The trouble with this travel-blogging lark is that it leads to a ridiculous amount of self-imposed pressure to write something lasting and profound about every place you pop off to for a few days. It’s even worse when you have a couple of trips in short succession: the second becomes the deadline for the first, even if you don’t feel like writing about it yet, the five rolls of film aren’t back from the processors, and you haven’t had time to carefully arrange them into a virtual coffee-table book to accompany your witty prose. It doesn’t help, either, when in a fit of luddite self-loathing you pack away the iMac for a couple of weeks to force yourself to create something that isn’t wrapped in tags, catching up on the endless parade of new links and blog posts in short snatches on your wife’s laptop, until finally you commandeer it and spend three days creating said photo galleries like you should have done two weeks earlier.

I’m still wondering, though, how to say something profound about Prague, when it’s now such a popular destination that every Eurailer of the past fifteen years has been there first, and looking at its name in Czech makes me want to start humming “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.” I can’t claim to have known much about the place beforehand; I wasn’t even sure why Czechoslovakia had split up until I read this historical account (from the Slovak point of view) after we got back.

We would have got there a few years ago ourselves if we’d had enough time between Berlin and Vienna; then it was flooded only weeks after we didn’t go; then we thought about it last summer, but went to Paris instead; then we looked into going over Christmas, but it would have cost 600 quid for the flights. Finally, thanks to Expedia’s January sales, we made it across to the Continent (as opposed to “a” continent) for the first time since August. And not a moment too soon: within days, the French had voted down the European Constitution, the EU had collapsed, border controls had been reintroduced, Italy had gone back to the lira, Brussels had gone back to sprouts, and all those shifty foreigners had been ejected—and they weren’t letting us back in, by jingo. [Source: Fleet Street, 29 May 2005.]

The Czechs must be pissed off, because they’ve barely been European for a year, despite all those maps with them as the bullseye on the continental dartboard. Wandering around Prague it’s clear why they were keen to join the EU: other benefits aside, it must have been galling to be considered somehow “non-European” when your architecture and history are as European as it gets. The city has echoes of Paris, Barcelona, Stockholm, Munich, and Vienna, maybe because most of them never had the crap bombed out of them; I guess all of Europe looked like this once. For someone born only on “a” continent (come to think of it, I can’t even claim that), visiting Prague is like walking into the pages of a picture book, with words by the Brothers Grimm. Churches are topped with spires on spires on spires; palaces are painted pale pink and green and orange; bridges arch across the Vltava like sea-serpents. No wonder the Old Town and the Castle are full of tourists night and day.

Friends who had been there around 1989 told us that Prague wasn’t what it was (busy, tourists, pickpockets), but it would be amazing if a city like this hadn’t ended up firmly on the tourist map. 1988 was hardly its golden age, anyway: Prague hasn’t been what it was ever since Hitler shipped its Jewish population to the concentration camps and Czechoslovakia kicked out its German-speakers after the war. I’d always thought of it as a German-speaking city (because of Kafka, I suppose), but there’s no trace of that now; even though K. has become a tourist staple, the religion and language that defined him have more or less gone.

Despite the tour groups and stag parties crowding out the bars of the Old Town (with beer at 50p a half, it’s not hard to see why), there’s still plenty of low-key Eastern European fun to be had, once you get out of the central part of town: the quiet park of Vyšehrad, the streets around the modern art museum, the TV Tower. Our own hotel felt like it hadn’t changed in twenty years; the breakfast room door was still labelled in cyrillic. (The breakfasts, fortunately, didn’t seem to be stuck in the communist era. I even discovered a taste for Czech blue cheese, though it hasn’t carried over to the stronger stuff found in supermarkets here.)

We spent a day of our trip getting all the way out of town, where the clapped-out Skoda count and the peeling-paint quotient shot off the charts. Just boarding the local train took us straight back to our first trip through the former East Germany in the mid-’90s: the aging carriages, the unkempt stations, the eminently reasonable return fares. The teenage girl on the seat across from us twisted the reels of a cassette around with a fingernail as she listened to a cheap walkman, where Edinburgh kids would be showing off their iPod minis.

The town we visited, Kutná Hora, was one of the trip’s highlights: its suburbs were standard grey housing blocks, but the centre was an immaculate time-capsule of Bohemian wealth. This former silver-mining town and royal retreat was home to one of the strangest sights I’ve seen: an Ossuary with the bones of 30,000 plague victims artfully displayed around its interior. Prague Castle the day before had been packed, but there weren’t many visitors here; I guess a reminder of one’s inevitable doom is less alluring than cheap beer.

Getting back late from Kutná Hora we missed our chance to see a classical concert at the Prague Spring festival, but still had plenty of chances to drink good beer (did I mention it was cheap?) and eat some good food—I had a hankering for dumplings, sausage, and “knee of pork” served on a personal-size spit. Other unusual sights included a “Museum Miniature” featuring the work of a Siberian artist who draws and sculpts on poppy seeds and the hind legs of fleas; the bronze babies crawling up and down the TV Tower; and the Cubist furniture in the modern art museum (not to mention the biggest collection of Cubist Picassos I’ve seen in one place). You can see some of it in Praha, and, if you just can’t get enough, Doors and Windows III (half Prague, half not).

My favourite exhibition around town was a retrospective at Prague Castle devoted to the work of Adolf Born, a cartoonist and children’s book illustrator who appears to be the Czech Republic’s answer to Michael Leunig. His work was a perfect match for the fairytale church spires and brightly-coloured wooden toys of Prague’s tourist shops and markets; I loved his exotic animals and costumed characters, his line and watercolour illustrations, and especially his oil pastels on black card—so much so that when I got home I bought some black card and oil pastels and started drawing in crayon for the first time in twenty-five years. I won’t be putting any of those up here, though. My first efforts aren’t a patch on Born’s... and when I packed away the iMac I also packed away the scanner.

12 June 2005 · Travel

Added by Kirsten on 14 June 2005.