BFT23 - Walking Around Prague

 

In my experience, Prague is a grey wet city full of colorful public art.

It rained pretty much every day we were there though it was never enough to stop us from doing anything and there were periods where you could just walk around in the sunshine before it clouded over again. I love this weather, so it only added to my fond memories of the place.

We spent a lot of time just walking around the city, marveling at being in a new place, taking it all in. You can do that there. It’s a fairly compact city, well populated at all hours, safe, and generally interesting, and if you get tired there’s always a tram coming by in a minute or two to take you back to your apartment. This is how cities should be, and we took advantage of it. I know there are little personal trainer demons that live inside everyone’s cell phones these days whose job it is to count your steps as you go through the day and I kept meaning to ask them how I was doing but never did. I know there were a lot of steps, though.

You see interesting things when you look up.

You see interesting things when you look down.

And sometimes you just stumble across people doing interesting things right about at your level. Kim, Oliver, and I found ourselves across the street from an international 3x3 basketball tournament at one point – which explained the groups of uniformed young adults that we would see throughout the city – and Oliver went over to watch the for a while. He reported that they were interesting.

We went to the Castle one day – more about that later – and spent a day wandering around in one of the highest places in Prague. They build those things on top of easily defended hills, after all. At one point we found a staircase that didn’t really seem to go anywhere so, being on vacation and having nowhere in particular to be at any given time, of course we followed it and eventually it led us out onto a broad sort of plaza where you could look out over the entire city. It’s a great place to sit and let the city wash over you for a while.

The Vltava River runs through Prague and you can’t help but walk across it or by it when you’re there. It’s a wide, slow river at that point and it’s crossed by a number of bridges and traveled by a wide assortment of boats. We spent a fair amount of time just staring out across the river at various points, enjoying the view.

One of the interesting things about walking around Prague is that it is kind of nested in on itself. You’ll be walking along a street and notice a little pathway or an arched entryway just sitting there unobtrusively and if you decide to go through it you’ll find yourself in an entirely new place, lined with shops and other buildings that you couldn’t see from the main road. We’d cut through alleyways or lobbies, drift around tiny little parks or odd statues, walk down long narrow plazas, and eventually make our way back out into the larger city. You can spend a lot of time just kind of aimlessly exploring these hidden corners.

Lauren and I had a half day to wander around on our own at one point. Kim and Oliver had gone to explore the historic Jewish quarter of the city, with its gorgeous synagogues, crowded graveyards, and deeply rooted history and we decided to let them do that while we did other things. They had a lovely time, and as it turned out so did we.

We started out by walking around our neighborhood, poking into whatever shops might be open. There were a few minimarts and we loaded up on snacks, but we were doing this on a Sunday and if you’re outside of the more touristy areas this means that most things are actually closed then, so eventually we set out for the Old City again.

You see the darndest things in the Old City.

These ducks were all over. There were at least three separate stores devoted entirely to rubber ducks painted to look like various famous people, fictional characters, stereotypical types, or just figments of a broad and somewhat overheated imagination, as well as fairly large displays in several other stores. I’m not sure whether this says that Czechia is the rubber duck capital of the western world or just that the local crime syndicates have figured out a new and whimsical way to launder money, but we did go in to look at them and even though we returned to America with no additional rubber ducks I have to say we did consider it. Being a tourist makes your brain do weird things.

We also found an extraordinarily colorful kitchenware shop which we enjoyed because Shiny. Later we brought Kim and Oliver there and Kim pointed out that our ice cream scoop at home was made by the same people so we felt a certain amount of vindication.

While Lauren and I were walking around the Old City we somehow got into a discussion regarding the Aperol Spritz. If you’ve never had one of these, it’s quite possibly the most summertime beverage on the planet. You take three parts prosecco (a sweet, bubbly Italian white wine) and mix it with two parts Aperol (a bright orange bitter liqueur) and one part seltzer and then add a slice of orange, and as we walked around this began to sound like more and more of a capital idea and it was at that point – almost as if by magic – that we happened to pass a place advertising them for sale and so it seemed pretty much ordained that we should stop in and have one.

