Back on the road again and literally, as the clock struck
the start on Monday 22nd July it was back on the road.
Today it was to be Ostrava in the Czech Republic and to do
that I needed to set off at 02:00 to get to the hotel parking at Manchester
Airport, through the disliked Manchester check in and on to Frankfurt.
I have started to have a real dislike for Manchester after
having to use Terminal 1 and after today I have decided I will try to avoid
where ever possible. The reason for
today’s distain was the check in, I arrived and as normal there are two queues,
one for first and business class and the other for the lesser mortals, I know
my place and took my place in the economy line.
What I didn’t understand is that we were moving albeit slowly when the
staff appeared and started an unofficial second economy queue and started
taking people from the back of the queue and putting them into the new one and
they were then pushed in front of our queue.
Normally it is easy to ignore such weird events but at 04:30 people in
the line were starting to get a little tetchy.
Luckily security was quick but by the time I got through it was past
05:30 and only 10 minutes before the gate was due to open.
So to Frankfurt and I thought having over an hour between
flights I would be OK. I was surprised
that the next flight took almost all of that and by the time I got to the gate
the last few people were going through to the bus. I was due to meet a colleague from Lithuania
who was joining me in Ostrava and when I boarded the bus found her already
waiting for the transport to the plane.
The weather upon arrival in Prague could only be described
as damn hot, the sun was blazing and what bit of breeze there was seem to be
blowing hot air.
As we queued for the bus it was this point that things
started to go wrong. A bus turned up and
I asked the driver if it was to the main station, he had no idea what I was
talking about and so I suggested we didn’t board, the next bus replied “Yes” to
my same question and we boarded only to find that instead of going to the city
centre we ended up at a retail park out of town with an IKEA to boot. We followed some people to the underground
and after some logical thinking and a bit of guess work we hopped onto a
train. This took us to a centre ish area
and then I recognised a word like htlevi that I thought was Czech for station
and we had a go at getting there, eventually we got to the station and booked a
train to Ostrava. As we had some time to
kill we stood in the sunshine outside the station and I took a few photo’s of
the relaxing locals.
The train journey as before was a pleasure on the train with
wifi to allow work to be done en route.
I must admit at this point to being shattered when I arrived
at the hotel and so had a quick hour on emails before grabbing a shower and
then going for a walk around the area.
It was whilst on this walk that we found a monument dedicated to the
second world war but could not quite figure out what it celebrated. I have added a picture at the bottom.
It was a shortish walk and then back to the room to do some
quick updates, do the blog and then it will be an early night at only 22:00.
Night All
A Park Just outside the station in Prague
A view out of the park in Prague
The war memorial in Ostrava
The inscription on the war memorial (translation please?)
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