guidebooks

sean and i spent a while at the bookstore choosing guidebooks for prague and paris before we left for our trip. and when we were there, we spent a lot of time standing on street corners pouring over them, often a little bit lost.

we opted for time out paris and lonely planet prague. time out was the clear winner, with well organized information and pretty good maps. (of course, we still ended up needing to know the name of that one street that wasn't labeled or that was under the map key, so if you're going to paris get your hands on a copy of the really detailed book of maps katrin lent us...) lonely planet prague had good listings, but maybe i've been trained by reading time out new york magazine for ten years - the writing just didn't seem as snappy. and the maps? pretty awful.

back at the bookstore we had decided against buying a guide by rick steves. i didn't know who he was either, but i sure do now - some guy who travels europe in a polo shirt and writes opinionated guides and also has a line of luggage. we saw a lot of other tourists with rick steves guides, and when we arrived at my sister's house in dresden she took us on the rick steves tour of the city. he says things like "there's a monument of a guy on a horse in the middle of the square but he's not very important so we won't talk about him." maybe next trip....