Prague, Czech Republic
We're back from three days in Prague, one of the architectural jewels of Eastern Europe, for the second of our Eurotrash mini-breaks. We'd had such a great time in Vienna last week, which is so clean, well-organised and genteel that I was worried that the rest of Europe would seem like a scum swamp by comparison (which most of it is, honestly), and that Prague would pale in comparison. But, like the troupers they are, Mum and Dad enthusiastically bounded around Prague (well, Mum bounded and Dad hobbled), took in the glorious palaces and churches, and cheerfully put up with some fairly appalling hotel service.
I made the mistake of booking us into the Hotel L'Opera, where some friends and I spent a fun weekend on my first trip to Prague four years ago. It was comfortable, not over-priced, centrally located, and the dining room was a pleasantly over-the-top former stately home with plentiful servings of meat for breakfast. I rather neively assumed that the hotel would be up to similar standards this time around. Unfortunatey, it wasn't. We arrived in the mid-afternoon on Monday, just as a rain and thunderstorm was starting, and our moustachioed taxi driver dropped us off on the corner, rather than outside the hotel, necessitating a quick dash to the front door as the rain started to fall. Despite telling Mum and Dad about fifty times that it might rain in Prague while we were there, neither of them had packed an umbrella, though Dad was wearing his ubiquitous raincoat. "Oh dear", I thought. "This is going to be a long couple of days".
Alas, the hotel had reverted to some kind of Communist block shithole. The bored looking girl on reception told us that there was no breakfast room, but that there was a bistro on the corner we could try. The room looked like it had last been cleaned when I was there four years ago, and now looked like the kind of room used for drug deals or illegal organ transplants. The only other guests in sight looked as though they were charging by the hour, and there was a rather worrying new addition to the neighbouring building - an all night "cabaret" (ie., strip club) called Cabaret Nana. I tried to banish thoughts of it being some kind of X-rated version of the Grab-A-Granny bar at the Northern in Invercargill. Ewww.
I suggested to Mum and Dad that we find another hotel. Of course, they wouldn't hear of it, and we took our valuables with us and went for a walk into the city, buying Mum and Dad an umbrella each on the way.
The last time I was here, the Czech Republic was on the verge of joining the European Union, and was a popular place for cheap weekend holidays, crystal shopping and boozy stag weekends. Four years later, Prague was definitely showing signs of greater commercialism and American-dominated consumerism - a brand new airport terminal, the presence of English stores and supermarkets like Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Debenhams (considered very exclusive in Prague, which is ironic, given that Eastern Europeans are being underpaid to work in the same stores in England). Somewhat comfortingly, the locals (at least, the older generations) looked much the same - sullen, unsmiling and thick necked, the men with handlebar moustaches and the women with tree-trunk legs, and everyone smoking continuously. The young people mostly looked like clones of American sitcoms - the girls with bleach-blonde hair and crop tops, the boys in aviator sunglasses and designer t-shirts, all of them wearing navy blue Levis and crowding into McDonalds, which seemed to be placed every 50 paces.
By the time we reached Wenceslas Square, the main boulevard of central Prague with the old Hapsburg palace at one end (now the National Museum), it was pissing down, and we took refuge in a nearby cafe. I learnt from past experience that the Czechs can't be relied on to make a decent cup of anything unless it was Pilsner beer or beef stock, and so levered towards anything with Italian coffee signs advertised outside. This cafe was so chic that its coffee cups didn't even have handles - just these little amputated stumps that you gripped with your curled thumb and forefinger. Dad made a manful attempt at trying to use them, as you can see.
Once the rain had stopped, I lead Mum and Dad through the cobblestoned streets and into the Old Town Square. It's difficult to describe how breathtaking it is to walk into the Old Town Square, especially for the first time, and even the best photographers and travel writers can't do it justice. It was fun watching Mum and Dad's eyes widen to the size of saucers as we walked past the old Town Hall and Astronomical Clock, with the Gothic twin steeples of Tyn Cathedral and the baroque magnificence of St Nicolas Cathedral circling the square.
