head-math skills. Once we get out of the single digits, I cannot add, subtract, multiply or divide. I’ve given up the battle and have hired expensive tutors to ensure that my children do better in life. I don’t want them to be so crippled that they always tip in even dollars… that they cannot make change when running the cash register at the coffee shop in an old folks home… or they “estimate” the difference between 988 and 320 as “about 400”.

My problem with head-math was rather apparent when converting CZK to USD on the run. The CZK is worth something like $0.042, which makes for lots of zeros and odd divisors so I had just taken to throwing down my Visa Card and hoping for the best.

This store had a wide selection of dolls which I figured to be in the $60 range based on some quick but likely flawed head-math. I found a really nice one on the top shelf which they quickly pulled down for me  because “it looks so much better in the light”. With graceful, fluid arm movements, the proprietor opened up the doll to reveal twelve layers, from a gorgeous foot-tall purple and gold doll featuring the Charles Bridge down to a teeny tiny microscopic nugget. I didn’t catch the price, but the most expensive thing I had seen so far was about $100, so I told her to wrap it up.

They moved with lightening speed, ushered me politely and appreciatively to the cash register and wrapped my new doll with utmost care. I felt pampered. Delighted. Excited to find such an interesting souvenir. I saw a lot of zeros on the cash register, but I always see a lot of zeros when koruny are involved, so I didn’t think about it much.

I tottered down the street to Ambiente Pasta Fresca, a favorite Italian restaurant amongst travelers from my company. I snuggled down next to a fireplace with some calamari and a bowl of sinfully delicious homemade pasta. Out of curiosity, I pulled out my blackberry and switched to calculator mode. I tapped all of the numbers and zeros and decimal points from my souvenir receipt and nearly puked a bowl of sinfully delicious homemade pasta all over the unsuspecting patrons sitting to my left.

I won’t tell you how much it cost, because it is far too embarrassing.

This is the part of the story where my friends always say “What did they say when you took it back?”

Perhaps the most embarrassing part of the story is that I didn’t take it back. I was so ashamed, so crippled by my own dumbassitude of not asking for the price or running the numbers KNOWING  that I cannot freaking multiply 7 X 6 in my head let alone divide all of those zeros by $0.046 that I couldn’t even bring myself to walk into the store again.

In my defense, let it be noted that walking into the store again would have required bolt cutters and some broken glass. Apparently, 30 seconds after my too-white-teeth-and-sneakered-obviously-american-and-stupid-ass strolled out of the store they shut off the lights, pulled down the grates and hit the road. I’ll bet they sell one of those puppies every three freaking years.

You can’t tell me she isn’t pretty, though.

**We will see that this is a misguided notion in another post.

Taxis Everywhere Expect to be Paid

I am sitting here in my hotel room in Prague humbly munching on a cheese sandwich and chocolate-banana-muesli bar. This deceptively tasty package was left on the empty seat next to me by the eternally gracious people of Lufthansa while I snored and drooled on the flight here from Frankfurt. Seriously- I need to pick up about a case of these musliriegel schoko-bananes. They are a the same aromatic, full body banana experience that I typically associate with fruity Mardi Gras drinks and candy runts.

A few weeks ago, I was in Barnes and Noble and picked up a book about Prague. I am here teaching, but there will likely be some kind of free time on Friday while I wait for the EDT people to wake up, so I figured I should know what to see. Also, there were these delicious little city books in the moleskine section and I just couldn’t resist. It was tidy and smooth, had a whole bunch of maps inside and places to write my notes as I muse on the bridge over the river… And besides its the official journal of Hemingway. Or something like that.

So these two little books sat on my desk waiting to be read, or at least flipped through. I got busy writing the papers for the classes, then had some deadlines to meet before I left, and a demo to prepare for the users event in Kassel that I did today…. and so the books got packed, but never read. This was a bad idea.

When I landed here tonight, I was just overcome with how wonderful this intra-EU travel has become. Once you go through customs in your entry country, there really isn’t much to deal with. Just breeze in! Move freely! Heck, even the money is the same!** What a concept.

I don’t really have great luck with cabs. I typically get into a cab and assume they take credit cards (when they don’t) or think that it will cost about $20 (more like $50), or not have any idea of the address where I am headed (you know, the Hampton Inn.)

