Prague-tically perfect in every way

Dobrý den! Last weekend I visited Prague and it was fantastic!

I had been to Prague before, but not in living memory, as my parents took me when I was about three years old. From the age of about two to about twelve, we had a series of au pairs who lived with us and looked after us during the day, as both my parents worked. Most of them were from the Czech Republic or Slovakia, and three of them live in or near Prague, so we took the opportunity to meet up with them on Saturday!

I got the train on Friday afternoon, arriving into Prague at about 7.30 after only about 3 and a half hours in total (the bus is even quicker). My first task was to get money out at the central station, which is confusingly named nothing even slightly recognisable: hlavní nádraží. The Czech currency is the koruna, which I found entirely impossible to get used to. I hazarded a guess and withdrew 1000 koruna from the cash point, before being instantly thwarted by the ticket machine which didn't take notes selling a 30-minute tram tickets for 24 koruna. I solved this by buying a postcard for about 20 koruna with a 1000-note, which some might call extremely annoying. After a triumphant tram journey where I didn't get lost or panicky at all (!!!) and a slightly less successful walk, I arrived at the hotel to check in. The person at the desk immediately presented me with a large (complimentary) glass of sparkling wine along with the key card to our hotel room, took me up in the lift and showed me around, and called me 'Madam Jane' multiple times. I thought it wasn't worth explaining that neither of those names apply to me, and just enjoyed the show.

After a spot of excited snapchatting to show my mother and sisters the incredibly luxurious hotel room, I went out to find some food. The receptionist recommended a Czech restaurant, so I faithfully followed the directions and found a Czech restaurant which was entirely empty. I felt so sorry for them that I decided to grace them with my patronage. The food was somewhat surprising, as the 'bread dumplings' that came with my goulash turned out to be literally pieces of soft white bread without crusts, and hence nothing like dumplings as I know them. However the goulash was nice and the beer (Budvar) was something like 60p? (The first thing I did when I reached the hotel wifi was the download a currency converter app, with which I then became completely fixated. There's something about converting currency, calculating percentages or generally working out pointless sums that appeals to me in a way I can't describe.)

Are these really dumplings?

On the Saturday morning Mother Jane's train was supposed to arrive at about 7, which meant she could come to the hotel and wake me with a gentle kiss on my forehead while murmuring loving things about 'my firstborn child', or so I imagined. Unfortunately the train was delayed by three hours for no discernible reason, so I went to meet her at the station instead. After dropping her things at the hotel, and having a lovely encounter with the hotelier who told us that we didn't have to check out promptly the next morning but could leave our things there all day (so helpful!), we went to meet Clara.

Pausing only to eat one of these delicious sugar-encrusted, soft on the inside and hard on the outside pastries that I think they made on Bake Off this year...? They're made by rolling strips of dough onto a pole/spit, as you may be able to see in the photo.

Clara was one of our very first au pairs which means I can barely remember her at all. However I do know that she did lots of creative things with me, which may well be where my prodigious talent for cutting and sticking things stems from. We met her, her partner and their daughter for lunch on Saturday in a Thai restaurant. The restaurant had almost no natural or electrical light but delicious-tasting food (I don't really know how it looked). We had noodle soup with tofu and vegetables and it felt so healthy. There was lots of reminiscing about the little horror that was 2-year-old me, and of course plenty of catching up. It was lovely to see her looking and sounding so well and happy!

View from the castle

After leaving Clara and her family, we wandered around the castle for a while, using Jane's helpful book Secret Prague, which informed us about a number of very interesting and some perhaps less interesting sights, including cannonballs still embedded in a wall from some battle at some point in the 1700s (a bit hazy on the details, as it was slightly too cold to concentrate for more than a minute at a time), a metal rod in a wooden door against which a cubit can be measured, as indicated by Jane in the picture, and a shrivelled hand belonging to a thief who tried to steal from a statue of Mary in a church. The statue supposedly grabbed his hand so tightly that he couldn't get away without ripping it off, or something. This hand was then hung on the wall of the church, because nothing reminds the faithful to praise the lord like a shrivelled body part from a fictional story.

The shrivelled hand.

After a certain amount of wandering we made our way back to the hotel in time for the wine and cheese they serve every day from 5-6, i.e. literally what I imagine heaven is like.

