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We leave on Christmas eve and hope for snow. It is dark and ice cold when we arrive at Prague airport.

Prague 2000

Gaby
2004-01-25 12:42:10

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We leave on Christmas eve and hope for snow. It is dark and ice cold when we arrive at Prague airport. About ten other people are waiting for the bus that will take us to the metro into the city. We don't have the right coins to buy a ticket at the machine, but the friendly bus driver let us on the bus for free. We follow the route on the map. The bus stops at every stop. In the metro, again, we cannot buy a ticket as we don't have coins. "Just get in", waves the man behind the counter. People are really nice here, we think. This is going to be a cheap holiday.

Czech. The word conjures up memories of animation films; quaint, handdrawn pictures with an otherwordly charm. Magic, imagination, bewilderment. This is going to be interesting.

Our hotel, the Blue Key, is very pleasant. Our room, done up in blues and straw colours, is cosy and very warm.

The Charles Bridge is lined with statues of saints. The buildings look awesome and spooky against the dark skies - vampires could fly out of the towers at any moment. The place looks like a setting for a film - as indeed it was for "Amadeus". The shops in the centre sell puppets, Bohemian glassware and wooden toys.

We will spend most of the next three days discovering the city from the morning until about three o'clock in the afternoon, when the cold dark weather will make us very sleepy. We find a couple of interesting bookshops and even more interesting coffee houses/cafés.

We like most:

Ebel Coffee House, with a good selection of bagels

U Bredovce, the secret place, hidden in an alleyway, does very nice special "alcoholic" coffees

Ethno, very trendy

One evening we visit a Black Theatre. The idea is simple: the stage is decorated in pure black, the actors are dressed in black and only the parts or objects that are supposed to be seen are in bright fluorescent colours. That way, it looks as if things fly across the stage, or an actor appears to have just a head and no body.

Ours was in the New Town. The establishment also has a jazz club where Bill Clinton and Vaclav Havel gave a concert a few years back. Next to it is an amazing café/restaurant, with the most unusual decor - including a couple of mechanical polar bears in the window.

It is bitter cold and we buy Glühwein and hot chestnuts in the market place. Everyone is wrapped up in warm woolly hats and coats.

"You tourist, you cold head", as the Moscovites used to put it.

One restaurant we will certainly go back to is "U Prince". We spend an agreeable evening there eating a typical dish with dumplings and listening to a live jazz band playing in the background.

Prague is a city of art and literature. President Vaclav Havel wrote his letters to Olga from prison, with references to his pile problem. Let us hope he eats lots of fresh fruit these days and has got rid of them by now. Earlier last century, Franz Kafka was born in the Jewish ghetto of Prague and wrote his bewildering novels in German.

But the real hero of the people was a creation of Jaroslav Hasek: the good soldier Svejk, the little man who stands up to bureaucracy and the whims of the powers that be, in a much more jolly fashion than any of Kafka's heroes.

His image still beams at us from the walls of Restaurant Svejk, where we have our last Prague lunch.