So right as I am about to get into a cab, I decide to be proactive! Use technology to get some answers. I count my money and wonder if it is enough. I pull out my blackberry and ping Jess, who manages the creation of the country kits. She’ll remember approximately how much the cab ride is to the hotel near the office. Here I am halfway across the world, and I can ping Jess! Ask her a question! Get an answer in real time!  What a concept. I’m so clever I could explode with cleverness.

Jess confirms that a cab ride is roughly $30US, so I’m good. I hop into a cab, show him the address of the hotel, and we’re in business. Plenty of time for a shower and some relaxing before getting a short but good night’s sleep. To kill time, I start flipping through some tourist leaflet from the airport, and I notice that the prices large numbers, like 100, 500, 1000… and that there isn’t the euro sign, but czk. Oh… no.

I consult the virtual posse via blackberry, and suddenly, they remember. Oh yeah. Not euros, but czech crowns. What a headsmack of a moment. How could I not have known this? I marveled at how these tidy little books fit into my purse and looked so adorable, but to actually read them? Pshaw.

Ok, easy fix. I ask the cabby to take me to a bank. He begins to look worried, but happily obliges. Phew, right? Easy peasy. Except when the bank machine EATS MY CARD. “Unauthorized Use. Retaining Card.” Fraud control. What a concept.

So I skulk back to the car and try to explain to the cabby that once again I have no money, but surely the hotel will be able to change my euros into czech crowns and all will be OK. We’re just a few blocks from the hotel. But when we get there… turns out they don’t have a room for me. The very lovely man at the counter tells me that my new hotel will be more than happy to change my money. I nearly burst into tears. PLEASE. PLEASE change my money so that I can show this cab driver I am not a total loser. So he did.

I finally make it here to a hotel that does have a room for me, which is very nice even if it took me about 15 minutes to figure out how to turn on the lights (apparently you have to stick your room key in some magic slot?). And I pay the cabby and thank him many times and tip him probably way more than I should partly because I have no idea how much a czech crown is worth but mostly because I am really sorry for making such a rookie travel mistake.

So as I sit here sulking and taking sips of wasser mit sprudel,  I finally decided to open up my moleskine city book and made the first note.

**apparently not

Notes: Lufthansa is amazing- wait until you hear how bad I fucked up on the return trip and how they saved my ass. While I love Air New Zealand’s feeling of coach-as-first-class, Lufthansa is still my number one favorite. My original reservation in Prague was at the Hotel Josef, and I wound up staying at the Maximilian Hotel.

Be less of a jackass by reading: Moleskine City Notebook Praha (Prague), Prague (City Guide)

My Bahnhof Has a First Name… It’s M-O-R-O-N…

I am in Frankfurt for two days this week before heading to Prague. My client meeting is not until tomorrow, so once I got some work done (read: took a gigantic nap) I managed to take a walk around town and see a few things.

I saw a lot of signs pointing to the zoo, and other attractions including plenty pointing to “bahnhof”. Which reminded me of when I was 15.

The summer after my sophomore year in high school, I won a scholarship to do a short exchange outside of Zurich. At this point, I had studied French for three years, and German for about 15 minutes on the plane. Zurich is on the German side of Switzerland, so this means that I arrived with only the absolutely most rudimentary amount of German skill. Or you could probably say none. Let’s go with none.

Zurich is a lovely place, and back in 1991 (and probably still today) it was a very safe place to let a 15 year old take the train alone from Adliswil and wander around in a clueless American girl fog through the Niederdorf and taking boat rides on Lake Zurich. After a few weeks, I began to notice that everything was named Bahnhof. There was the big Bahnhofstrasse in downtown Zurich, and every town seemed to have a Bahnhofplatz or Cafe Bahnhof as well. There were a lot of things named after Wilhelm Tell, but Bahnhoff really was far more visible.

So I asked my host family one night over dinner who was this Bahnhof person? He must be really famous because so much is named after him. They kind of stared at me funny for a few moments, then nodded and said that Mr. Flughafen was nearly as important.

Man, the internet has made life a whole heck of a lot less embarrassing.

Notes: In Frankfurt I stayed at the very nice but hella expensive Hilton Hotel Frankfurt. One really terrific thing was that they actually had a room ready for me when I stumbled into the lobby from the airport at 9AM. I may have been lucky, or they might have taken one look at me in my stained sweats and decided they didn’t want my low-brow self hanging around their lobby until 4PM. This was my first flight on Lufthansa, and I was impressed with the food and the service. The Frankfurt Airport was very efficient as well- in the future I will be sure to use it as a hub to other Eastern European destinations.