How Did I Get Here? Part Three: Praha.

About three years ago one of my wisdom teeth became infected. The pain was excruciating, and sent waves of nausea down through my body. Antibiotics healed me, but about three months later I took a trip to a dental surgeon to have the offending bones removed. My trip to Prague really started during my two hour stay in the waiting room of the dental surgery.

It was there that I finished reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness Of Being. This book made me determined to do two things. The first was to read Kafka, and only some weeks later The Trial changed my life. The second was to visit Prague.

And so I came on a quasi-pilgrimage to Prague, a city whose reputation is quite intimidating. And it's all quite false. The city is amazingly beautiful at night, sure - everyone should spend one night in Prague, with a camera and some mechanical contraption to shut properly their disconnected jaw. But during the day, Prague is getting more expensive, and more full of (mostly American) tourists grabbing bargains at the diamond and Bohemia Crystal stores which seem to be open 24 hours a day. Seriously, who buys diamonds at 1am? And exactly how do you store Bohemia Crystal in your carry-on luggage? The Anglicised Czech word for a 24 hour store is 'non-stop' - great tourist buys are what never stops in this town.

Still, yesterday I went to the Kafka museum, where I saw original manuscripts of his work, an original letter to his father, and even more amazingly, examples of the reports he wrote in his job as a legal clerk for an insurance company. Those reports go further than anything to explain the mystery and claustrophobia of his literary genius.

I also walked past the house Kafka lived in.

I also went to the Cross Club, Prague's teenager-haven nightclub. There would have been a thousand people in this place, most drunk and incredibly irritating, almost all under 23 years of age. The place is quite amazingly laid out with metal cogs and engineering contraptions littering its walls and ceilings. What is has in aesthetics, it lacks in decency.

But a sigh of relief, for tonight I will be sleeping in Vienna.