A Night at the Opera

Saturday night we had a 'quiet' one in at the hostel with two American guys who were staying in our dorm, Barrett & Mike, who were pretty cool. In fact, Laurie, Barrett & I ended up going out at 6 am and coming home at 9.30 haha. We went to one of the infamous 'herna' bars, dodgy locales on every corner where, so it was rumoured, you could fulfil all your gambling, drug, and prostitute-related needs. Maybe we went to the wrong herna bar - we were the only ones in there and it was perfectly fine. The gambling part was true, though.

That night (Sunday) I went out to the opera - yes, the post title wasn't a sarcastic ode to my stop-out behaviour. Me, Jo, and Elishka got our cultural fix at a performance of Aida. It was pretty cool, the theatre was really nice. For pretty much all of the first half we had no clue what was happening: I picked up the occasional word from the Czech subtitles and Elishka speaks pretty good Czech, so in the mini-intervals between acts we tried to piece it together, with average results. In the proper interval we got a programme, which helped a lot. I liked the big choral numbers, some of the solo/duo songs were a little dull, but all in all, it was a good experience. There was even at least one song I'd definitely heard before - what a culture vulture!

Monday was another quiet day. Most stuff (museumy-wise) shuts down on Mondays in Prague. (Cesky Krumlov trip fell apart, btw, but this weekend for sure.) So I just went shopping, got some gloves and a scarf and chilled. At night, me, Laurie and Scotty made dinner and watched Grease (Scotty had never seen it before, gasp!) & Sonja, Greg, and Carolyn turned up later, which was cool.

Oh yeah, before we got the movie we went to this photocopy place so Laurie could photocopy some stuff for her lessons. It was so funny, when she went to pay she accidentally gave the woman the wrong change. The woman stood there saying '85' in Czech, and after a moment, Laurie sorted it out. But the woman just stood there with her hand out, and printed a receipt, pointing to the total, '85'. Laurie counted it again - definitely 85 - still the woman kept standing there. I counted it - 85. This random customer who was next in the line counted it - 50, 60, 80, 85. Finally the woman said 'It's fine' and put the money away. Ah, the bizarrities of the Czech Republic. Was it because we were English-speaking, because she was an ass, because she was trained up by the Communists to make everyone's life a series of small frustrations? We shall never know, but it was amusingly weird...