Prague Had Other Plans

This was meant to be a history trip. Castles, cathedrals, a properly researched itinerary, the works. What I had not accounted for was how much of it I would end up tasting rather than simply seeing, history and food elbowing for the same afternoon, one wearing a very tall spire, the other filled with dumplings, and not the neat little Chinese parcels I had been picturing either, these were the Czech kind, dense and doughy and built for mopping up gravy rather than dipping in soy sauce.

Prague Castle, for the record, is not one building. It is a whole walled complex up on the hill, palaces, gardens, courtyards, a former monastery, the sort of place that clearly could not decide what it wanted to be when it grew up and simply became all of it. Right in the middle sits St Vitus Cathedral, gothic spires stabbing straight up, a golden mosaic worn soft with age over one of the side doors, and inside, a stained glass window by Alphonse Mucha that stopped me mid step and mildly inconvenienced several tourists behind me who had places to be.

The day had actually started a few hours earlier though, over breakfast at Café Savoy, which bills itself as a café and is really a small gilded opera house that happens to also serve chlebíčky, those little open faced Czech sandwiches piled with everything from ham and egg to smoked salmon, each one dressed up like it was auditioning for a magazine cover. I ate several under a ceiling so extravagantly frescoed and gilded it looked personally offended by anyone who dared eat a plain slice of toast beneath it.

From there it was cobblestones the rest of the way, the kind that photograph beautifully and betray your ankles quietly. Old Town Square eventually delivers you to the Astronomical Clock, where a genuinely alarming number of grown adults gather every hour, phones aloft, to watch a skeleton pull a rope, twelve apostles shuffle past two tiny windows, and a rooster crow the whole performance shut again. The mechanism dates to 1410. We are all, apparently, still not over it, myself very much included.

Charles Bridge is next, thick with baroque saints in blackened stone keeping watch over the river like a very stern, very silent welcoming committee, and it delivers you straight into that first view of the castle on the hill, the one every postcard has already ruined for you and somehow still gets you anyway.

Back up at the castle, past the cathedral, comes the changing of the guard, noon sharp at the first courtyard, full band, full ceremony. The uniforms, worth knowing, were designed by the same costume designer who won an Oscar for Amadeus, which feels about right for a city that treats pageantry as a mild inconvenience it puts up with rather elegantly.

Then, because apparently one cannot walk fifty metres in this city without meeting a snack, there is trdelník, the sugar dusted chimney cake spinning on rollers on every second corner, filling the whole street with the smell of a fairground that got a serious upgrade. Here is the bit nobody tells you when they hand you one still warm, it is not actually Czech. Slovak and Hungarian roots, no Czech grandmother has ever made one at home, and it only became a Prague tourist favourite in the early two thousands. In other words, a very good pastry with a slightly fictional backstory, much like most of us on holiday. I had two, purely for research.

Lunch was goulash and dumplings at Kuchyň, a sausage that needed no help from anyone and a beer that arrived before we had properly finished reading the menu, and by evening we had graduated to Anonymous Bar, a proper speakeasy behind an unmarked door, candlelit, gold masked faces painted on the walls, and within about four minutes of arriving, gold masked faces on us too. The cocktail list clearly does not believe in restraint. Mine arrived pale peach and floral, an actual sprig of baby’s breath perched on top like it had wandered in from someone’s wedding, while my friend’s turned up a deeply suspicious, glowing green, the kind of drink that looks like it might grant a wish or a hangover, possibly both.

Somewhere between all of that we also met King Kong. Not the actual King Kong, a bronze one, life sized, reclining rather smugly in a public square beside two enormous gold spheres that a nearby plaque insists, with a completely straight face, are art. It is called, with admirable and slightly alarming honesty, King Kong Balls. I have no further comment except that Prague contains multitudes, and evidently a sense of humour to match mine.

And then, the next morning, a train from Praha hlavní nádraží, that grand old station with its Art Nouveau hall and gilded figures holding up the ceiling as if they, too, had somewhere important to be. Thermal baths, a cruise past a parliament building lit up like it knows exactly how good it looks, a walk between Buda and Pest that I am fairly sure turned into a pub crawl at some point, though the photographic evidence has mysteriously gone missing. That one needs its own letter, properly told rather than squeezed in at the bottom of this one.

So consider this the cliffhanger. Prague fed me exceptionally well and let me leave with my dignity mostly intact. Budapest, from what I remember of it, had other plans.

Your resident castle and cardamom enthusiast,

Arpita