It just dawned on me that I ought to have taken a picture of one of the stripey furry things playing with a ball sold at most Prague souvenir shops, since it was the thing that most impressed me about the city, but you always think of these things when it’s too late.

I had thought it would be Kafka, but Prague turns out to be sort of like Disneyland if Disneyland were based on a tubercular Jewish writer instead of a mouse, so although I found myself walking across the Charles Bridge¹ quite often, I could never actually be arsed to take the stairs down to the Kafka museum. Nor did I go into any of the houses where he once lived (especially not the one on the Golden Street, which now charges admission – the street, I mean – and I didn’t feel like buying a ticket to see a street) nor the Kafka coffeehouse (it was closed when we wandered past), and so on.

Don’t get the wrong idea, Prague is very beautiful. More beautiful than Vienna, I think, definitely livelier and more well-preserved medieval buildings. At least in the renovated inner part.

The unrenovated outer part, which we briefly visited by accident by taking the #18 streetcar way too far, was less fetching, but interesting nonetheless.

Also, the food is quite good, not to mention the beer, although the baked goods – for which Czech culture is famous in Vienna – were few and far between. We finally found a pretty good bakery, but it had mostly new inventions (the brownies were not as good as Gamma’s) rather than the old traditional standbys.

We managed to get a room with an excellent location – exiting the front door, you overlooked the Charles bridge, and the castle, and stuff. Got a little ripped off on the price, as the website via which I reserved it advertised it at about half the price, but it was okay. The location made up for that, I figure.

A few things you might want to consider if you are planning to visit Prague:

• It’s totally worth a visit.
• Don’t go with Alpha, though, if you have to carry a lot of stuff, because she literally runs, and you might end up falling while leaving the top of an escalator because the wheeled suitcase you are pulling will torque because the axle is so short, throwing you off-balance; if you are lucky you will crash into a wall, though, stopping your trajectory before you actually tumble onto the floor.
• Don’t yell, either, if you do this (for example, “WHOAAA!”) because everyone will turn and look.
• When you exchange money prior to your trip, be careful you are given the right crowns. Just telling the bank clerk that, no, you do not want Danish crowns, you want Czech crowns is insufficient. If you do this, you will be charged for Czech crowns, but the first place you try to spend this money in Prague will inform you that they are Slovak crowns, worth about 80% of what you paid, and not legal tender anywhere in the Czech Republic.
• Also, when you go to the cash machine? And withdraw Czech crowns? Don’t go straight back to the guy to whom you have just demonstrated your ignorance of Czech money, because he will give you, in change, some counterfeit money.
• This happens to be funnier in German, because you go from “falsches Geld” to “Falschgeld”.
• Anyway.
• Don’t despair if this happens, because you can leave the counterfeit money as a tip, or otherwise foist it upon someone else, who will in turn give it to another tourist as change.
• It’s all part of the great circle of counterfeit money.
• The Black Theater was pretty cool.

The last time we were in Prague was, roughly, a quarter-century ago, and it was monolithic, grey and communist. There was nowhere to spend money, really, and so on. This time, there were plenty of places to spend money, for example on ferret-like toys, or crystal, or T-shirts reading, “Czech me out”. We visited a shopping center in Prague that was far posher than anything we’ve ever seen anywhere else in the world.

We got sort of tired of all the money-spending after a while. Not that we spent much, just watching other people doing it got old. But we loved the city.

We finally found a pub filled mostly with Czechs, rather than tourists. We were getting a little low on money, so that we ordered things based to a great extent on price, because one of the bartenders was this big, biker-looking guy with a pot belly and a ponytail, and the other was this big, biker-looking guy with a pot belly without a ponytail, and we didn’t want them to beat me up.

My wife got some Prague ham, which we had been looking for all the time we had been there. It is somehow famous here in Austria, for being good. It was pretty good, too. I had some mushrooms and hash-brown pancakes, which were also good.

And beer. One drinks beer in Prague.

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¹ “Do you speak English?” asked a boy with a clipboard, as Alpha and I crossed the Charles bridge. They were too young (about 14) to be Sc13nt0l0g1sts so I talked to him and his partner. Their English teacher had sent them out to interview visitors. Later we saw more clipboard-holding kids talking to people, too, so maybe he was telling the truth. “Have you ever eaten a frog?” he asked. I said no. “Can you ride a horse?” I said yes. That seemed to impress him more than my not having eaten a frog. I briefly considered telling him that I had eaten several snails, with garlic butter, but then he asked me if I had ever met anyone famous. I said, yes. “Who?” he asked. “Apocalyptica,” I answered. “Oh!” said his friend (the longer-haired of the two). “You know them?” I said. “Yes!” he said. We shot the shit about Apocalyptica for a minute, then they needed to go find someone who had eaten a frog.