The thing about Prague nights is that they gallop past much too quickly, leaving you wondering where on Earth those past couple of hours went while you were tucking into a meal and forking out conversation. You look up from your schnitzel/curry/beer/Shirley Temple and - YEEHAW - it's past midnight and the metro's stopped running.
Taxis are readily available and you'll have much less of a chance of getting ripped off if you order by phone through companies like AAA. (We've completely given up getting one off the street after being gutted by nefarious parties.)
Still, when we do have a late outing, we usually prefer Prague's infamous night trams, which provide some of the best people-watching in the city. They tend to be a touch crammed, and usually merry. And as the Czech Republic's blood-alcohol level tolerance for driving is 0, with much stiffer penalties than in the U.S., the night trams are a necessity.
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| BW waiting for a night tram to pick him up |
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| Here comes one! That's a huge pub crawl to the left. Meh. |
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| More night owls |
There was that one time someone deposited a pile of bile on the floor - the tram driver stopped, entered the compartment, dumped sawdust on it, and kept going - but we won't dwell on that. Or the fact that numerous people getting on and off stepped in it.
No, we sort of enjoy a good night tram jaunt now and then.
Ohhhh the night tram, what a quintessentially Prague experience! Can't live with it, can't live without it. I specifically remember one time someone set off some kind of smoke-bomb pepper spray thing and the whole tram was coughing-- sort of awful. But every other time has been positive and sometimes hilarious.
ReplyDeleteA smoke bomb?! Yikes! It probably helped the smell, though! I do think there's more of a sense of "community" on the night trams than on public transit any other time of day. The mood is so much lighter.
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