Dust poo shit

It has been two-and-a-half months since I last left England. Two-and-a-half months is a very, very long time to be in England. Peter’s Russian colleague always says, “One cannot stay in England longer than three weeks, otherwise, they will go nuts.” I couldn’t agree more.

A trip wouldn’t be a trip if I didn’t have issues at Border Control. Our trip to Prague was no exception, except that my issues were with the Czech Republic (CZ) Border Control, not the UK Border Control.

Peter took one for the team and approached the CZ Border Control counter first. The officer stamped his passport and Peter passed through the gate. The officer then waved me forward and I walked up to the counter and handed over my documents. The officer looked at me, looked at my passport, looked at me, looked at my passport, took a phone call, and then finally stamped my passport. He then pressed the button that lit up the green light on the gate to indicate that I had passed his check and could proceed through the gate.

Since photography is highly frowned upon in any Customs and Border Control area, I was not able to take a photo of the gate. The photo above is of a gate that is very similar to the gate in the CZ Border Control area. There was a light bulb positioned on top of the CZ Border Control gate. When the light turns green, you are free to pass through and proceed to the arrivals area of the airport.

As mentioned above, the officer pressed the button and the green light on the gate lit up. I hesitated for a second as I was expecting the gate to pop open a little bit. After realizing that it wasn’t going to pop open, I attempted to push the gate but it would not budge.

Then I heard, “Dust poo shit!”

I looked at the Border Control officer and he was staring at me in a very scary way. Obviously, I knew that I needed to “just push it,” however, I was having difficulty as the gate was very heavy.

Then I heard (in a louder and more stern tone), “Dust poo shit! Dust poo shit!”

I looked at the officer again and wanted to say, “Listen, fella. I’m dusting poo shit as hard as I can.”

Then I heard, “DUST POO SHIT!”

My fight-or-flight response kicked in and I gave the gate one last poo shit and it finally swung open.

I met Peter and we walked to the ATM in the arrivals area. Peter proceeded to make two withdrawals from our credit card instead of our debit card. After realizing his mistake, he freaked out about the fees the credit card company was going to charge for the two transactions. Brilliant. We hadn’t even left the airport and we were already flushing money down the toilet.

Speaking of toilets…

Many toilets in Prague have “start” and “stop” functions.

Having flushed our wee and money down the airport toilets, we navigated to the bus stop area and boarded the Airport Express bus which transported us to the main railway station in Prague. From there, we took the Metro to a stop near our hotel and then hoofed it to the hotel.

Due to a delayed flight and slow public transportation, it was late in the evening when we arrived at our hotel. We rushed to our dinner reservation (on the other side of Prague city centre) and finished the evening with a sampler of eight Czech beers at a local microbrewery in the city.

Protip: Nettle flavored beer is absolutely vile.