Rick Steve's Melancholic, Alienated, Self-Defeating,Immature and Unhelpful Gay Nephew's Guide to Prague

Editor's Note: The Following Should Not Be Taken As Actual Advice For Travelers. Rick Steves Was Stoned Off Glue And His Brother Was The Only Person Around Who Could Write A Section On Prague in 2009, As The New Year Has Just Occurred And We Would Really Like To Stay On Top of Our New Listings. We'd Delete It, But Hey, New Content Is New Content, Right?, And We're Trying To Include New Minority Voices In Our Efforts To Reach Out To Those Affected By New Media And Readers of Blogs Dealing With Issues Of Existential Despair, And Provide These Readers With Tourism Advice That Speaks To Their Needs As Young People. So, Without Further Ado, A Piece of Writing I Haven't Even Seen...

Hi, welcome to Prague.

Let's start with an image, since I guess that's what guides are supposed to do. So, imagine a garbage man taking out the, uh, garbage. The man looks really pissed off at the world. As he takes out the garbage, the garbage bag tears. Garbage starts slipping through the tears of the garbage bag. The man looks like he's going to cry. Inside his car, "I am Beautiful" by Christina Aguilara is playing.

Welcome to Prague.

This is the first thing you see.

(My editor said I should use contrasts).

Down the street from my shitty, pointless hotel is a souvenir shop filled exclusively with shitty, pointless babushka dolls.
There are a few cups and wooden carvings magnetized to the mirrored walls, but the primary focus is shitty, pointless babushka dolls. The woman who owns the store wears a bright metallic winter jacket with fake fur. She ties her belt around her waist so tightly you wonder how she breathes. She looks like something out of a Gary Shtenygart book. And she's selling little, ugly, painted wood carvings of fat Russian ladies you can put on your fridge, ironically. Kudos, you. And everyone will say "oooohh, where did you get that?" and you'll respond, "I got it in EUROPE," and then your friends will be all like "JEALOUS!" and you'll feel glad because the point of life is to make people jealous through the attainment of ugly things you can place about the house ironically.

The buildings of Prague look like something out of Hogwarts (or some other analogy that doesn't suck). They're grand, with sooty roofs and gold spires. Spires abound. The city is, quite literally, injecting itself into the sky. Forcefully. With little stars of davids and crosses. Everywhere you go, you're reminded of your athiesm. There are also lots of stupid tourists on stupid missions to count all the stupid old churches in Europe or something, too. It's just basically sad. Tourism is shitty and pointless and does nothing to bolster feelings of mutual understanding between countries. All you really understand from being a tourist is that lots of countries have really old churches, lots of countries were conquered by barbarians, and lots of countries want you to buy their babushka dolls. There, now I just saved you 800 dollars and the neck pain associated with long airline travel. Mazel Tov for staying home.

Also, the food is quite possibly better where you are. I've now given away 2 terrible meals to homeless people. One was a pizza that had goo on it (literally, goo) and the other was a salmon pasta that smelled like my grandmother's nursing home. No, actually, that's a lie. My grandmother's nursing home smelled like Pine Sol. This smelled like the gunk at the bottom of a boat that catches fish in stormy weather. I feel bad for the homeless people who got my food. But, mostly, I feel bad for myself.

I also got in a fight with a lady who refused to let me sample her gelato. I guess, here, sampling is not something people allow. So don't try to buy gelato here, unless your ready to commit to a certain color of gelato without knowing if it actually tastes like mint or mangoes or dulce de leche.

And don't try using the internet here. I went to this cyber cafe, and I was using a computer when it froze. I told the man there I needed to use a different computer, that the computer I was using had frozen, but he kept pointing to the security cameras and yelling at me in Czech. Then he head-butted me. He knocked his head against my head. Hard. I doubled back and ran outside and called the cops. Then his mom showed up. She looked like she was going to cry, so I didn't press charges. So if you like internet, and not being head-butted, Prague also hates you. But if you like being misunderstood by people, and inadvertently causing angry cultural clashes and having things like foreheads smashed into your skull, and then being guilt-tripped into not pressing charges by a short Turkish lady, this is the place to go.

So, let's recount that. Prague is a really great city for getting head butted, being unprepared for the taste or texture of the gelato you just bought, being guilt tripped by short turkish ladies, buying wooden tschotchkies you can scatter about the house, ironically, to make your friends jealous, watching sad proletariats (who gravitate towards soulful, misunderstood teen pop stars during their lonesome days) try, unsuccessfully, to shovel up the trash that fell out of their trash bags, and being pitied by die-hard christian as they continue on with their religious pilgrimage across Europe. If all these things sound appealing to you, you'll certainly enjoy the remainder of my uncle's guide to this shitty, pointless city.