Then we went to the restaurant to meet the second and third au pairs of the weekend, Pavlina and Radmila. I'm friends with Radmila on Facebook so I at least know what she looks like and a bit about what she's doing, but I hadn't seen Pavlina since I was about three or four (I think) so I hardly recognised her at all. However, totally unsurprisingly they were both entirely delightful. Pavlina had brought us a huge bag of the most beautiful gingerbread biscuits I'd ever seen (homemade!), along with a few photos to show us. And again, there was lots of reminiscing about me as a demon child, including a story Pavla told about a time when I locked myself in the loo and refused to come out because I wanted my mum. She said she didn't know what to do, so after cajoling for a long time she finally turned to the threat that she would get the hammer and break down the door. Amazingly, it worked and I came out. I think Present Me would be like, "DO IT" and wait until she'd admitted that it was a completely empty threat - she said she didn't even know if we had a hammer - before coming out to gloat. However Past Me was scared of literally everything, so on reflection it's not at all surprising that Pavlina was successful.

So talented???!

After a delicious meal (I had trout with potatoes and spinach, mmm) we went to a bar famed for its absinthe that Jane found in the trusty guide book. Fortunately we didn't have to actually drink any absinthe; instead, we admired the painting of the green fairy, drank mint tea and ate ice cream and sorbet. 

Poor quality photo of the famous painting

We got the tram back together with Radmila and Pavlina, which meant our goodbyes were a bit hurried as we didn’t realise when exactly our stop was, but it was worth it because WE LOVE TRAMS. I have many things in common with my mother, and our love of transport such as trains, trams and the top deck of double decker buses is one of the important ones.

On Sunday morning we had a leisurely breakfast in the beautiful hotel dining room, and briefly considered going to the spa in the 'sister hotel', where could have had a complimentary massage. After realising that neither of us wanted to do this because we're both uncomfortable with spas for various reasons, we struck out in search of more culture. To get to the old part of town we walked from the hotel over the Charles Bridge, where we saw a group of middle-aged Czech buskers playing fantastic jazz. I did take a video but I fear it may break the internet if I upload it here, so it may have to go elsewhere.

We went up the Clock Tower (I think - or was it the Bell Tower? A tower anyway. Jane, if you're reading this, please enlighten me) from where we had the most wonderful, if vertiginous, view.

At the top was this statue of a cheeky man lifting his skirt to reveal his leg.

The clock

After a fruitless search for the stone head of a man under the Charles Bridge that allows you to judge how bad the flooding is by how much of his beard is underwater, we headed to the main square. Here, we saw the Meridian, the significance of which I don't particularly understand, the astronomical clock, the complexity of which I cannot comprehend, and a tiny pig on a lead, about which I cannot fully express my joy in mere words. It took some food from my hand and it felt as though I'd been baptised, or blessed at the very least.

The Meridian

The Pig.

We had a hot chocolate in the Cafe Mozart overlooking the clock and the rest of the square; as you can see from the photos, however, it was no ordinary hot chocolate, but one where you stir a solid piece of chocolate on a stick into hot milk. Another form of heaven.

We then went on to the Powder Gate, stopping off in the beautiful church that featured the aforementioned shrivelled hand. It was very smoky inside because of the incense, and contained the amusing sign shown below that can be applied to many situations, if you think about it.

The Powder Gate

The guide book also led us to this statue of someone who supposedly isn't Darth Vader...? Are we sure?

"Here's some money, go see a Star War"

Finally, to finish off the weekend we had a meal at about 4 o'clock in a Czech restaurant near the castle, on the street we'd walked up with Clara. It did involve more fake dumplings but I forgave them because the duck was delicious.

All in all, it was one of the loveliest weekends I can remember. Prague is an absolutely beautiful city with lots of culture, good food and transport, and astonishingly cheap beer. It was wonderful to catch up with the former au pairs and see how well they're all doing, and equally lovely to see my mother, especially as she was looking so cute in her enormous furry hat. The only downside was how blue I felt getting the train back from Prague - I didn't want to leave! But I will see her really very soon, and the rest of my family too, so I have no cause for complaint.

So děkuji, Praha! And apologies for failing to learn a single word of your language. It is really mind-bogglingly difficult to remember.