By Iva Skochová

In the summertime, when the residential streets of Prague are suspiciously vacant, one wonders: Where have all the Czechs gone?

Trying to concentrate a year's worth of fun into the two short months of warmth, a lot of Czechs simply hang out every weekend at their cottages in the countryside. Most, however, crave the beach. For my land-locked fellow countrymen, beach vacations have always been most intriguing. Wherever Czechs go on their holiday, they will almost certainly be within close proximity of some crowded body of water and they will come back so tanned you can actually read the words "skin cancer" in their sun spots.

The Czech love affair with the ocean is fascinating and entertaining at the same time. I recently came back from a three-week trip to China and a few people asked me if the water was warm. Failing to understand the references to the comforts of local beach bumming, I launched into a rather complex monologue about the state of Chinese plumbing.

"You mean you didn't even swim in the ocean once? Why would you go there?" they said over and over, unable to grasp what else there is to do on vacation if you don't periodically go in and out of water. I tried to explain that the water in the East China Sea is not exactly the Caribbean, but it didn't help much.

While the destinations have changed over the last 20 years — Croatia and the Greek Isles have become the new Bulgaria, and the Mediterranean has replaced the Black Sea — the fascination with water and tanning has prevailed. Travel agencies love this trend and multiply like rabbits. They cater primarily to the easy crowd: beach-starved, traditional middle-class families who don't have high expectations for service and who typically don't speak a foreign language and can't just pack up and go on their own. Instead, they pick their package vacation and pay a travel agent a large sum of money for something that would easily be done on the Internet. They are not demanding. If they are not happy with the service, they typically perform that Czech passive kind of complaining (not assertive enough to actually get anything for your dissatisfaction— they just want to talk about it). And besides, as long as the sea is there, what could possibly be that bad?

Buying a package vacation requires an in-depth knowledge of abbreviations like those used in real estate. "Tunisko***, 7 nocí, PP, kam.pláz 800, slunecniky/poplatek" is quite typical. For a mere 9,900 Kc ($415), this could be a great deal: seven nights with air conditioning in a three-star hotel in Tunisia. For a veteran of Czech vacationing, however, this could potentially mean mild hell: A three-star hotel in Tunisia is modest, to say the least, since the Arabic hotel rating system is extremely optimistic. You only get breakfast and dinner, which could mean starving to death or at least maintaining your body weight throughout your vacation. Worst of all, the beach is almost a kilometer away (about half a mile), it's rocky, and you have to pay extra for beach chairs and umbrellas. This one will mean a few compromises.

Every once in a while — when feeling sufficiently guilty for not spending enough time with my aging parents — I agree to go with them on a vacation of their choice. Our first trip was a modest three-star Egypt breakfast-only deal. We spent a full week in our hotel, occupied exclusively by Russians and a few Czechs, faced with a pitiable selection of hotel food and a poorly flushing toilet (a detail quite important in a country famous for the effects of certain digestive problems, the infamous Pharaoh's revenge). Then there was the four-star all-inclusive Cyprus trip, where people didn't leave the hotel for stretches longer than 3 hours because they might miss one of the many opportunities to overindulge on the plethora of "free" food and local liquor. An all-inclusive trip (AI), the mecca of gluttony, is apparently gaining popularity with the Czech tourist, who is easily pleased by excessive food and drink supply. I found it unnecessarily stressful to fight my temptations to guzzle without shame 24/7 and asked my parents to please never take me to such places again.

I can't decide which option is more evil. The half-board setup technically requires you to stay in the compounds of your hotel with the fat and ugly tourists only for breakfast and dinner. But, if you have a penny-pinching mother like mine, she will not let you eat lunch unless it is dirt cheap or free. Thus you have to periodically sneak out, buy some grub, and then make up a convoluted story about a group of people giving out free sandwiches on the promenade.

As I start to run out of lies, I start to question my decision about banning all-inclusive vacations from the wish list. How could you not love a buffet full of goo — potatoes, risotto, lasagna, beef patties, a few calamari, a slice of ham, a piece of fish, all smothered in a variety of colorful sauces?

Czechs also tend to overdress for the level of service. In Egypt, young Czech beauties dance around cockroaches in high heels and summer dresses. Clearly, a lot of these families saved up a lot of money to spend a vacation in a three-star hotel and perhaps were expecting to get a bit more class for their money.

Also, they care too much about what other people think of them. This is the only force driving them to limit their caloric intake. Other European countries seem exempt. I once witnessed a tiny 70-year-old woman shove down six plates of food and three desserts in about 15 minutes. The economy in Germany must be really bad.

Package family vacations always progress the same way. You gather at Ruzyne Airport in the middle of the night (charter flights capitalize on off-peak travel times) and assess the rest of your group as decidedly uncool. Hopefully, they won't be staying in the same hotel, you think to yourself as you gawk at women wearing straw hats, men wearing T-shirts displaying their former vacation destinations, and absolutely everyone sporting the stereotypical Czech combo of sandals and socks. The elitist in me feels ill at the thought of spending a week with these people. But I remember that I am doing this for my parents and so I dutifully get in the 200-meter-long line to exchange our travel vouchers for air tickets.

At least three people cut in front of us, but I decide to remain on my best behavior. The thing that will make me feel better is a stiff drink, but I can't have one at the airport with my mom around because it's more expensive than free, and I will never hear the end of my spending irresponsibility. Only seven days and 11 hours left.

The plane is delayed two hours. The kids, getting antsy, scream louder and louder. A 70-year-old woman refuses to hand over her manicure set to the security personnel. The cops take her out in handcuffs. This creates much excitement and the whole group takes advantage of exercising the good old Czech habit of staring shamelessly.

By the time you spend a sixth consecutive day at the beach, regularly rolling over to prevent pressure sores, applying waterproof sunscreen, going swimming, re-applying sunscreen (it's not as waterproof as they say), and you pretty much start going crazy. Fortunately, you quickly realize that staring shamelessly is acceptable here, too, which keeps you occupied for a few hours. You pick out the fattest kid or the pinkest German tourist on the beach, the woman with the saggiest boobs.

When the entire tour group gets sufficiently bored, it's time for the agency's "delegate" to come and sell organized bus tours to some local tourist trap. It usually involves stopping at a local handicraft maker of some sort (ceramics, gold, papyrus, depending on the country) where you are not required, but definitely encouraged, to buy a souvenir. Then the bus takes you to some famous cathedral, museum or monastery you have never heard of. Then there is an organized lunch (sometimes even with kitschy local band playing) and then an organized stop at a beach so the group can sample swimming in a different spot. This typically marks the highlight of the trip and means that dinner is right around the corner.

Somebody once posed a question whether it's better to live a life so boring that you are easily excited or to live a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored. With most locals gone this time of year, it makes you wonder.