Prague might not be the place you come to find good food. However, if you crave exceptional Vietnamese food in Prague and love to go off the tourist map, then you should visit Sapa, the largest Vietnamese market Prague.
Be prepared for a culture shock. Once you enter Sapa, you feel that you’re no longer in an EU country. Sapa’s rundown and unkempt appearance might make some of you feel unsafe, but there’s more to the market than the crappy environment that will be yours for the next hours.
I lived in Prague in my 20s and still live there.
Easy access to anywhere in Europe. Prague is quite central. If you are based in Prague, you can go just about anywhere. While I was here, I managed to accomplish a mega journey, a big item on my bucket list. I visited all 50 countries in Europe.
Wait! What about surprises? What about just let things happen? (Read “How a Missed Bus Turned into an European Extravaganza“)
You can forget that dealing with Czechs.
The Czechs are strange kinds of Slavs. They don’t resemble other Slavs I have encountered, who are more slovenly in their habits and actions. In contrast, the Czechs are fastidious in nature, possessing a weird sense of orderliness, not only uncharacteristic for Slavic people, but also for people from post-communist countries.
Seriously? A sound recommendation on how best to run away from home is to find another home and settle down?
When I was a child and then teenager, I fixated on idle boat ride on shallow water and bumpy ship journey across open sea. As I got older, overnight train, long-distance bus and road-trip got added to the mix. In this millennium, online shoutout and social hash tags boat voyage and land transport are shortened to #rtw, glorying round-the-world trip spanning major continents and world cities.
So I didn’t get to driff off indefinitely and tag my vagabonding as #rtw, but I stumbled into another kind of traveling, less roaming and less world-bound. I moved to one region, stayed put and became region-bound. I became Eurocentric.
For starter, this kind of traveling is much easier than the traditional #rtw where you will likely need to sell everything or put everything away, quit everything and do nothing but rounding up the world.
Living in Prague and traveling in Europe have gotten me “addicted” to the coffee and sitting-down culture. I developed a new habit to find small cosy cafés to work or socialize with others.
I’m sure there are many of us who prefer to work in a more unstructured environment different from our everyday’s cubicle station. This goes especially for creative people who need a sanctuary, a nurturing place to boost their creativity, not merely a place to work.
Yesterday at the Czech beer festival, I had a pulling-your-leg kind of debate with three Slovaks about their country’s relationship with the Czech Republic. They told me Slovaks beat Czechs in the world ice hockey championship to reach the final and how Slovaks were proud especially that the losers were Czechs. To that, I joked, “Nah, it’s family. There is nothing nice beating your ‘big’ brother. Your common ‘enemy’ is Russia. If you had let the Czechs win, they might have beaten the Russians. You should have looked at the bigger picture.” “No, they are not the big brothers. We are of equal status. We have our country.” The Slovaks shot back at me. “No. Slovakia was never a country.
Got a last-minute ride from www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de or rideshare.co.uk directly to Belgrade for €60. Otherwise it would be another planning hassle to figure out a way to get a cheap alternative to either Kosovo or Macedonia cheap. Buses to Budapest were all sold out. Direct train to Skopje costs 5800 ckz, too expensive for long-hour transportation.
A major accident on the highway only one hour leaving Prague delayed our trip for another 2 hours. By the time we got to Brno, it was 18.30. There, we made a stop for Branko, the driver, to meet up and had dinner with his friend. By the time we left Brno, it was already 20.00. No hope for getting to Belgrade by night now. I slept through most of the journey and woke up only once when we dropped off Sandor, the Hungarian, at Sezged, who came home for the Easter weekend. He was a Ph.D.
I’m using a mind ploy to keep myself motivated and focused in the next few months applying and getting a Czech trade license (Zivnostensky Lists). By calling this over mundane and administrative process ‘adventure,’ I hope that I won’t yank my hairs and scream murder in the next few months.
It will be almost another year before I can consider myself a permanent resident of this country I can not wait to leave. But for this to happen, I need to main a continuous legal presence of five years which is fine if I continue to work for the same company during this period. I want to have a backup just in case I get fired, lay-off or fed up and just quit (the last is more likely). By having a Czech trade license before my working visa from my current company terminates, I don’t breach the five-year requirement.
The first European country I visited is coincidentally where I live now. The year before at a summer camp in California, I met Danny, a Czech guy from Prague, who ‘marketed’ his city. Some guidebook even commented that “Prague is the Paris of the Eastern Europe.”I had an internship in Poland in summer 2004, exactly one year after I met Danny and remembered all the nice things he said about the city. Seeing that Poland was neighboring the Czech Republic, I booked a flight ticket from London to Prague for a quick sightseeing trip before taking a train to Poland.
My name is Cindy, also rhymes with travel junkie. A friend said I was probably a gipsy in my previous life. One of my many secret missions in life is to convert you to run off every once in awhile.
