A Piece about Prague

How To Escape Prague Like a Spy

Every traveler’s nightmare happened to us. Halfway across the world and dead broke. Now I’d mentally prepared before our trip by watching a lot international spy movies and I knew: when things go down, you run to the Embassy. I mean actually physically run. But being broke didn’t sound as urgent as witnessing an illegal arms trade and being hounded by some super spy in a tank with me clutching my panting wife’s hand, dodging bullets until we finally ran through the Embassy’s gates and yelled, “Sanctuary!” Which is probably not the word you yell. Not that it mattered because we weren’t in that particular situation. We were broke. In Prague.

My wife, Valerie, and I had been in Prague three days already. “The City of Spires” is breathtaking. At dusk, as the landscape blurs a bit, you can see all those spires black against the color. We would just pick a spire and walk until we were under it. Of course, these were the idyllic days. When we had money. Later, those spires looked like shark teeth. Like a big mouth closing in on us.

We’d been traveling east from London, dealing with the Euro, the Romance Languages. But the Czech Republic was the first place that felt completely foreign. Between my Spanish and Valerie’s French we’d bluffed our way east. But Czech with its Slavic roots and unfamiliar alphabet sounded crazy in our ears. Street signs looked like puzzles for decoder rings. The local fashion was somewhere between The Warriors and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.

Even more, the money was baffling. The standard of currency in Prague is the Koruna or Crown. About one hundred crowns per four US dollars. We’d get a bill for dinner that was like nine hundred crowns, look at each other, mouth “Embassy”, and start stretching for the run. Then we’d remember the exchange rate, laugh at our cultural naiveté, and pay up. But our Crownlessness wasn’t because of the exchange. It was a bank error. Like the bank had erred in letting us go overseas without enough money.

Here’s the key to getting out of Europe broke. Have an escape route. We had kept a few days on our ten day Eurorail passes, purchased our return Chunnel pass, and had a flight home. All we had to do was get to the train station. We filled our bags with “complimentary” breakfast items from our hotel and headed towards the subway with our last money. A thousand crowns I’d forgotten in a pocket. Roughly forty bucks.

We made it to the subway without any arms deal witnessing. We tried to interpret the subway fares, gave up, and bought the cheapest passes. We felt like we’d made it until the train station when two cops waved us over and asked to check our subway passes. Out of the hundreds of people pouring out of the subway cars, we were the only ones stopped. Because we were clearly foreigners.

He flashed a badge and said the English words “expired”, “no good” and “pay fine” while pointing at the subway cards. We made the universal “we don’t understand the language” sign. He gave the universal “I’ll take you to jail” sign, so we made the universal “weepy faces” and he finally made the universal money sign. I pulled out the rest of our crowns and he grabbed them without even counting. He gave us the universal “get the hell out of here before I change my mind” sign and we ran to the train. Sanctuary.