GlobeDOTTIng: Day 73. Prague.

I arrived in Prague at about 5:30pm yesterday. I first went to see if I could catch a taxi to my hotel. But it was just as Cynthia and I had experienced in Russia....you have to negotiate your fare, and they unfortunately try to take advantage of American tourists. First, they wanted the equivalent of $50. When I immediately converted it into USD and told them that was ridiculous, they dropped the fare to $35. I told them that was still too high and offered them the equivalent of $15. When they wouldn't budge, I turned around and went to the metro. In anticipation of this, I had studied the metro map the night before, just in case. The only problem was the metro card machine only took Czech coins, and all I had were Czech bills and euro coins. But I was able to talk a woman into giving me the necessary Czech coins for a two euro coin. So I paid her double, but it was still a lot cheaper than the taxi! so I hopped on, made my transfer and arrived at my hotel about 10 minutes later....piece of cake :-). BTW, when I asked at the hotel how much I should have paid to get from the train station by taxi, they said about $15, max!! I really don't know how you avoid their scam if you really need a taxi?

After getting settled in, I went to an excellent restaurant I had read about on line, V.Zatizi, which was right around the corner from my hotel.

Then I took a short walk up to the bridge, as I heard they were doing some fireworks in honor of my arrival :-)...