Chapter 16: A Month in Prague? Czech.

Warning: many pictures ahead. View on a slow mobile connection at your own risk.

There’s lots of words too, but you can safely tune those out. Sometimes I ramble.

Our week in Munich was much too short, but there was an AirBnb reservation in Prague with the Sanders name on it. We underwent a slight measure of panic at the train station when we belatedly looked up entry requirements for the Czech Republic and thought we needed a PCR Test and government entry approval, but we finally spotted the size-2 light-light-grey text on white background entombed at the bottom of the page that read, verbatim, “None of this applies if you’re vaccinated; you’re cool; LOL scared you didn’t I?” We exhaled in unison and boarded our train.

Prague is the fifth most visited European city, and has achieved almost mythical status in the travel world as the perfect combination of European history, culture, architecture, and affordability.

Travel is re-opening across the continent, and the streets were crowded as we walked through the “City of a Hundred Spires” on Saturday afternoon.

On Sunday we stumbled across a restaurant called Pork’s; can you guess their specialty? Pork knuckle is a traditional Czechian dish commonly served with fresh bread, pickled cheese, and dark local lager. I opted for the pulled pork knuckle roll, which was crispy and salty and delicious.

On the way back we caught a beautiful sunset over the Charles Bridge.

I figured my sister the architect would appreciate a picture of the Dancing House, a non-traditional building designed to evoke Ginger Rogers dancing with Fred Astaire.

The novelist Franz Kafka was born and spent much of his life in Prague, and a huge 42-layer metallic sculpture of his head rotates in his honor every hour. This supposedly reveals “Kafka’s tortured personality and unrelenting self doubt”, but it also just kinda looks cool.

Rachel and I really like checking out old cathedrals (we’re on the right continent for that), so later that week we trekked over to Vyšehrad, a fortress just south of the city containing the 1,000-year-old Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul.

The fort is perched on a riverside cliff just south of the city, and the top of its walls provides a spectator’s view of Prague.

The next Saturday morning we made our way to the Prague Farmer’s Market, which quickly became one of our favorite weekend activities. We stuffed our backpack with local goat cheese, deer and boar sausages, hummus, pastries, craft beer, and cookies, then wondered towards the best-smelling tents for a breakfast of espresso, strudel, and piping hot deep-fried potato cakes.

The farmer’s market lines both sides of the Vltava River bisecting the city, and small cafes have been installed on the promenade into a series of vaults originally used for ice storage and boats unloading their wares. They now feature the largest elliptical pivoting windows in the world, and are popular places to grab a beer or coffee or sparkling wine to camp out on small tables and watch passersby.

So, we did that.

(At this juncture I am certainly regretting my attempt to shoehorn our monthly stay into one blog post, but let us press on.)

The 1,100-year-old Prague Castle is the largest ancient castle in the world. The main church inside its walls, St. Vitus Cathedral, is an impressive gothic behemoth…

…with gorgeous stained glass and painted glass windows softening the streaming sunlight.

Climbing 287 stairs up the south tower of the cathedral offers a panoramic, breezy view of Prague.

As we puffed up the steps we passed the largest bell in the country, which portends disaster if it cracks when it rings: in 2000, it foretold a disastrous flood. Today, for better or worse, it hung silent.

In addition to the cathedral, various smaller buildings on the castle grounds showcased an impressive assortment of suits of armor, weapons, and torture devices.

Judging by the number and creativity of the artifacts, torture was apparently quite popular back then. I assume you needed to be somewhat careful who you called a wench or a knave on the dusty streets, lest you end up with quite a few more holes in you than God intended.

Wenceslas Square, named after the saint and posthumously-crowned Good King Wenceslas of Christmas carol fame, is a long, wide boulevard with a history of political and social demonstrations. In 1969 a local university student set himself on fire to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. A month later, another student did the same, and a memorial in their honor lies in front of the impressive National Museum at the end of the square.

In 1989 the non-violent Velvet Revolution seized power from the ruling Communist Party when the square was filled with 500,000 protestors apparently less inclined towards self-immolation.

After a month in Prague, we agreed that it was one of the few larger cities we’d passed through during our travels that we could potentially see ourselves living in (the others being Munich and Ljubljana). The Old Town can be overcrowded with tourists, but the outskirts have a laid-back, easy-going vibe, dotted with green parks and little cafés and pubs with outdoor tables and limited but satisfying menus.

I’d highly recommend that you

(ahem)

Czech it out.