Getting there, and staying somewhere

Max and the boys were booked into a cheapish hotel, some distance out of the city but with easy access to their sporting venue. As the main thing I wanted to see in Prague was Max, we asked him to get us booked into the same hotel.

Early morning hassles

We had to get up early in the morning. We found a taxi driver asleep in his taxi in the main street of Bakırköy, and arrived at the airport in good time. There were hardly any check-in desks operating, and our flight was one of those combination ones: Czech Airlines and Turkish airlines together. We couldn't see a Czech counter, but there was a Turkish "Common Check-in" ... with a queue a mile long. We joined the line, and shuffled our way up and then back and then up again in the lane. It took about 20 minutes to get to the counter.

The girl looked at our papers: "Are you going to Prague?" she asked. We nodded and smiled eagerly. "You're at the wrong counter, you need the Czech counter ..." she told us.

So we set off again. We tried asking one official-looking uniformed chap, but he backed away in fear when we said "Czech Airlines?" telling us he didn't speak English. By the time we found the right counter it was almost at the end of check-in time, and there was no queue at all. We zipped through, and then through the passport check to the departure gate. When we went on a domestic flight to Izmir, we had to go through three security checks, but here there was only the one.

We are used to answering endless questions and filling in declaration forms going to and from Australia. But here it was so much easier.

Flying over Czech Republic in the early morning, it was a beautiful sight. I hadn't realised it's so small. Only about 2 million people altogether, about a million in Prague itself. And the houses we looked down on mostly painted in pretty pastels with red pointy roofs with little windows in them ...

This has never happened to us before. Because we were so late checking in, our bags were the first two to appear on the baggage carousel! So, grabbed our bags and walked on out into the Prague sunshine.

Looking for the yellow desk

Max couldn't meet us, he had a basketball match to go to, but we had a piece of paper with the name of the hotel - Ceskamoravska - and some instructions to either catch a bus and a train from the airport, or to ask about a shuttle bus at a yellow shuttle bus desk ...

Couldn't find any yellow desk. (We found out later there are two or three terminals, and we just weren't at the same one that Max arrived in.) There were a couple of white shuttle buses hanging around, and when we mentioned the name of our hotel they agreed to a price and we climbed aboard. Simple enough, ay?

Finding the hotel.

Ceskamoravska is the name of a station on the Metro, so the bus driver knew where he was heading, and set off confidently across town. And we also had a number by way of an address to describe exactly where in that district the hotel was. But when we got there, it was not nearly so simple.

When we got to the right area he started driving around and around, unable to find the hotel. "Oh, look! There's an 'Auto Kelly's'", Peter said. Suddenly I remembered Max had said something about that in an email - "It's right behind Auto Kelly's". But even sitting there staring at Auto Kelly's, we couldn't see the hotel, and the driver was getting quite distressed.

I went through the email print-out again: "Hotel Ceskamoravska - Inturprag".


Then I noticed a pink building - just there behind the orange business centre - with "Hotel Inturprag" written on it.











No wonder we couldn't find it. It changed its name. Nowhere was the old name mentioned.

Still can't see it? Okay, let's come around a little further.