Stuart Homfray The Weblog

Transport, and going to Chomutov

One of the major differences between Prague and Wolverhampton (and I do understand that it is a little unfair to compare a capital city with a smaller city from another country) is the transport system. Whereas Wolverhampton’s can be patchy and inefficient, Prague’s is really rather well-organised, with services easily accessible whereever you are. This stems from the fact that when planning a new set of apartments or housing estate, the officials tend to think how best to service the citizens themselves, rather than outsourcing everything to smaller companies that wish to make a profit.

Anyway, the thing that brought this issue to mind (not that it’s not brought to mind daily) was visiting Šárka’s grandparents in the town of Chomutov, in the north of the Czech Republic, near the German border. It takes about two hours, more or less, from where we are in Prague (Černý Most), and everything went exceptionally smoothly: leave the flat and walk outside to the bus-stop, catch bus to metro station, catch metro to the main bus station (Florenc), then catch bus to Chomutov: easy, smooth and without any problems. As you can see, you are reliant on three modes of transport being on time. On many occasions, back in Wolverhampton, you may find that the first mode (bus from near your house) can fail: either you need to take a 10 minute walk to the bus-stop itself, and/or that bus may be late, early, or it may not even turn up at all (slightly problematic in a situation like this).

Chomutov itself is a fairly non-descript town, it must be said, but there is a lot of wonderful countryside to pass through before you get there, and there looks like there may be some nice hillwalking (but we did not have time to sample it as we were only there for a few hours). The grandparents were very nice folks indeed (although I did not understand 99.5% of the conversation :-)), showed us some great pics and gave us a hell of a lot of traditional Czech food (I can usually put away a fair bit of food, but even I was struggling at the end!!) Šárka’s gran gave me a lovely hand-made ‘gel candle‘, and a small, round vase that I liked the look of (although I admit that I felt as though I had almost ‘pressed’ her into giving it to me when I highlighted it as something that I liked - I was assured that she did not)

All in all, it was a lovely day out - I enjoyed meeting the grandparents, and we enjoyed our journey back (although someone fell asleep on the way home!!!