I'm standing in the middle of a pretty Czech town called Cheb. With its pleasant colonnades and mouldering Gothic churches, it seems unexceptional.
Yet this small town is the centre of the world's greatest concentration of hookers. And garden gnomes.
The main reasons for these bizarre proliferations is the proximity of Germany (just ten miles down the road), and the gulf in income represented by the border. Since the old Iron Curtain collapsed, rich Germans have driven over the frontier to buy favoured items from the poorer Czechs.
One thing they come looking for is gnomes. Garden gnomes and other kitsch ornaments are highly popular in southern Germany (they have never been near as popular in Czechia). Germany used to have its own gnome industry. But in the last few years German gnome moguls
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Strange companions await sean thomas in the Czech-German borderlands |
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have discovered they can make and sell gnomes much cheaper on the Czech side of the frontier.
The effect of this is that every shop around Cheb appears to stock gnomes.
You can buy gnomes on roadsides, in grocers, and in petrol stations. You can buy them from stalls, supermarkets and newsagents. The centre of Cheb has a huge bazaar, run by Vietnamese, almost wholly given over to gnomes. They specialise in the adventurous end of the gnome market.
Which brings us to the market for commercial sex. According to a recent study, Cheb has more brothels per head of population than anywhere else on the planet: at least 35 bordellos have been counted, in a city of just 30,000 people.
There are underlying factors behind the explosion in Cheb's sex industry - besides the proximity of Bavaria. Decades of communism have made 
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