Ahem. Allow me to be a crotchety old man for a brief moment: How big is Prague’s Ruzyne airport now? It broke my I-am-doing-this-in-my-sleep rhythm of taking the subway/bus to the airport last month, that’s how big it is.
Now there are TWO stops at the airport on the bus, ho ho ho! (That doesn’t count the thousand k letiste stops that precede it). The stops are confusingly divided up between Schengen and non-Schengen agreement countries—think fast, Americans--which is ridiculous, as the Czechs join at the end of the year.
Once I got inside I was struck how empty it was at 8am, normally a busy time for an airport--especially one that sends passengers to other parts of Europe as its bread and butter. Perhaps it’s built like buying shoes for an 11-year-old, in that the airport is meant to grow into it.
Here comes the old man part:
I’m easy to entertain. Heck, I was impressed with the capacious foodstuff/duty free shop they built on the far side of passport control a few years back. Now, with a sprawling selection of shops that I still have no intention of visiting spread out over four or five terminals, it just feels like weird version of Detroit without the monorail. It’s too bad.
Not to say that it was better when you had to take the bus to the terminal because there were no sky bridges, or when the only way to fly there on an American carrier was via Stuttgart, but the expansions are a microcosm of what’s happened to Prague itself: rapid, efficient development at the expense of personality. I bet they’ll even break a thousand-crown note at the airport without a single sigh or complaint. What a gyp.
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