First Day in Czech Repulic

I had fly to holland to transit to Czech Repulic. If I am not wrong, there is no direct flight from Singapore to Prague. The name Prague is familiar to me in a short story I read 10 years ago, a friend of Kafka but I don't know it was a city of Czech Repulic. Anyway, I don't know how to pronounce it correctly until I reach check-in counter in Singapore Changi Airport.

Prague is a nice airport. But I noticed that there was a lot of CSA(Czech Airlines) planes. Apart from CSA, a few jets from British Airways and Air France parked in Prague Airport. I had no problem finding our agent from Czech Republic. He hold the paper with my company logo and my name. He only didn't know how to pronounce my name correctly.

We drove more than two hours from there to Pardubice, a small town in Czech repulic which has a few big industries. We stopped on the way to have a lunch. It was rice with some dishes. I was surprised that they eat rice for their meal. But my agent said they eat mainly potatoes and dumpling. The announcement on the radio was like Russian language. But it was Czech. They all can speak Russian very well as they need to learn Russian language for more than ten years under Communist regime. I heard (bel bel bel) a few times on radio. Later I realized that it was referred to (www). :)

They revolted in 1989 to overthrown Communist government. Now their country enjoy the benefit of Democracy. There are a lot of fruit trees planted beside the highway. My colleague explained me that people were very poor under Communist government. When they travelled from one town to another, they need to walk on foot. So they planted the fruit trees ( green apple, red apple and others) for other travellers to eat on the way.

I found a very big castle on the way. My colleague said it was from 17th century. It is really magnificent. We arrived to customer place in the afternoon. I was really tired partly because of jetlagged. But I managed to fix a few problems on machine before I went to hotel.

The name of the hotel was "Penzion Atrium". It cost us around 1200 ck per night. It is around 42 Euros. It has satellite TV with more than 800 channels to views. I tried to find Asia SAT 1 but I can't find it. I think it was only Europe satellite. I found some girls advertising on TV. It was a strange thing for me. I haven't found that sort of advertisement in US or UK before.

I had my dinner at nearby restaurant. One of my customers advised us to find it because he said it was famous. We were lucky to have English menu in that restaurant. I chose Mexican soup and barbecue pork for my dinners. The soup was really nice. The big bread was remove in the middle part and soup was poured into it. It is simply delicious. I went back to my hotel room after dinner. After I had written an e-mail to Singapore for on-site report, I fell asleep before I had my shower.