For the first time. Prague, Czech Republic

One of the things you never forget is the first time you went on a big trip. For the most part of the Europeans of my generation, the Inter Rail train ticket was the starting point of this big moment. One month, not much money, zero experience in travelling and the entire Europe to discover. A few days ago I read in a book that said that “loosing your travel virginity is a bit like loosing that other virginity really: you spend years dreaming about it; you have absolutely no idea what you're doing; it's over much quicker than you'd hoped; and you know you want to go back and try it again”. This sentence is the painful truth. My Inter rail was, like to all others I know, a trip that featured all of the first-time traveller clichés, for the experience and for the visited places, with one exception: Spain and France for the proximity, then Italy (Roma, Firenze, and Venezia) and Austria (Salzburg and Innsbruck). No, we didn’t go to Greece! On the contrary: in our last day in Venezia, at the stairs of the Santa Lucia Train Station, we were strong enough to change our plans. We were an extremely well organized group of friends - who had spent several days planning the whole trip (from the amount of tuna cans everyone should carry along, to the cheapest camping site we would have in each city) – but, for some reason (and many philosophical discussions after that!), we decided to follow the advice of some other travellers who were arriving. They said we had to go to Prague. So we went, and they were right. Despite (and because of) the recent Velvet Revolution, Prague was still a city like any other we had seen so far: no McDonalds, no English Spoken, no cookies or chocolate bars on the regular supermarket shelves. No West. Instead, the feeling that we were making a journey into a magical place: the Slavia Cafe, the Staré Mesto (Old Town) main square, the wooden toys on children’ stores, the faces, the domes, the bridges, the atmosphere. Things were never the same again. We had just found that, rather than going, travelling was about being. In this story I had the pleasure to have a helpful collaboration of one of the fellows of my first adventure. Thanks. They were moments to remember for live.