Going to Prague in 1990
My parents were Czech refugees in 1969, so there was no way for us to travel there without a risk of arrest. But in 1989 came the Velvet Revolution and the borders were suddenly open to us. Unfortunately, we were completely skint at the time, and these were the days before £1 flights to Prague on ScumAir, so it took a fair bit of penny-pinching to find a cheap way out there. My mother came up with the solution: a flight to Frankfurt, followed by a train journey to Prague.

So let's begin with the outbound journey. The flight to Frankfurt was fine, but then it turned out that there wasn't a train to Prague for another six hours. We found that we could cut that down somewhat by changing at Nuremburg, so that gave us a chance to wander up and down that fair town shouting 'vere are ze rallies?', which passed the time a little.

The train to Prague left Nuremburg at about 11pm, and was an incredibly uncomfortable Communist affair, carefully designed with no soft seats where contraband might be hidden. At 1pm, just as we were drifting off to sleep, a guard came stomping down the corridor, yelling 'PassKontrolle' (spelling guessed at) and woke us all up again. We eventually arrived in Prague at 5am (and it was well worth it - 'tis a damn fine place, and it was a lot emptier then!)

The return journey was even worse. This time it was just me and my brother, and the connections were even less helpful. It turned out that the only option was to leave at midnight (yes, with another 5am border crossing), and then to spend twelve hours at Frankfurt airport. My grandparents packed us off with a packed lunch and all the German money they could find, and this is how it was that the two of us had to spend twelve hours in Frankfurt airport with nothing but ten German marks and a bag of macaroons.

And the final irony? My mother was misinformed: the journey was much more expensive than a direct flight would have been.
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Thu 29 May 2008, 16:04, 2 replies)

You'll be pleased to know
that passport control has been more or less abolished on the Czech/German border. I recently got a train from Prague to Dresden without any hassle. But I remember travelling on an Inter-rail through Eastern Europe all those years ago and constantly being woken up for both passport-control and customs on each side of the border.
( mistaspakkaman and the inedible shifting caterpillars, Thu 29 May 2008, 17:34, closed)

Exciting Political Treaty Fact!
The Czechs joined Schengen (the "we're all European and not an island full of demented Daily Mail readers, so we're not going to worry about passports when people go between our countries" convention) about a month ago, so going from CZ to DE is now no harder than going from London to Bristol (probably easier given the quality of the trains...)
(stalinism, Sat 31 May 2008, 18:43, closed)