BFT23 - Wenceslas Square and the Old Town

 

We spent a fair amount of time in the doner shop, enjoying our first meal in Prague. But the weather reports were telling us that this would be one of the only dry evenings we’d have while we were there and the night was still relatively young even for us so we after a while we pried ourselves away from the table and headed out into the city.

If you go to Prague as a tourist you will end up at Wenceslas Square. That is the law. We figured we’d attend to that first thing, and I have to say it was a lovely place. It was about a twenty minute walk from our apartment and we ended up going there several times over the course of our stay. It has a sort of magnetic pull, for one thing – you’d head off to see something in an entirely different direction only to find yourself back there somehow without meaning to or really knowing how you got there – and for another our time in Prague was much less linear than our time in Italy. We’d often find ourselves looping back to places we’d been to before, to see things we missed or just on the way to other places.

We walked up the main road for a bit, slowly getting used to the fact that we were in a place we’d never been before and trying to take it all in as best we could. Eventually we turned left. From there we followed the sloping side of the road until we got to the large impressive building ahead of us, a beacon in the distance, which turned out to be the Czech National Museum.

The Museum sits at the top of Wenceslas Square, which really isn’t a square at all so much as a very long pedestrian boulevard, flanked on all sides by shops, hotels, restaurants, and random buildings of all kinds. It is occasionally crossed by roads or tram tracks.

We never did go into the Museum – there were plenty of other things to see, after all – but it made a handy landmark. The other big landmark at that end of the Square is the big statue of St. Wenceslas. He’s the guy on the horse. Surrounding him are statues of St. Ludmila (who can be found pretty much everywhere in Prague, possibly in more places than Wenceslas himself, or even Kafka, if you can imagine), St. Agnes, St. Prokop, and St. Adalbert. I can’t say that I knew any of this at the time as I was content to follow my “see it now, look it up later” approach to tourism, but the statues are impressive nonetheless and it doesn’t take a whole lot of mental firepower to figure out that the tallest guy sitting on the biggest animal and carrying the pointiest bit of metal is probably the one they named the place after. That’s how these statues work.

We spent a happy evening just kind of walking up and down the square, enjoying the much cooler weather and seeing the sights. Prague was about 10 to 15C (20 to 30F) cooler than it had been in Italy and for that reason much more comfortable to us northerners, though the weather forecasts were correct in predicting rain for much of the rest of our time there. It wasn’t a deluge of water – more of a light rain that you could never really tell whether you should open your umbrella or not for – but it kept things cool and to be honest I love grey, rainy days anyway. That’s my weather.

One of our first stops on the Square was a festive little store that sold – among other things – umbrellas to tourists at extremely reasonable prices, so we bought some. They were perfectly serviceable umbrellas and ultimately we ended up leaving them at the apartment for the next people so perhaps they are still being used.

The Square was crowded with people. One of the things that I really liked about all of the places we visited this trip was that there were always people about at all hours. You could be out walking at 11pm on a Wednesday and there’d be people out enjoying the cities, talking with their friends, heading to this or that place to do whatever it was they were going to do there. We are social animals, we humans, and it is good to be reminded of that now and then.

One of the things on Kim’s list of Required Elements for this trip was to have a beer in Wenceslas Square, and once you’ve made it to the Square the hard part is done. It is surprisingly easy to find someone to sell you beer in Prague. The Czechs consume more beer per capita than any other people on earth, including the Irish and the Germans – 140 liters (roughly 37 gallons) per year per person, if you’re looking for the numbers. Germans consume 99 liters per person and the Irish 93, though surprisingly neither is in second place. That would be Austria at 108 – a full 32 liters behind the Czechs, so it really wasn’t much of a contest. If you’re wondering, the US comes in 20th on that list, with Americans consuming roughly half of what Czechs do. Do not mess with the Czechs when it comes to beer.

We sat down at a table and someone came right up to ask what we wanted and then we sat there and watched the crowd float by on a gorgeous summer evening, sharing the time together.

Oliver has become a fan of a metal band called Sleep Token recently. I’ve listened to some of their songs and they’re good if not really my thing. They’re not a huge band as these things go but they have a devoted fanbase that follows them on Discord, stages meet-ups and events around concert dates, and generally seems to look after each other in a communal sort of way. So it was kind of fun to be sitting there at our table in Prague and notice a guy wearing a Sleep Token shirt walking by with his family. Of course Oliver got up to talk with him, and of course they had a good time bonding over their shared love of the band. This is how music fandoms should work, after all.

We ended up wandering into many different shops on Wenceslas Square that evening, including several tchotchke shops and a bookstore where most of the books were in Czech, of course, but which did have an entire alcove devoted to fine writing implements and you have to love that. We also sat for a while on the abundant benches, just taking it all in. It’s a good place to do that. Sometimes there are musicians out busking, though the quality can vary widely. This first night the musicians were pretty good, but it has to be said that on at least one subsequent visit the guy caterwauling into his little microphone was chased off by people from the nearby restaurant because he was scaring away their customers. I can’t say they were wrong.

As noted, Wenceslas Square has a certain pull and we ended up back there more than once. Most times it was rainy, but not always. Oliver and Lauren got some warmer clothes at two adjacent clothing shops and wore them around the city for the duration of our trip. One afternoon I was my own while everyone else was scattered around the city doing other things and after exploring the city aimlessly for a while I found myself back at the Square in front of a bakery that made remarkably good chocolate rolls, a situation which I did not let go to waste. Oliver, Kim, and I also had a good lunch there while Lauren was busy getting her hair cut and it was perhaps a bit touristy but certainly very tasty and really that’s all you can ask of a meal sometimes and we enjoyed it.

At the bottom of the Square the streets led out into the Old Town – the medieval heart of the city – and we spent a fair amount of time exploring that as well.

One of the first places we went was an open air market that sold pretty much everything, from souvenirs to mead to fruit. We sat on a bench nearby and sent Oliver to get some fruit and for a few days we were convinced that the fruit sellers had grievously overcharged him until we went back and took a closer look at the prices and realized that he had in fact paid the correct amount, it’s just that those fruit were more expensive than we’d thought. It was good fruit, though.

The Old Town is full of winding little streets and shops, and we had a good time wandering around in it, that night and other days as well. It extends fairly far from the Square, and there are all kinds of places to visit, and we’d run into bits of it on our daily travels, here and there.

There were places that sold elegant glass. There were places that sold Czech makeup. There were places that sold pretty much anything you might want and a lot you probably didn't. You could get candy bananas, if you so desired. We didn’t, but we could have.

By this point it was getting toward 9pm and we wanted to see the Astronomical Clock. The Astronomical Clock is the oldest such thing in Europe still functioning, and if you get there on the hour when it is set to do its thing you get treated to a pretty fascinating show.

The crowd waited patiently.

Eventually the hour came and the clock came to life. Wheels spun, figured appeared and disappeared through various openings, bells rang, and eventually the golden chicken at the top sounded its call and everyone was happy. You can’t beat a golden chicken for crowd satisfaction, I say. The crowd then dispersed to its various places.

Afterward we wandered around the nearby square as the sun went down over Prague. The square was golden in the light and smelled of roasting pork from the nearby sausage stand, and it all fit together oddly well to end our first night in the city.