Tourist Traps of Prague

A hike up to the top of the fantastic Astronomical Clock tower was totally worth the pittance they charged for it.

Surprise! It's been retrofitted with an elevator.

Prague is filled with all sorts of great tourist traps. If the sign is in English, it's a good place to lighten your wallet with little benefit in return.

If you ever have the urge to see marionettes sing along to a thankfully abbreviated "Don Giovanni", this is the place to be.

It cracked us up to no end that the Museum of Commies is "Above MacDonad's". When the curtain fell, it fell hard.

The walk up to Prague Castle was steep, but I was motivated by wine...across the river, I could see vineyards along the edge of the hillside that the castle perches on. Once we got to the castle and realized you had to buy a ticket to see anything at all, we got all meh, let's go find some wine.

St Vitus Cathedral

I got yelled at for taking this picture because I didn't pay. I'm only posting it to spite the security guard.

Finally! Wine!

Czech wine wasn't exactly the most quaffable quaff in all the land, but we found a Rose from Moravia was fairly drinkable, and it made us happy.

However, I had declared myself over Czech food pretty quickly.

So much meat! As a lapsed vegetarian I'm pretty quick to tire of an all-meat diet. It was impossible to flee from it. Meat, potatoes, cabbage.

You can mix it up with some meat, potatoes, cabbage and funnel cakes.

I decided to give it one more shot.

Lokal came highly recommended. While the interior was smokey beer-hall chic, the food ended up being fantastic- some of the best we had all trip. I even ordered a second plate of spinach because I was in love with the fact that they offered a green vegetable, even if it was doused in cream.

What better way to prepare for an overnight train trip than to get pampered a bit. Lucky us, Prague has a huge selection of really inexpensive Thai spas. Thai massage is one of those "hurts so good" massages where you get walked on and bent over backwards to crack your back in ways you didn't know you could.

The Czech Heath Department hasn't shut the foot nibbling fish operations down, so we had to try.

That tickles just to look at it. Yes, it's a bit gross to stick your feet in a fish tank. Yes, it's disconcerting to have little barbaric fish wiggle their way between your toes and start nibbling your calluses like it was a chunk of ham. Which, at that point, I'm sure I was exuding eau du ham through my pores. A good way to unwind after so much walking.

After an adventurous of trying to sleep on a train, we arrived in the morning in a new city, ready to begin a new adventure:

Mucha Madness

Aside from the gorgeous architecture and quaint squares in Prague....

There's an interesting art history here as well. It's known for the illustrator Alphonse Mucha. He really left his mark all over Prague, and cooked up the Art Nouveau movement.

He started out doing huge posters for theater productions and advertisements in his studio in Paris, moved to New York, and then back to Czech, where he used his notoriety to encourage a liberated Czechoslovakia through his political art.

They are stunning. Anything he advertised for, I would surely be tempted to buy.

The Mucha Museum was a nice introduction- they had a nice series that showed his development as an artist, along with photographs of his studios and models. A walk through town and you notice that his work is all around you.

The glass window he did in St Vitus Cathedral is extraordinary.

Mucha was definitely the happiest art we saw in Prague. A Jakub Schikaneder exhibit at the Waldstein Riding School was enough to make even the sunniest day fill with doom and gloom.

And don't get me started on the Amoya museum, the museum for young artist.

It kind of gave the impression that this isn't a very happy place.

But then the Hare Krishnas showed up in Saffron made some joyful noise.

Prague

One of the reasons that convinced me that it was time to move overseas was the upcoming federal election and the unavoidable political drama that every American gets sucked into every four years. Kidding! But seriously. I love not having to hear about it 24/7 and you can get your absentee ballot online now like a good citizen.

But really, the fact that I could get to some really interesting places in very little time was the icing on the cake when it came to packing up and moving.

In the same amount of time that it once took me to commute back and forth from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I can now hop a cheap flight and end up someplace kind of crazy.

Like Prague.

Thanks to cut rate carriers in high competition, you can book a bare-bones flight to a lot of places in Europe for less than $100. It's not going to be the most comfortable flight of your life, but at least it will be a quick one.

Prague is a gorgeous city. It's a rarity in the fact that it was not heavily damaged in world wars, so maintains a lot of its medieval architecture. It's also the seat of the Art Nouveau movement. The combination of the two styles was a little mind-blowing. So many ornate facades!

It's an easy city to explore. Most of the sights are clustered along pedestrian streets. This creates a bit of a tourist trap atmosphere, but the streets are so picturesque and fun to get lost in, I found that I didn't really mind.

The main Old Town Square was filled with tourist and buskers and cafes, and the lovely old Astronomical Clock and ancient churches.

Walking around the square in the late afternoon and the lighting was just magic.

Czechoslovakia isn't isn't exactly known for being a culinary mecca.

It's heavy- lots of meat and potatoes in various forms, and it's one of those places that think you are joking when you say you are a vegetarian. It's kind of telling when the best restaurants rated on trusty TripAdvisor were all Italian, Indian and Thai. No matter, we immersed ourselves in the local cuisine anyway and lived to regret it. Pickled cabbage is the closest thing you'll find to a vegetable, and I ate more pickled cabbage in that week than I have in my entire life.