We had our farewell dinner at a Thai restaurant with the lovely Singaporean friends in Munich. First time I smelled RICE after more than two weeks of stay in Europe!!! At the moment, we felt so blessed with RICE!!! Of course, it was a good Asian dinner with plates of RICE!!!

Our Munich friend had reminded us to be mindful with our belongings in Prague. He had encountered a bad experience when travelling in Prague with his girlfriend. His camera and bag were stolen when a man stood near him and flipped his coat, and like magic, the things were gone with the thief. The most disheartening part was, all the photos taken throughout the Europe tour were gone too! Another point was that the policemen might not help even if the tourist is being robbed, as tourists are supposed to be richer than the robbers!

We also heard that a lady was being pushed in the train by a few men, and just before the door closed, the men left in a hurry, leaving the zipper of her haversack opened and her wallet was gone.

The following day was a long journey for us to Prague, with a two connecting train rides in Austria.

Next: Journey to Prague!

The Munich station was nice and clean. We returned to Austria for connecting trains to Prague. Our first stop in Austria was Salzburg, followed by another train to Linz. Austria is also famous for its yummy apple strudels. I bought one at the train station and it cheap and tasted good too. From Linz, we took a train to the Austria-Czech border, then another train to enter Czech.

The train to enter the Czech’s border was funny; it had only one carriage and we were the only few passengers in the carriage. It looked more like a bus running on the railroad! We often hear stories from travel agencies about the tense atmosphere at Czech’s border, with strict-looking custom policemen carrying big rifles while checking everyone’s passport on the coach. We prayed hard that it was not like what was told.

It really wasn’t what was heard about the scary Czech custom. There were only two custom policemen carrying small pistols entered our train. They checked our nationalities from a little booklet and gave us an entry-permit stamp. Our Singapore passports were checked quickly, but Jacky’s Malaysian passport took the police officer a while as he babbled with his colleague and went through the booklet again.

Fortunately, we didn’t face any problem with the Czech custom. So far, we had only got two custom stamps from Austria and Czech; we didn’t get stamps when we entered France and Switzerland.

The trains and train station in Prague were very old. They appeared much older than the rest of the trains and stations we went over the past two weeks; seemed that not much restoration was done to the station for the past decades. In fact, Czech Republic is formed on 1 January 1993, after Czechoslovakia, which was then a communist country, peacefully split into Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Having heard stories about pickpockets in Prague, we were extra careful with our belongings. Guess what?! We had our first suspect appeared the moment we alighted the train at Prague station! A young man awkwardly bumped onto my friend as soon as my friend came out of the train. The platform was so wide with no crowd, why would the man walk to our direction and bumped onto him? The young man apologised in English with an awkward accent. ENGLISH! We had not heard any stranger and even customer service staff whose first word was English throughout our two-week stay in Europe. We often had to start the conversation with, “Excuse me, do you speak English?” The biggest surprise was, the young man went up the train that we just came down, and we all knew that the train terminated at the station! Very suspicious man.

The train station in Prague was gloomily lit and quiet. There wasn’t anyone queuing for ticket at the counter. Another suspenseful incident happened again: Jacky went to the ticket counter to check on the train ticket to the old town square where our hostel was located. Then, a uniformed man walked toward Jacky and beckoned him to go somewhere else. We were puzzled. Jacky was simply making enquiry about train tickets at the counter, why the counter officer didn’t help him and let someone outside the queue to do the job? Of course, out of safety reason, Jacky ignored that suspicious uniformed man. And that man could not do anything more but to walk away.

Another scary incident happened again, at the train station. Our friend wanted to withdrawn money at the ATM. Two suspicious men that looked like crooks were loitering behind us. There wasn’t anybody nearby except these two men. We kept staring at them, while guarding behind our friend who was withdrawing money. Fortunately, no robbery.

This was the only place where people came to us and spoke English to us, promoting their hostels and other things that had never happened before when we were in France, Switzerland, Austria and Germany.

Eat like a King in Prague!

