The Czech government requires that visa applications be submitted to a Czech embassy; that is, you cannot apply for a visa from within the country. Long before we came over to Europe, we made an appointment at the Czech embassy in Dresden, Germany. We flew from New York into Frankfurt and took a train to Dresden, woke up early the next morning, walked to the embassy, and found out that our paperwork was not in order. Our visa application had been rejected.

This was bad news. We hopped a train to Prague that afternoon, arriving late at night. We rented a room from a guy with a creepy nervous tic who was hawking rooms at the train station. The room ended up being in his house. He ended up being very nice.

Early the following morning, we cruised down to Brno to have the university take care of fixing our paperwork, and then continued on to Pilsen for out TEFL course.

Some time later, we took a train to the Czech embassy in Bratislava to try again. Getting into the Bratislava embassy is much like it would be to get tickets to see the Beatles if John Lennon and George Harrison came back to life and they decided to play one and only one show. People gather as early as 6:00 a.m. to wait outside the embassy on the sidewalk, and at 9:00 a.m. a man comes outside and assigns numbers to everyone based on some criteria we could not determine. People are allowed into the embassy one at a time until noon. At noon, the man comes back outside and says something in Czech or Slovak that apparently means, "We are closed. Come back tomorrow." There is nothing you can do to guarantee yourself a place in the next day's line. You simply come back again and again until random chance gives you a number low enough to gain entrance within the three-hour time window on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday (the embassy is closed on Tuesdays and Thursdays). Although we had taken a 4:30 a.m. train to arrive in Bratislava at 6:00 a.m. to get a good spot in line, we did not get in. We decided not to try to come back the following day.

On the way back to the train station, we bought the wrong ticket for the tram, and were caught and fined by the inspectors. It was not a nice day overall. Later, a friend who had already visited Bratislava summed it up nicely: ÒJesus, Bratislava. That place is, in my mind, a raging shithole, an unfortunate little hovel of piss and mafia.Ó

We saw these doors on the way to the embassy. We liked how they looked.