Prague, August 2018

In August 2018, Sandy and I took a marvelous Viking river cruise on the Danube. Before the cruise, we spent three days in Prague ….

After three days in the Czech capital, here’s my Prague-ress report.  (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)  Sandy and I walked all through the Staremesti (Old Town) and much of the Novemesti (New Town) and took tours touching other highlights, including Prague Castle and sites associated with Operation Anthropoid, in which Czech resistance fighters killed Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking Nazi official and one of the architects of the Holocaust.

Prague is elegant.  Ornate buildings festooned with friezes, bas-relief, sculptures, and gold leaf line cobblestoned streets and tiled sidewalks (Sandy noted that she saw no women wearing heels).  Alas, many buildings also sport scrawls of graffiti, which our tour guide silver-liningly portrayed as freedom of expression that had been forbidden under Communist rule.

Running through the Old Town are narrow lanes and broad squares bordered by museums, churches, synagogues (including the marvelously named Old New Synagogue, which dates back centuries), arches, towers, stately apartment houses, and stores both chic and seedy.  The museums comprise both the traditional (e.g., the National Museum and various collections celebrating specific artists or styles) and institutions highlighting other aspects of the human experience, including chocolate, beer, medieval torture instruments, the senses, and sex machines.

Beyond the cultural highlights, Old Town Prague ubiquitously features:

• Vietnamese immigrant-owned Mini Markets selling cannabis (sans THC)-infused candies, teas, baked goods, coffee, beer, and even absinthe; arrays of mini liquor bottles, matryushkas (both traditional and featuring various politicians and sports teams), and oh-so-clever T-shirts (e.g., “Czech Me Out”).

• Kiosks selling a vowel-poor but calorie-rich dessert, Trdelno Zmrzlina (chimney cakes filled with ice cream).

• Bookstores, often with grandiose names and footprints (such as Palac Knihy – Palace of Books).  Prague is a literate, cultured, educated city, and I’d guess just the Old Town boasts more bookstores (likely in absolute terms and certainly per-capita) than Manhattan or the DC metro area.

• Restaurants specializing in Traditional Czech Cuisine such as sautéed wild boar cheeks (presumably those from the head of the animal), spiced pigs’ knuckles with mustard and horseradish, and veal knees.  Little wonder the Czechs drink so much beer. 

• Sleek, eerily quiet bus trams that unquestionably hold first place in the traffic priority pecking order, pedestrians be damned.

• Speaking of traffic, traffic, some of it of the one-block-per-ten-minutes variety.  Astoundingly, many major intersections have neither stop signs nor traffic lights.  Compounding the chaos, most streets and sidewalks are torn up for improvements in advance of a grand celebration in October marking the 100^th anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia, which of course hasn’t existed for more than a quarter century.