On Wednesday evening, June 4, I took a flight from London Heathrow to Prague for one sole reason, which was to attend a wedding of two great friends of mine - Peter and Denisa that was to take place on Friday, June 6. The flight was surprisingly on time and also arrived on time, my luggage made it all the way for me to pick it up in Prague with no frustrations what-so-ever. The next step was to take a taxi from the Ruzyne airport in Prague to my sister, which is a very straight forward drive that takes some 10-15mins. Free market competition has been established by the public company managing the airport grounds, so that two companies are now competing to drive incoming tourists or business folks from the airport to their desired destination whilst inflicting the very first impression about the country on them. Let me set it straight here that the whole thing is an absolute rip off and I'd highly recommend to all of you travelling to my country to make pre-arrangements or travel at times, so that you can still catch a bus taking you to the tube. The prices these two companies charge are ridiculously high and believe it or not, you're going to pay the same no matter which one you take, which means that there's a gentlemen deal (cartel) between the two to maintain the high charges of course ... this is absolutely horendous and astounding for me, as a Czech person!!!

 

Anyway, I paid my app 18 quid for less than a 15min drive, and landed in my sis' place where I spent a night. The next day I had to repack my luggage and launched into a search for a hair-dresser. When I finally found one in a centrally located shopping mall I ended up paying around 20 pounds, which made me realize that the situation has changed and my country somehow doesn't present the destination where tourists / foreigners could spend their money cheap ... next time I'm more likely to simply get my hair cut in London for likely a better service, better result and only slightly higher price. With the Czech Crown being valued 30CZK to 1GBP at the moment, many price tags have creeped so much that they're no longer any different from the ones in London ...

 

Shortly after mid-day on Thu, my sister and her husband Tomas got on a Czech fast train - Pendolino - and headed to Ostrava, where we changed and took a slow train to Frydlant and then a taxi to the hotel where the wedding was planned to take place. The Czech fast train wasn't as exciting as we all expected. We paid some extra for first class tickets. Although the seats are fairly wide, there isn't much space inbetween seat-rows and therefore having someone else sitting opposite to you, one gets a feeling of tight space around him/her.

 

The hotel where my friends were to get married is situated in the hilly part of the Czech Republic, nearby the Slovak and Polish border. The place used to belong to a rich family called Rotschild, which seemed to have invested quite some funds in it and made it beautiful. As we learnt later, the place serves as a very popular wedding place, and that for apparent reasons - it's beatifully situated, with green hills all around it, with a stunning garden house where the marriages are concluded ...

 

Our typical group of friends arrived - Dusan & Lenka, Michal and then us. The wedding was fairly small - 30 people, but very well organized with lots of traditions kept - i.e. broken plate, iron cuffs around groom's ankle, ... Peter and Denisa made sure that we all met together with their families, which was great and we promptly made friends ...

 

I very much liked the wedding and enjoyed all my time there. I was also an important guest due to my status of the BEST MAN ;o))) ... my sister being the BEST MAID ... I've also taken lots of photographs. Some of them turned out well, some a little worse though ... but hopefully the newly weds will find them sufficiently capturing all major moments ...

 

The happening was over on Saturday morning. We all packed our stuff and Michal drove us down to the train station from where we started a 5hr ride to Prague. For me the capital wasn't the destination yet and my mom gave me a ride of another 1.5hrs further to our home in Ceska Lipa. While travelling, the Czech Republic's footbal team successfully entered the EURO 2008 cup beating Switzerland 1:0 with quite a significant amount of luck, some say undeservingly, but yet the first 3 points are ours ;o)) ...

 

It's great to be home for now. Today is Sunday and I'm flying back to London where I'm bound to see my Napolitan tesoro (treasure) ;o))) ... whom I cannot wait to see :oP ...

On Sunday, June 1, after a very lazy Friday evening, Saturday (all day long) and Sunday morning, Flavia and I realized we really needed to do / see something that weekend else all the time we had was going to sink in and no longer term benefit would have been extracted out of it ;o)) ... therefore we chose to attend to one of our tick-list items, which is one of the London's most famous markets close to Notting Hill - Portobello ...

 

We got there around 2pm expecting loads of small stalls and antiques on sale, but surprise surprise, there were no stalls in the street and apart from the brick-and-mortar shops, there was nothing else of any resemblance to the reputation of a great touristic place ...

 

We still walked up and down Portobello road. On the way from Notting Hill Gate we peered through a numerous small shops (predominantly offering food and sweets ;)) ... at the end of the road we did encounter a few stalls finally, but with not much interesting at display, so we turned around and marched back towards Notting Hill Gate tube station. As hungry as we were, we made an effort to eat something traditionally English, but due to quite a negligent behaviour of staff at one of the typical pubs, we had to walk out of the place and ended up in a chain called (I guess) Burger Kitchen. This place serves probably the biggest burgers I've ever seen. For about 8 quid I pumped my stomach full and didn't have a need to eat for the rest of the day :oP ... let alone the fact the burger was trully excellent ...

 

Portobello remains on our to-do-list still though. We only need to wait for the right time to go ;o)))