With exams wrapped up at the end of last month I hopped on a plane to Prague with Sally, Ben, Alex and Anna from law school. This unsurprisingly resulted in a deluge of photos which I have now sifted through to produce the new Prague album in the Gallery. I decided to postpone posting until I had the photos sorted, which has delayed things somewhat. The trip was great fun with a mixture of sightseeing and regular stop-offs in beer gardens to replenish fluids lost in the heat. After we had decided on a cheap city break I ended up picking Prague on the basis I thought it would be prettier than the alternative Budapest. Friends better informed than I seemed to agree and the architecture was certainly stunning, in proximate variety more than any specific style. The football was on during our stay so that covered the evenings’ entertainment and we found the food surprisingly good for a country not famed for high quality cuisine. Being mid-week it also appeared blessedly free of the infamous stag party crowd. All in all a thoroughly enjoyable jaunt.
Travelling light we decided to make do with just hand luggage (and for a period like that I can successfully survive out of a small rucksack — it’s my camera that takes up the most space). This highlighted one of the oft forgotten, and perhaps most serious, results of terrorism. With no baggage in the hold we were limited to liquids of no more than 100ml. However the hair gel I used comes in nothing smaller than 150ml, leaving me with no option but to use wax! I decided to forego the intriguing experience of debating the true state of matter of a solid network within a liquid medium with airport security on this occasion…
Flying back the perils of flying a budget airline befell us as RyanAir apparently ran out of planes, resulting in our flight leaving several hours late, around midnight. Waiting in Prague was fine with several packs of cards and me annoying everyone by repeatedly winning the game Sal introduced, “President’s Men” (once you win it rewards you, making it harder to be unseated). However it meant we arrived back at Gatwick after the tubes had stopped running. While the others headed off by various means I elected to hang around the airport to kill a few hours until they started again. This led to my discovery that as refreshing store-bought beverages go, a pint of milk is much better value than a coke. Sipping milk from a plastic carton while listening to podcasts and reading Kafka on the Shore