I mentioned before how I traveled with a pair of beautiful women and then got driven insane by show tunes. I also learned, on that trip, why you should never travel with friends.

Our Prague trip started out well. We ran into a guy in the train station who rented us an apartment one block from Wenceslas Square, which is the heart of pretty much anything anyone would want to do in Prague. The apartment was nice, we could come and go as we pleased, we could cook for ourselves and it was a reasonable price.

Everything went downhill after that. Although there was a Mozart Festival going on, we’d apparently landed during a short hiatus. This meant there was nothing to see except a puppet version of Don Giovanni which is not something that interested us as 1) it’s a dark, depressing opera; and 2) puppets. (To see what we missed, see here.)

Instead, we ended up roaming around Prague, which is not a bad place to end up roaming. It’s almost annoyingly beautiful and well preserved. I managed to check out a couple exhibits about Franz Kafka and visit the castle that inspired his novel.

The problem was, we were three, which meant we didn’t always want to do things that interested all of we (something like that). Tension began building, especially as we had no real distractions other than each other, and we ended up going to a cinema to watch Schindler’s List (because that’s totally not more dark and depressing than an opera about sin and punishment).

After we watched Schindler’s List, we decided to go party. Yes, to understand how messed up we were at that point, and remember, alcohol was not yet involved, we watched a movie about the holocaust and then went out to find a disco.

Something punished us for that choice, though, because we saw a disco on top of a tall building and decided to go there. When we got there, we paid a hefty cover charge and then bought an expensive drink each. The club was well decorated and modern and mostly empty. It was playing some of the worst music ever. It was like someone was playing the music backward. Even if I’d wanted to dance, the music was impossible to dance to. (To this day I’m shocked such music exists.)

We left and found another club which turned out to be a lot of fun. It was full of locals and was great for people watching. (Unfortunately, I was still in my “stand off to the side and watch people” phase which, I’m assured, is normal and which, I’m also assured, I’ll move past some day.)

That one ended badly as well. One of my travel companions had decided she’d had enough, got the coat check ticket from me, and retreived her coat. Unfortunately, she neglected to all the coats. I then spent the next 20 minutes arguing with the coat check guy and describing everything in my coat and my other travel companion’s coat.

Eventually, all coats were retrieved. It’s the friendship that never quite got retrieved.

I should have gone to see the puppet show.