Prague Day 6

Last day of conference.  Blahblahblah [too tired to take much in] till 12:30 then it’s over!  Have lunch with Antonia and her dad at an Asian place, where the waitresses actively discourage customer satisfaction.  The eventual food is actually quite good.  Home for a nap and then to a tourist trap restaurant with my Stellenbosch colleagues.  Hotel yet AGAIN tell me to get on wrong tram.  Fortunately, I found a decent tram map at train station today, so that and my improving gut feel allow me to save face just in time.  The restaurant is quite Bavarian in nature, with an emergency blow-up ancient accordion player.  One gets dark beer that is strong enough to dissolve the glass plonked down in front of one, even when one has not asked for it.  You have to actually forcibly return it to the tray if you don’t want it... I decide to try it... Uuuuuuurrrrgghh is all I can say.  I order a sweet honey wine (another big mistake- think late harvest) to try and balance out the bitterness.  The ancient accordion player comes up to me and asks me where I am from, in thick this-is-the-only-English- phrase-I-know Czech.  I say “South Africa”, and he says [blank stare].  I shout “Africa” (maybe he’s deaf; one would have to be to play the accordion night after night)...  He dsays [eyes glaze over].  The guy at the table next to me explains that he has a representative song from all the European countries, so he wants to play the appropriate one for me/ our table.  He ends up playing...’It’s a long way to Tipperary’, which it is indeed, if you are from SA.  Anyways, it’s a fun evening.  We end up walking home along the river, each of us peeling off at our relevant tram stops. Dead. Sleep.

Me and Antonia, my new German friend