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.
(Read the first part “The Germanized Slavs“)
I found a new love. I loved spread sheets. I loved everything that had columns and rows so I could put bits and pieces of data into cells. By using spreadsheets I was able to dig into the giant blob of the travel industry, organize my research and record my activities. I listed every day and broke it into blocks of time like first half, second half or morning, day and evening. I identified every possible action points including simplest task such as “taking the bus to the airport”, “getting from the train station to the guest house” or “check-in online”. I filled the next columns with details of the places, contact information, reference numbers, etc.
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.
Everybody said that I was traveling the world. I think not. Traveling the world, to me, is bumping from one place to another, crossing continents and visiting at many countries as possible, many of which were randomly selected.
I’m not traveling the world as I am going home, a long way home in deed. The 1st home means where I came from before, and where my parents lived. The last home is where I live now. And if it worked out and I crossed to Vietnam from China, the title would be “Home, Home and Home.” It takes so long because I wanted go overland as much as possible. If I had more time, instead of flying in and out of Australia, I would to do it by ships.
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.
4/8/2011
Dear sender,
I am out of office till 14th August. In urgent cases you can reach me on +420 xxx xxx xxx. For all support requests please contact X. Best regards, Y.
Dear sender, Thank you for your e-mail.
I am currently out of the office till 08.08. I will have no access to my e-mail account during this time.
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.
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.
