Our last day in Prague did not begin well. Check-out time was nominally 11am, but with no other guests arriving that day Jaroslav had told us we could leave whenever we were ready. This was fortunate, because at 11am I was still sound asleep and didn’t stir from my pit until noon when I was woken up by the sounds of Jeff packing his gear. I was ready to go an hour or so later. Jeff claimed to be hangover-free for a second day on the trot; I was suffering but still mobile, but something very bad had happened to Josh.

We looked through the door of his room to see him lying utterly motionless. He may have been groaning slightly, but if so I couldn’t hear it over our laughter.

“Are you hungover?” we asked.

“Yes.” he replied.

We discussed what to do — wait for Josh to get up? Go for a wander and meet up with him later? — but as we talked he emerged from his room and shuffled painfully to the couch. He was in no fit state to face the outside world, so we decided to leave him to recuperate and meet him later.

Before we left though, Jeff and I both felt the need to relieve ourselves. Urgently. We two might have dodged the hangover bullet, but five pork-based meals in two days was wreaking its own particular form of havoc with our digestive systems.

“I wouldn’t go in there for a bit,” Jeff said as he emerged from the bathroom. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any choice. My need was pressing.

Christ, it smelled bad. It smelled even worse when I’d finished. There was a little mains-powered air freshener in the hall, but I’d found the scent so overpowering that I’d turned it off the night before when we’d arrived back from the club. Without Airwick’s finest to mask the smell, the eye-watering fumes from the toilet were in full noxious bloom. I was glad to be getting out of there.

Just as we were leaving, Josh stood up unsteadily. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he said, walking hurriedly down the hall and into the pestilential bathroom.

Poor guy. Jeff and I left to the sounds of retching, and I shudder to think of what Josh must have experienced in that thrice-curséd bathroom.

* * *

We ate lunch at a place called café café*, sitting outside and watching a variety of rich people come and go. As we waited for our tardy but tasty mains to arrive, a Ferrari pulled up and then growled off; a chopped VW rat rod driven by an extremely tattooed chap did the same, and to cap it all, a convoy of three Rolls Royce Phantom coupés rolled up together and parked across the street. The people sitting at the tables either side of us were expensively dressed and well coiffed, and the whole scene had a not-so-quietly-rich air about it. In Britain it might all have been considered a tad vulgar, but Praguers clearly have no problems showing off their wealth!

After lunch we walked over to the Old Square again to climb the tower of the old town hall and looked out over the city. The view is amazing, really; Prague could double as the Vienna of The Third Man or the Venice of Casino Royale (or, indeed, the Prague of Casino Royale), and the almost mundane baroque buildings are punctuated by gothic eye-poppers like Our Lady before Týn and sci-fi monuments like the TV tower. I’m not a great fan of heights, but I could have stayed up there for hours. We pottered around the old town taking a few more pictures and then headed back to retrieve Josh, who’d gotten as far as the pizza restaurant immediately outside the apartment building before stopping for lunch. We joined him for a Coke before we had to leave.

“I’m just waiting for Jaroslav to come out of the front door, stony-faced, with his eyes streaming,” I said.

Like a Buck Rogers freeze-frame ending, we laughed.

FIN

* Turns out café café is a sort-of gay hang-out which is also “straight-friendly”. It’s a shame Josh wasn’t with us – he’d have been right at home.