With a delay at the airport and an long train ride the next evening, our stay in Prague was quite short. We wandered around the old part of town, looking at art on buildings and such.

In Old Town, many of the shops have wooden statues commemorating the people who owned the shops before. This shop used to be a fisherman’s.

One problem was the currency, Koruna. We got out the minimum amount at an ATM in the airport, tiredly thinking it was about $50.

Throughout the day, we noticed that what we thought were small tip amounts won us big smiles and enthusiastic service from everyone. We ate lunch at a French restaurant, and the server showed us the fresh fish of the day.

Looking at the menu, Clare saw that you could get 100 grams of fresh fish for lunch. She ordered some – turned out that you get the whole fish, and the 100 grams indicated the price was per 100 grams of fish. A very large lunch!

After that surprise, and with champagne and wine at lunch, we were even more suspicious about the amount of cash we had, because that lunch could not have been less than $50. Later, we discovered that we had actually taken out $450 of Koruna. Oops!

Back to Prague.

Of course we went to the Charles Bridge, world renowned for its history and monuments.

This one is of a priest who took the Princess’s confessions, but refused to tell her father what she said, so he was thrown off into the Vitava River. Of course he became a saint.

We found an Apple computer museum! (The fourth was reflected with Brian).

This was a guide to sculptures imbedded in the pavement at one end of the Charles Bridge.

Then we took a train to Berlin! We rode on a Czech train (Eurocity) and had a good dinner in the dining car (spending the rest of our Czech money). After crossing the imperceptible border into Germany, south of Dresden, the stops were announced in German and English, rather than Czech, German, and English. Changing to a local S-bahn train at Berlin hauptbahnhof, we arrived at our hotel near Alexanderplatz after dark.

Brian bought a Budweiser on the train, the original Czech product.

• Europe 2018