An Irishman’s Dairy: The trial of getting to Prague

On my first visit to Prague, more than 20 years ago, I brought with me a copy of Kafka's The Trial so I could read it in its setting, a thing I like to do.

Alas, there was no time for books on my second visit, a very short one, last week, en route home from Poland. But by a weird chance, this time, I spent my only night there in a Jurys Inn. And that’s another thing I like, a circular narrative.

The Prague of 1993 was a decidedly non-Jurys type place – it was still emerging from its half-century under Soviet rule and with nothing like the tourism it has now. Beautiful but gloomy, it was still the perfect backdrop for Kafka’s dark story about a man being tried by an unidentified court, on unspecified charges, with seemingly endless bureaucratic delays – at least until the strange last chapter which dramatically truncates the process.

But I didn’t have much time to read in 1993 either, being there on a student (mature in my case) project from Dublin City University’s journalism school. As a prize for good marks in a radio documentary project, half a dozen of us earned a free week in Prague, working on another project at Charles University.

And it was a rather wonderful experience.

It meant bypassing what there was of the city’s embryonic tourist industry, eating and drinking where the locals did. The beer was excellent and the food was mostly pleasant, although I’ll never forget the awfulness of the breakfast buffet that faced us every morning in our hostel. It gave me a small inkling of how the Czechs had suffered under communism.

I can’t remember now what our project was about and I suspect our supervisors found it instantly forgettable too. But it involved us trying to get information from at least one Czech government ministry. And I recall being struck by the reluctance of the local students to ask questions of officialdom, as if Kafka’s Josef K’s experiences (pre-communist as they were) had scarred them all.

One-way flight

The story of how my family and I ended up in Prague last week, having been at a wedding in Poland, betrays another of my occasional weaknesses: a love of train travel. The flights to Wroclaw had been booked months before, one-way, because we weren’t sure how long we’d be staying.

So since our ultimate destination was down in Poland’s southwest corner, from where the Czech capital was (all maps suggested) at most two hours by rail, I booked the return journey out of there. This was not a well-researched plan, although at least my children now have a better understanding of how neighbouring land-locked countries develop into separate ethnic and political entities.

Tourists

You’d hardly notice them on the map, but there are mountains between southwest Poland and Prague. This meant that the quickest rail connection involved first travelling the more-or-less opposite direction, and would have taken five-and-a-half hours, provided we didn’t miss either of two very quick train changes.

In the end, we had to resort instead to Polskibus, which took the direct route and was supposed to take four hours and 50 minutes. That, however, was a Kafka-esque fiction. The journey took nearly six hours and albeit scenic, it was a bit like The Trial – going on forever, until it stopped.

Arriving in Prague at 10pm, I had just enough time to drag my wife and kids on a walk through the old town, to show them the famous Charles Bridge at night. For some strange reason – possibly exhaustion or sunstroke from a similar walk earlier in the day in Wroclaw, where it was 35 degrees – they didn’t find the views quite as enchanting as I hoped.

Nor, I felt, did they get as much as they should have from our mid-afternoon stroll the following day when I showed them Wenceslas Square and Prague Castle. But in fairness, it was 36 degrees in Prague. So, finally moved to pity, I packed them all into a taxi and, since the driver wouldn’t take five passengers, I walked back to the hotel.

Fleeting as it was, my latest visit confirmed that, if anything, the Czech capital has too many tourists these days.

Of course, it was August. Although the Jurys' desk clerk assured me it was this busy "all the time" now. No doubt it's the influence of Ryanair. But I blame myself a little too. Back home in 1993, I promptly made my debut in a national newspaper, extolling the joys of unspoiled Prague in the travel pages of The Sunday Press.

@FrankmcnallyIT