Josh, Jeff and I convened last weekend in Prague for a heady mix of booze, football and neo-classical architecture. The original plan had been for Paul, Jez and Ben to round out the group, but familial obligations — and new family members — contrived to keep them elsewhere, so it was down to the old East Preston Street massive to reprazent.

Jeff and I had flown out of Edinburgh, arriving half an hour before Josh’s Heathrow flight, and with some time to kill I fished out the Czech pronunciation guide I’d printed out the previous night. It seemed prudent to memorise a few useful phrases before we attempted to make our way in a Czech-speaking city. Some phrases seemed easy enough: ano for ‘yes’, ne for ‘no’, and prosim (pronounced “pro-seem”) for ‘please’, for example. ‘Thank you’, though, was a bit trickier.

“‘Thank you’ is…well, according to this, it’s pronounced ‘dye-koo-yi’. ‘D’, ‘e’ with a sort of inverted circumflex, ‘k’, ‘u’, ‘j’, ‘i’. I tried it out. “Děkuji. Děkuji. Okay then.”

“What is it?” asked Jeff. “Děkuji?”

“Yup, sounds about right.”

We were interrupted by Josh’s arrival from baggage collection, tottering under the weight of an enormous backpack, and after we’d finished mocking him for it we bought a three-day travel pass each and headed for the bus into town. After finding the right bus stop, the journey was fairly straightforward: the bus took us to the western terminus of an underground line, and from there we took the metro all the way to Můstek station on Wenceslas Square, right in the centre of Prague. We took the escalator up into a warm but overcast day. The square was more of a rectangle, a bustling and slightly down-at-heel avenue that sloped downwards from the grandiose National Museum at the south end towards the Old Town at the north.

“We have to call Jaroslav [the flat's agent] to let him know we’re here,” said Josh. We waited as he made a quick phone call and then set off to find the apartment.

“Where’s the flat?” we asked him.

“Number 47, Wenceslas Square,” he replied.

It might be worth mentioning at this point that Jez, whose work brings him to Prague many times each year, had given us some suggestions for things to do and places to avoid in the city. He said, for instance:

Wenceslas Sq is unpleasant, try to avoid in general.

Huh.

We found the flat over on the west side of the square, through an arcade and in a little courtyard off the square itself. There was no-one there to meet us, so Josh called Jaroslav again and we waited for him to arrive. We looked around: there was a pizza restaurant with an open-air deck at the back of the courtyard and an internet café across the way.

“This doesn’t seem so bad,” I thought.

As we waited, a shaven-headed, hook-nosed guy came through the arcade and made a bee-line for us. He looked like the kind of guy who broke legs for a living.

“Hello,” he said. “I am Jaroslav.”

We introduced ourselves and followed him into the building where he called the lift. The lift arrived, and it was tiny: Josh and his massive backpack alone could have filled it, but Jaroslav encouraged the three of us inside and then slid in beside us. We were squashed against the walls and each other like three sardines sharing a tin with a piranha. And an enormous rucksack.

“The lift,” Jaroslav said jocularly, swivelling his head as if to draw our attention to its size. Perhaps he thought we hadn’t noticed. He pressed the button for the fourth floor, but instead of moving smoothly upwards the lift started to oscillate up and down as if on a straining piece of elastic.

Josh looked unhappy.

Eventually the lift started to ascend, the slipping clutch or stretching cable or whatever finally gaining some purchase, and slowly climbed to the fourth floor. It stopped, hopped up a few inches, and stopped again. The doors slid open and we exited as quickly as was seemly.

The flat itself was fairly nice, in a wipe-clean sort of way, and after signing the rental agreement and being shown around by Jaroslav, he asked us what were doing in Prague.

“Are you on stag do?” (I am not exaggerating the lack of the indefinite article.)

“No, not really; it’s more of a boys’ holiday,” we told him. A ‘mancation’, as Josh later put it.

“Okay, you need anything — taxi, food, or anything else — you call me.” The emphasis, however slight, was all Jaroslav’s. “Anything”? What the hell did he mean? Strippers? Hookers? Drugs? Broken legs?

“Er, thank you. We’ll let you know.”

He took his leave and we all breathed out. We flipped coins for the choice of beds, unpacked our stuff, and wandered off out for the day.

(To be continued.)