After much strange incidents at Prague station, we finally reached the Old Town Square safely. Well, the next problem was, we were confused with the street numbers and couldn’t find Youth Hostel TYN. The night was falling and yet we were still looking for the hostel and tried not to wander into quiet lanes.

It didn’t take us too long to locate our hostel at last. Youth Hostel TYN is strategically located at the Old Town Square. Our room had two beds and a communal toilet and bathroom on a level. We had a pleasant stay there.

Time to satisfy our appetite after a tiring. We walked to a Czech restaurant nearby to have dinner. The service of this restaurant was bad, but the food was quite good and most importantly - CHEAP! Rice is a common dish and we ordered rice again. It was like eating in an average restaurant in Singapore! We ate like a King the first time in Europe! Imagine how we felt after using so much Euros which was twice as much as Singapore dollar.

No matter how prudent we were, we got cheated. This time, it was the waiter that overcharged us. When we asked for bill, the waiter just wrote down all the prices on a piece of paper and charged an extra 22% of tax! Actually, we had read about waiters who cheated on tourists in Prague by writing the bill on pieces on paper to confuse the tourists, yet we happily footed the bill as it was really cheap!!! So you can imagine how cheap the food was, even being over-charged! We realised this scam when we asked the hostel keeper about tax stuff in the restaurants and he told us there was no such thing as an extra tax.

Prague Old Town Square!

Charles Bridge crosses the Vltava river in Prague. The bridge is decorated by an alley of 30 statues and statuaries, mostly in Baroque style, erected around 300 years ago.

The Old Town bridge tower is also considered as one of the most astonishing civil Gothic-style buildings in the world.

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We walked along the historic buildings and naively believed in a trickster who looked like a South American. He showed us that by waving the paper doll in front of the speaker, the paper doll would dance. Seeing is believing, but not always! We tried to spot the trick; we tried to see if he was manipulating the paper doll, but we just couldn’t find any loophole! We couldn’t see any string attached to the paper doll too. I wanted to open the packaging which was only loosely stapled to check the content before I paid. Then the trickster became very impatient and fierce that he didn’t allow me to check. We bought two - a Pikachu and a Minnie Mouse at €2.50 each! In fact, there were many peddlers along the passageways selling the same stuff too. (See below for how we discovered that we were being tricked.)

There were also people selling padlocks to lovers, to connect the idea of love and lovers by locking the padlock and throwing the key into the river, and the lovers became eternally bonded. Oh, I had seen this before on Mount Huangshan in China, where the people there do the same thing. And I heard that the keys are alike, so even if the lovers throw away the keys into the abyss, the peddlar could open the padlock again and sell it to other lovers again and again.

P.S: Back in Singapore, we tried to make the paper doll dance in front of the speaker on with music. You must be thinking we were very stupid. No argument over that! Then I found that the piece of paper in the packaging was a piece of instruction, surprisingly, written in English. It instructed us attach the string to make the paper doll dance. One might not see the magic if the trick is performed tactically. We were so silly! The paper doll is actually a string puppet. As a tourist, I used to buy things out of impulse when seeing something special in that country. Also, I realised that tricksters are normally fierce to intimate the victim so that the victim would just give and take instead of hesitating further. After much incidents that had happened in many countries, I think I have grown some wisdom at last!

Next: to Pisa for the leaning tower!

Travelling in May proved to be the right month for us: lesser crowds, cheaper rates, attractions open with longer operating hours, longer daylight, not too cold yet able to see snowing in Central Europe like Austria, spring flowers blooming.

Yes, everything seemed to be right for us throughout our 27 days in six countries. We did not fall sick or hurt ourselves…we had enough money to survive… we managed to stick to our tight train schedules except some hiccups in Austria… we managed to catch our flight to Switzerland at the last minute… we didn’t lose our pile of train tickets… and we were not picked or ROBBED!

But, on the last day of our sightseeing in Rome, something sickening happened to us. It was related to our metro tickets. We had already read some journals about some tourists being confused with the metro tickets in Italy and were slapped with a fine. So, we had been careful in reading those fine English lines among a lot of Italian words on the metro tickets. Read the full story