After our emotional experience in Krakow, we took a seven-hour train to Prague. Prague is beautiful. In fact, it’s been ranked as the most beautiful city in the world.
The Clementin Hotel
We stayed at The Clementin Hotel, the narrowest building in Prague. It got great reviews online and from Czech friends. However, for us, it was a big disappointment. The room and bathroom were very tiny. This was expected since it’s the narrowest building in the city, and we have no problem with small – after all, we’d recently spent 10 days in a smaller cruise ship state room. The problem with the hotel was that the room was unsafe. The bathroom was so poorly designed we had to shimmy behind a glass door to get in and out of the shower, and it was angled in such a way we were afraid we’d get stuck in the shower or worse yet, fall. And the service was lousy. When we asked for a bathmat, the manager snickered at us. While we would never stay at The Clementin Hotel again, the hotel was within a short walk of everything we wanted to see, and it was pretty on the outside.
Exploring the City
On our first day, Monica just had to see Lennon’s Wall, where people have been adding colorful designs since John Lennon’s murder in 1980. Unfortunately, we forgot a marker to add art of our own, but it was awesome to see!
One day, we took a private tour in an old-time car.
But mostly, we just wandered around the city, and found beautiful buildings, houses, churches and palaces at every corner. The city really does look like Disneyworld, especially when it sparkles at night.
Concerts and Food
We attended two opera and string quartet performances in spectacular halls. One included dinner.
We ate delicious Czech food, drank magnificent Prague hot chocolate, and tasted real absinthe at one of the many absinthe bars and had Czech ice cream in the evenings. Peter even found a local watering hold to get his nightcaps.
On our last night, we went to a fancy restaurant on the river, which is a posh hangout for regulars like Tom Cruise.
Our favorite restaurant was a tiny bar and grill across from our hotel called “The Irish Times.” We ate there twice. Pete loved the sandwiches and, as usual, Monica ate soup: delicious Eastern European mushroom soup.
Communist Bunker
One of the reasons we are visiting former Iron Curtain countries is that we’re very interested in what it was like under Communist rule. In Prague, we took a Communist history tour from someone who lived in Prague all his life. He told us what it was like when Stalin invaded and controlled the country and took us to the spots where people rebelled. He took us inside a nuclear bunker and shared how the Communists prepared people for nuclear attacks. He shared personal stories of believing propaganda as a child to seeing the city rebuild after Communist fall.
Aside from the hotel fiasco, we experienced everything we set out to do in Prague: tour the fairy tale city, eat good food, see live classical music, and learn about its history from locals. After four nights in Prague, we left for Berlin.