To kick off my incredible trip to Poland, I flew into Prague to meet my family and ‘Czech’ (okay, last pun) out the country for two days. After a 6-hour delay in Zürich, I hit the ground running immediately, breezing through an empty customs area straight into an Uber. My driver, a Ukrainian refugee named Olesya, floored it by cement apartment blocks from communist times, through a throng of students on skateboards near the Czech technical university, and past the riverboats along the Vltava River. I soon checked in at the Urban Crème, a sleek modern hotel sandwiched into a row of 1800s walkups, arriving just in time for my family’s food tour in the Old City.
Markéta guided a phenomenal food tour, fully satisfying us with tons of food and interesting information about life in Prague. We began with a deliciously savory three-course meal of braised beef shank, brown butter chicken, and fermented potato pancakes (with a side of herbed stuffing and colorful cabbage slaw) at Kro Bistro in the Karlin neighborhood. We followed this feast with a sausage and cheese charcuterie at the Lokal (local neighborhood bar), paired with a foaming Pilsner Urquell that was delivered with a scorecard – we only had one pint apiece, but locals will regularly hang out and drink the nine beers allotted on the tab over the course of a social evening. We tried the famous meatloaf sandwich and steak tartare at Nase Maso butcher shop, personally and enthusiastically presented by a young carving artist. We ventured inside the steel vault at Banker’s Bar, sipping on their signature Becherov sour while listening to Marketa’s storytelling in elegant, low-lit surrounds. We capped off the evening at Café Savoy, tasting scrumptious choux pastries (větrník and věneček) and strawberry dumplings in an elegant late-19th century restaurant that exuded vibes of Austro-Hungarian royalty. Bold, fun, decadent, informative, luxurious, and a bit excessive – our food tour was all of the above, and then some!
An enthusiastic ambassador for the city, Markéta also introduced us to the history and culture of Prague, providing a special window into the emergence from communism since the Velvet Revolution of 1989. She described her communist-era childhood as bleak and minimalist – people were only afforded life’s basic essentials and had abandoned the finer aspects of culture, religion, and hope. Marketa’s older relatives who fully grew up with communism remain skeptical about her job as a food tour operator: Prague’s culinary scene is practically brand new, as Czech chefs who trained elsewhere are returning to Prague and rediscovering traditional ingredients and recipes. Vestiges of the communist period are still very visible across the city: Prague was divided into Hunger Games-esque administrative districts, and we saw the period contrasts of Prague 8, Prague 7, Prague 6, Prague 5, Prague 2, and Prague 1 as we zipped between landmarks by light rail.
At street level, however, I saw only a vibrant, eclectic city with interesting surprises around every corner. Lauren and I started the next day at Prague Castle, a massive 14th century Gothic cathedral that doubles as a secular shrine to everything meaningful about Prague; recesses contained carved maps of the medieval city, the vaulted ceiling featured painted crests of ruling families from across Europe, and modern memorials to WWII-era resistance and the Velvet Revolution were displayed prominently. As impressive as the architecture was from the inside, nothing beats the tower view that we earned by climbing 287 stone steps: intricate roof adornments in the foreground with an infinite panorama of red roofs and dark spires bisected by the shimmering Vltava River. Back at the ground level, we marveled at the history within the royal palace and the quaint nostalgia of Golden Lane, a preserved street of tiny stone businesses that included a tea room, a goldsmith, several historical residences, and a silent film studio that showed a reel of the idyllic street scene from around 1910. Tucked behind one of the residences was the prison tower, Daliborka, where cold stone cells and medieval torture equipment showed that everything was not, in fact, golden in Prague’s olden days.
Descending from the castle hill into Prague 1, the fun and random character of the city came into focus. We passed on a couple of stereotypically-medieval dinner theaters then followed an intriguing sign for “Pivo Basilico” into a cool stone basement where we were treated to a fantastic Tuscan lunch of pizza and the best green ravioli with prosciutto and lemon. We picked up fresh fruit at a pop-up farmers market then walked through the Senate gardens, a beautifully landscaped baroque courtyard with a reflective pond, florid grotto, and geometric hedgerows – a perfect backdrop for a local pageant queen’s photoshoot. We snacked on trdelnik, or chimney cake, a melt-in-your-mouth fried dough cylinder stuffed with fresh fruit and ice cream…but when your ice cream comes with a piping hot pastry, it does nothing to relieve you from the summer heat, which was pushing 95 °F/35 °C with no breeze by early afternoon.
We staggered into the R. Jelínek Slivovitz Museum looking for a cool atmosphere, and it ended up being perhaps the coolest stop of our entire visit to Prague! The self-guided tour led us through interactive exhibits, where black-and-white holographs of Jelíneks explained the family’s history of slivovitz production followed by a light show that explained why the Moravian hills are perfect for cultivating brandy plums. The best part was a VR immersion room where we experienced the complete journey from plum to liquor, which was a tree-shaking, tractor-bumping, fruit-mashing, warm-fermenting, hot-distilling, efficient-bottling, fast-shipping, drink-pouring wild ride. Chasing virtual reality with reality, we tried a flight of various shots paired with meaty finger foods, one strong flavor-punch after another. We staggered out of the museum with an exhilarating buzz which made the rest of our city tour a fun-filled blur.
We rejoined the throng of tourists at the famous Charles Bridge, meandering past craft vendors and street performers while gazing at the beautiful river views on both sides. We continued on the touristy Karlova Street, poking our heads into a few shops: one memorable store displayed hand-carved board games from floor to ceiling, how fun! We debated visiting another of the many eclectic, very specific museums here, which include museums dedicated to artists Mucha and Franz Kafka, to communism and the KGB, to medieval alchemy and beer, to Legos and sex machines, to absinthe and optical illusions. But we were running out of time, so we skipped straight to the iconic Astronomical Clock, watching the wooden figures announce 5 o’clock as golden hour began to descend on the much-photographed main square. After rejoining with the rest of my family (and enjoying another drink at a rooftop bar above the Vltava), we all boarded a cramped, graffiti-covered elevator and plummeted to what seemed like the center of the earth to ride the subway amid dark, bunker-like concrete tunnels. A dinner of Ukrainian-style pierogies and an evening walk around the grand boulevard at Wenceslaus Square, and our quick visit to Prague drew to a close.
In such a short time, Prague left a lasting impression on me, with its beautifully layered history beneath its bustling, adventure-filled present. Our stop at Kutna Hora on the way out encapsulated the contrast perfectly: on the surface, it’s a pastoral village with cobblestone streets, historic architecture, terraced orchards, and a towering 14th century cathedral. But beneath a small cemetery at the edge of town lies the Sedlec Ossuary, an underground chapel adorned with the bones of 40,000+ exhumed bodies fashioned into bell-shaped altars, detailed wall hangings, and skeletal chandeliers. A bizarre and macabre place with a fascinating backstory, it was another one-of-a-kind sight tucked into a dark nook of an otherwise idyllic landscape. I would be excited to return to the Czech Republic to explore more of these hidden gems, as my brief visit was full of intriguing twists and turns that inspired my curiosity, released my inhibitions, and satisfied all of my senses.
Worldly Observations 
woohoo I was there in 2012. it beat out München and 3 Swiss cities to become my favorite stop of my trip. really should’ve paid more attention to the bridge i was walking on but it was the winter so everyone was hurrying somewhere to get hot cocoa.
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