Blague from Prague

If you like collections of ancient castles and churches surrounded by scores and scores of schlocky souvenir stores Prague is the city for you. Really, how many blown glass cats and pornographic t-shirts can the Earth support?

Prague is a city of tourists – Disneyland without rides. As such, it is a slice of the world, or at least that small part of it that has they money to travel around.

Each country, I can observe, contributes its own special style to tourist culture.

Americans are easy to spot. For some reason they like to travel around in large groups all wearing identical t-shirts. Why would a group of twenty-somethings decide to go out together all wearing bright orange? How about that group of thirty-somethings all wearing black t-shirts proclaiming "Michael's 40th Birthday". Yeah, that's how I want to spend my 50th when it comes around. Maybe I'll line up a couple dozen close friends and family to hike the Inca Trail into Machu Pichu with us all wearing bright green shirts emblazoned with "Vamos Gringo Viejo!"

Europeans are easy to spot too. None of their shirts match but they studiously follow dour-faced tour guides who hold closed umbrellas high aloft so their charges don't get lost. Really, I thought that was just in movies. So obedient.

A city of tourists is also a city of languages and people who speak all kinds of odd combinations of languages. Austrians who also speak Spanish. Bulgarians who speak English. Chinese who speak Czech. Here's one place where my American brethren get left behind. As the old joke goes: When people speak three languages they are called trilingual. When people speak two languages they are called bilingual. When they speak one language we call them American.

Finally, there are the long cobblestone streets that tourists find so quaint. We have those in Bolivia too. In Bolivia we call them simply, "the street".

On to Zagreb.