Praha in the first few days: finding which side is up again…

Prague has been quite an experience in the first 2 days. We began our travel adventure on Friday May 22, where we arrived at Newark International at around 4 or 5 in the evening for an 8:50pm flight. The drive was easy, thankfully, since we could have run into holiday traffic and didn’t, and there were very few cops out on the roads, but what was most interesting, was that everyone was actually going the speed limit for a change?! Usually people are trucking along route 80 in PA and NJ at an 80mph clip and on this particular day it was as if everyone had been sedated by the upcoming holiday. Whatever the reason, it made for a more leisurely drive and that was neat. Neat.

Virgin Atlantic airlines is an interesting bird to fly. Seriously, if you watch this ad from youtube, you’ll see exactly what we saw when we went through the security gate. As we were waiting in line, a whole entourage of Virgin Atlantic flight crew members passed us and were ushered into the front of the security line- everyone stared. Kids stared.

And so we got to the gate and once again, 20 minutes before we boarded the plane, the same kind of activity ensued, and it was a remarkable scene, as the crew passed us to enter the jetway™ bridge people made audible comments about the appearance of the stewardesses, mostly they were positive comments. Anyway it was quite interesting- we had sporty spice and a younger version of her as well and then a host of others who in total kind of looked like they were in a Robert Palmer video which of course I can’t watch in the Czech Republic…

The flight was alright- the pilot dropped us onto the Heathrow airport runway like he had a date with one of the sewardess, a seriously crappy landing. At 8:30am London time (That’s 3:30am Eastern) we hopped off our plane bloodshot eyed and ready for coffee, or a drink, or breakfast, no a snack, oh crap I couldn’t decide, I think I slept 3 hours and I was all messed in the head, don’t you love the global life. I think I recall Hasan Elahi telling me that he sort of gave up on “time” as a space of reality since he travels so much. I can see how that would be a natural progression of the “jet-set” academic lifestyle.

Layover: 6 hours… more to come. I gotta sleep. Todays photos are here though…

This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 2:48 pm. It is filed under Travel, prague. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.