It's 900 years of Czech history and architecture all in one space, and standing inside it feels as if you're transported back in time - well, apart from all the fat tourists with video cameras recording the Astronomical Clock, which chimes every hour with a revolving mechanical display of wooden puppets, a skeleton that rings a little bell, and a mechanical cock crowing. Here's another shot of Mum and Dad in the Square with the Astronomical Clock to the left.
Back we headed to Heartbreak Hotel, and we went next door to a fantastic Czech restaurant called Pivovarsky Dum, which brews its own beer and serves hearty Czech "peasant food" - weiner schnitzel, goulash, lamb shanks and huge dumplings with everything. After the rain, the shitty hotel and the unsmiling locals, I was relieved that the food was still good, and giggled as Mum and Dad cheerily ploughed through their meals. Here's Mum pretending to drink a Pilsner.
When we got back to the hotel, we discovered that the floor lamp (which didn't have a lampshade anyway) had blown, and the toilet cistern was making a weird sound every time we flushed it. Oh dear. After some strained conversations with the concierge, we managed to get him to replace the lamp, and promise to fix the toilet in the morning. We moved the chest of drawers in front of the door before we went to bed as a safety precaution, and then went to bed. Dad promptly dropped off to sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, but I think Mum lay awake in bed most of the night staring at the ceiing, waiting for someone to break into the room and slit our throats.
The next morning was a gloriously sunny day, and we decided to hit the big time. We found a nice Italian cafe for breakfast, with the most enormous portions of bacon and eggs I've ever seen, which, judging by the huge arses of the other customers, was a firm favourite on the menu.
We took another stroll into the Old Town Square, though it was now considerably hotter and more packed with tourists. We went church-spotting, partially as a way to get out of the heat, and started with St Nicholas's cathedral in the Old Town Square, which is a glorious baroque confection, and now a popular venue for classical music concerts.
From there, we went on a little wander through the cobblestoned streets around the square, and went into St Jakob's Basilica, which is possibly the most over-the-top example of baroque interior decorating we've ever seen. Here's the altarpiece, which is even more spectacular viewed in close up.
The third in the trilogy was Tyn Cathedral, the Gothic church that dates from the 9th century, with the twin Gothic spires that are visible and recognisable throughout the city. There were no photos allowed in the cathedral, and a mean little man with a monobrow was standing guard at the door to make sure all the visitors came in made a donation, and didn't speak or take photographs. It was somehow comforting to know that petty church bureaucrats were alive and well all over the world.
After so much gold and marble, we needed a sit down to try and recover, and we had some rather muddy tasting bottled Czech mineral water, and ploughed through seas of tourists with their umbrella-waving tour guides to get to the Charles Bridge, the old medieval bridge connecting the Old Town with the west side of Prague, now dotted with religious statues and with some spectacular views of the city.
After a bite of lunch, we took the plunge and headed uphill to Prague Castle, a massive complex of palaces and churches perched on a hill overlooking the city. To save Dad's legs, we took a nifty little tram to the top of the city, and walked down a road which sloped gently down towards the castle. We stopped off at the Loreto on the way, an old convent (the nuns have gone, which was evident, as the garden needed weeding) and walked down the hill to the large square leading to the Castle entrance. The area was first developed in the 9th century, and has housed at various times the Bavarian Kings, the Holy Roman Emperors, the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg dynasty, and now the president of the Czech Republic.
It's one of the largest palace complexes in the world, and being there felt again like we were going back in time about 400 years and entering into some kind of other world, or a film set. It's a little like going through a labyrinth, or peeling back layers of onion skin - you walk through a gate or a wall and find another massive building, and then another, and another. Like the Old Town Square, the Castle complex represents almost every architectural style from the last 1000 years of European history.
The granddaddy of them all is St Vitus's Cathedral, a massive Gothic number that's been discreetly decorated over the years with gold leaf and mosaics. After a quick look inside, we sat in the shade in a corner of the square just looking at it for a while.
