![]() On my way back to the botel i looked around for a local bar in a fabulously un-exotic area surrounded by shopping malls and KFC and McDonalds. I basically just wandered from the central station to my botel a few miles away, and then walked up and down the riverfront till i found a vegan restaurant - a Loving Hut, of course. Today i discovered a hint of a Little Saigon marketplace close to a metro station that had potential. If Europe fell, if cars became extinct, if, if. Present day Prague doesn't appear to have a Chinatown, but walking along the water and seeing all the wasted space, you can see how riverside markets and stalls could develop. Yes, it is tacky as all hell, but one of the locations in Dreamfall Chapters is a houseboat in Chinatown, which is along the water. I figured a good place to start would be booking my stay in a "botel" - a boat hotel moored permanently on the river. But how could it just be the same old guff and still inspire the amazing depiction of Dreamfall Chapters? I am trying to find out. Yes, like Vienna, it's basically the innards of The Venetian Las Vegas vomited out somewhere where actual rich people and artists once lived, and thus ostensibly higher brow. Now those façades are gussied up and sold to working class tourists for photo-ops. Or, you know, every other European town where the rich decided to rococo the fuck out of every façade just to take an especially conspicuous dump on the heads of the proletariat. I was pretty disappointed to walk to my hotel and realize it was just Vienna redux. ![]() ![]() Unfortunately, present-day Prague is more of a cookie-cutter European town. The kind of place i imagined Istanbul would become when i visited it for those two brief days back in 2013, before Erdoğan's latest crackdowns. There's a souk and a Chinatown and it looks like exactly the kind of place i want to live. There are punks and neo-Communists and it's wildly multicultural. There are hovering trains and skyscrapers and screens everywhere. Much like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, the game is set in a far future Prague, but - unlike Deus Ex - it doesn't portray the city as a cookie-cutter European town. In my mind's eye i was expecting an embryonic Propast - a featured location in the computer game Dreamfall Chapters. Neither of those things are a shining endorsement. Oh, and British lads go there to get hammered. I know precisely zero about the city other than that all my jet-set colleagues who check off weekends in European capitals like it's a competition think that it's great. I came to Prague with a bit of apprehension. Spoken Czech sounds like dozens of tiny explosions, fuzzy wuzzy fireworks. Then a pair of talkative young girls heading into the big smoke. ![]() I shared the cabin for a while with a tough-looking older man with tattoos behind his ears, his gray mullet curling down to obscure the text. Straight across the border there are high-rises and towns that feel like people actually live in them, even if they do look a bit shabby. The DDR must have been a real economic wasteland. It was surprising to me how much more built up the place was, compared to East Germany. Never been, which is perhaps odd because - like Poland - it's closer to Berlin than most of the "famous" places in Germany. So i took the train south on that nondescript Thursday, dozed through the relentless dreariness that is rural East Germany, whizzed through Dresden, then past some hillbilly towns on the border, and hello Czech Republic. Then i became a manager, and i quit smoking, and i cut back on drinking, and i turned vegan, and i started walking to work, and the riot police occupied my neighborhood, and Brexit happened.Īnd Brexit happened. I practically lived at Katerholzig/Kater Blau. My first 2.5 years in Berlin were all about clubbing. The last time i went out was New Year's Day, and before that i don't even remember. I guess that's how it always goes when you leave a place, but it feels odd to leave Berlin - world capital of techno, raves and parties - that way. I shouldn't just leap into a travel blog without a goodbye to the city i spent 3.5 years living in, but i left with a whimper - not a bang.
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