Verdict: tasty. I spent much of the remaining days of the summer enjoying them back home, in fact.

The other thing you’re supposed to do in Prague, apparently, is try a chimney cake. They’re traditional, which as a historian I know is often a code phrase for “this is the best our ancestors could do under the circumstances and now we consider it a delicacy because the weight of history demands we do so,” but in this case they were actually quite good. They’re basically hollow tubes of pastry baked on hot rollers and coated in crunchy sugar on the outside and then slathered on the inside with something else sweet – in this case, Nutella.

So there you go: chimney cakes and Aperol Spritz – the meal of champions. You heard it here first. No need to thank me, good citizen. It is a service I provide.

You can’t walk around the Old City for long without finding yourself in front of the Astronomical Clock eventually and we enjoyed watching the Golden Chicken strut its stuff a second time. There is no such thing as too much Golden Chicken.

Our plans were to meet Kim and Oliver for lunch and after an abortive attempt at one place (“You don’t have a reservation?” “It’s two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, were we supposed to?” “Of course, sir.” “Ah. Well, thanks anyway”) we found a table at the Restaurace Mincovna, pretty much back at the Astronomical Clock again. The clock has that magnetic pull, much like Wenceslas Square.

This was really the most Czech-ish food we had while we were in Prague and it was good if a bit heavy. We caught up on our various days over goulash, sausages, pretzels, and pickled cheese and felt properly Eastern European which is a very different thing than Southern European, especially when you’re basically just an American just trying to fit in.

One of the great joys of walking around Prague is that the city is full of public art. Czechs seem to place a great deal of value on art in their public spaces and pretty much everywhere you turn there is something to see.

There are a lot of statues, for example – and not just the heroic kind like we saw in Wenceslas Square though there were some of those, but also whimsical ones, abstract ones, and more than a few of Franz Kafka who will be getting a large chunk of a post for himself soon so you’ll have to wait for those.

This was one of the heroic ones, which was about halfway between Mincovna and the Clock, and it was pretty impressive right up close.

On the whole, though, I think I preferred the weird ones.

Some were weirder than others.

And I couldn’t quite tell if this was weird or not. It’s all in your perspective, I suppose.

Perhaps my favorite of the sculptures, though, was one that was exceedingly difficult to spot, mostly because you have to look high up in the air between buildings.

If you look closely, it appears to be Sigmund Freud just kind of dangling there, not really concerned about his predicament at all when you get down to it.

We stopped and stared at it for a while and as any psychology major knows when you stop in a public place and look up and point you will gather a small crowd who will do the same and eventually there will be a large crowd looking and pointing and you can slip off on your own while they continue to look up and point and this probably says something about human nature but it has been a long time since I majored in psychology and I no longer remember what it is. It did seem appropriate to be doing this with a statue of Freud, though.

Not all of the art is that formal. Some of it is just part of the buildings. Many of the buildings in Prague are either painted with intricate designs and artwork or simply adorned with sculptures that you will miss if you don’t raise your eyes from the street now and then.

This one was one of the first ones we saw, walking down our street toward the Old Town. The neighborhood is not particularly touristy or artsy, and yet this was there. It speaks well of a place that they care about such things.

Even just the signs and entryways were often artistic.

And not every bit of art was really supposed to be there. European cities seem to tolerate a level of graffiti that American cities rejected in the 1980s, in part I suspect because it is often of fairly high quality – not the garden variety tagging that means nothing to anyone not already in the know, but some interesting bits of artwork.

Of course not everyone enjoys that. But even there, there is art.

Every once in a while you come across art that actually performs. One afternoon as we crossed one of the bridges over the Vltava we found ourselves face to face with these guys.

They played a few songs, much to the amusement of the small crowd that had gathered, and then everyone headed off to be harangued by men in sailor uniforms trying to sell us tickets to a riverboat cruise, whom we eventually managed to evade.

We walked along the riverfront for a while after that, and eventually found a tram back to the apartment.