Down we walked past the St Georges Chapel, the old Royal Palace and Lobkowicz Palace, coming out the other end to a cobblestoned terrace with an amazing view out over the city.
After a quick stroll through the hillside gardens and a restorative coffee sitting in the square listening to an amusing Czech polka band, we headed home, taking the magic tram which sped us right through central Prague and delivered us to just outside our hotel door. As a navigator and map reader, I really have to take a bow for this one. We had dinner at Pivovarsky Dum again, and seemed relaxed enough to spend a second night in the crack den without too much anxiety - though I'm fairly sure I heard the mafia coming in at one stage during the night to drag off some of the guests and take out their kidneys.
In the morning, I bought Mum and Dad their 50th wedding anniversary present (more details to follow), and we took a stroll up Paritzska, one of Prague's most exclusive streets (housing Cartier, Prada, Dior, etc) and turned left into the Old Jewish Quarter. Like most European cities, there's been a Jewish community on and off for the last 1000 years or so, with varying degrees of prejudice and tolerance. In 1262 Přemysl Otakar II issued a law granting the community a degree of self administration, but they were required to live in a walled ghetto around Josefov, just north of the Old Town Square. In 1357, Charles IV gave the Jews of Prague the honour of a flag, which included a yellow Star of David considered to be the first use of the star to represent a Jewish community. It's a shame Charles didn't think to give them anything more useful, like more land, as they were still crammed into a tiny space. The Old Jewish Cemetery, which dates from the 15th century, was so small that graves had to be stacked one on top of another - it's estimated that there are around 12,000 graves in a space of less than an acre.
The ghetto was mostly demolished in the 19th century, as Prague planned to remodel its town planning to look like Paris, and there's very little photographic evidence of what the area looked like before demolition. Six old synagogues remain, including the "newish" Spanish Synagogue, built in the late 19th century after the Prague Jewish community achieved full emancipation. The interior is lavishly decorated in a Moorish style, and features an interesting exhibition of the history of the Prague Jewish community, with some fairly chilling images and artefacts from the Nazi deportations. The display contained one of the most horrifying things I've ever seen in relation to the Holocaust - neatly typewritten lists of names of Prague Jews selected for deportation, and hand-drawn graphs showing the numbers of male and female deaths in concentration camps. It's a horrible image of mass murder being reduced to a mathematical equation and a mechanical process of elimination.
Elsewhere in the old ghetto, the Jewish Museum is a striking building - completely empty inside, but for the names of all the Prague Jews known to have died in concentration camps during World War II inscribed on each wall, from floor to ceiling. Upstairs is a very moving exhibition of art drawn by children incarcerated in Terezin concentration camp. As upsetting as it was to view, I was pleased that we got there. Mum and Dad had once upon a time expressed a wish to go to Krakow so we could visit Auschwitz. I'm kinda pleased we didn't make it there, as I wanted Mum and Dad's trip to be enjoyable rather than harrowing; and while going to a cemetery and a couple of synagogues in Prague isn't exactly the same thing as visiting a concentration camp, it provided a little reality to balance out the crystal shops and slinky coffees and gold-smothered churches we'd been seeing.
Speaking of crystal shops, here's Mum and Dad standing outside an unbelievably opulent store on Paritzski. We thought it was all fairly gaudy and hideous, but it makes a great picture.
Back we headed to the Old Town, and stopped off at the Opera House to see the rather creepy memorial to Mozart, whose opera Don Giovanni premiered there, and then lunch at an uncharacteristically chic cafe with waiting staff who didn't resemble the Elephant Man, before heading back to the hotel to get our taxi.
Despite being nice and early for our flight, we were stuck on the tarmac for an hour and a half (the actual time of the flight back to London) while we waited for ground control clearance from Prague airport. Two delays on Easyjet in two weeks was pretty impressive, but Mum and Dad were very sporting about it. Moral of the story: don't travel on cheap shit airlines!
While I think Mum and Dad are still in love with and prefer Vienna, we had a great time in Prague, though Mum did have a bit of trouble getting clear directions out of the locals:
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