Prague part 2

After the Cold War Museum, I took a tram up the hill behind the castle to visit the Museum of Miniatures, also on my list.  I was alone in the museum and I took my time peering through microscopes at such wonders as tiny metal boats sailing on a sea in variegated shades of gray that was actually the veined wing of a mosquito, a golden copy of the Eiffel Tower inside a cherry pit, and a caravan of camels led by a Berber nomad traveling the vast and empty expanse inside the eye of a needle.  I was charmed.

When Christian and I reunited at the end of the day, we had only one site in common: we both stopped independently and took photos of this well-known sculpture outside Franz Kafka’s house of two men peeing into a pool shaped like Czechoslovakia.

That evening we had dinner at a local brewpub not far from our apartment. Sadly, there was no Pilsner Urquell, which we have mutually decided is our favorite beer - both for its crisp flavor and because at 4.4% it’s lower than average in alcohol content. The goulash we ordered was also underwhelming, pieces of meat in a salty sauce with dumplings:

Although it’s definitely nothing at all like real Hungarian or Czech goulash, I think I prefer my Grandma Margaret’s Minnesota hotdish version of goulash that she made when I was young: macaroni noodles, ground beef, and canned condensed Campbell’s tomato, cream of celery, and cream of mushroom soups.

We had an afternoon flight on a Friday.  We stored our luggage at the train station in the morning, walked through town, and had lunch at another wonderful restaurant recommended by our AirBnB host, a place called Mlýnec.  We had an outdoor table on the terrace directly in front of the Charles Bridge.  We ordered the very affordable lunch of the day, three courses that were very good but more typically generic “fine dining” than Czech. Raw sea bream in a strawberry passionfruit sauce, perfectly cooked slices of filet mignon in a teriyaki reduction, and a surprising dessert: sweetened coconut milk frozen into a ball, coated with corn flakes, and briefly deep fried. It was like the deep fried ice cream found at Mexican restaurants in the US, only better.

Here is a photo of the inside of the very stylish restaurant:

Walking back through the city to the train station in the early afternoon, I realized that we made a good decision in avoiding Prague on the weekend.  There was a huge surge in the number of people in the streets already, so much so that it was impossible to walk at normal speed.

It was absolutely wonderful for Christian and I to spend a full week together, just the two of us.  We haven’t been away together like that since 2019.  But Prague itself didn’t live up to my high expectations.  I preferred the provinces, the other areas of the country that we saw, though I have to report that Christian very strongly disagrees with me.  For him, Prague is stunningly beautiful, filled with historical and cultural sites to visit in its many churches and museums.  But there were so many tourists…

Yes, I see the contradiction: we are also tourists, though we are maybe slightly more interested than average in Czech food and language.  The problem is just that there are too many people, everywhere: in the streets, in the trams, in lines, in the castle, in restaurants.  After a day or two I’m exhausted. I can’t imagine what it’s like for people who live there, having to deal with crowds this this year round. Maybe I would tolerate it better if I grew up in New York City rather than in less populated places like Minnesota, Montana, and eastern Washington. 

My favorite time in Prague was the morning that I got out of bed at 6 am and left the apartment at 6:15 to walk around the nearly empty city.  It was peaceful and uncrowded, the only people out were me and some very dedicated selfie portrait takers – a subject that will have to be addressed in a later post. The Charles Bridge was almost empty:

I came back at 8am with pastries:

My second favorite was the afternoon that we walked around the Žižkov neighborhood, on the far side of the train station from the city center and distant enough to have very few tourists. We saw the famously weird television tower with it crawling babies, an old red Soviet era Lada, and best of all a poetry jukebox installed in a park. You could choose from a selection of twenty Czech poets, and when you pushed the button they read one of their poems. We understood almost nothing, but both loved the idea.

I would like to go back to Czechia someday, but I think I would spend time in two other cities rather than Prague - Brno and Olomouc. And I would happily drink more Pilsner Urquell, which sadly so far I have been unable to find in France.

Up next week: summer vacation in northern France.

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