Prague

Travelling: Solo/ with company

My first visit to Prague was launched in tears. The Christmas spirit had departed my world, or that’s how I saw it anyway, and I wanted to look busy and be somewhere else in the run up to Christmas. I had big swollen eyes when the plane landed and I was hoping to find the little mini-bus service to town without having to ask too many questions. At least it was dark.

The hostel room I had booked was in what had once been the Imperial Hotel (just checked this out now four years later and it has become a 5-star hotel!) and it had a jazz café with a ceramic ceiling on the ground floor that was listed in the Rough Guide as one of the 10 things to see in Prague. As I checked in, the café was heaving with beer and smoke and Dixie jazz reverberating off the stained glaze of the magnificent ceiling. I was still pop-eyed from the plaque I had just seen almost across the street marking the building as the former home of the insurance company where Franz Kafka had worked for 14 years. It was such an unexpected, left field encounter it knocked the whole stuffing out of my misery and I laughed out loud. Nearly everything I saw in Prague over the next week had the same effect on me, and part of that came from the realisation that you can take a cheap flight out of whatever mire you are in, with or without company, and walk into a novel, a history book, a festival of music and new food and postcard scenes and casual conversations, and you never come back to quite the same place. I love Prague for this reason, but I love it too because it is a gorgeous city.

I have been back to Prague many times - alone, with a friend, with family - and I would go again tomorrow and next week. Christmas does it for me, for the outdoor indoors of the old town streets, the choco-rum and steaming sweetmeats and trinkets, golden churches and lit up trees, but mostly for the music that pours from every baroque hall, church, teahouse, river barge and public square. I had the best steak I have ever eaten in a Brazilian restaurant one Christmas Day. On a different year Christmas dinner was a burger and fries at MacDonalds between one opera house – the one where Mozart premiered Don Giovanni and which was used as the setting for much of the movie Amadeus – to another. I had Figaro for a mid-afternoon starter at the Estates Theatre and Traviata for dessert at the State Opera House near the end of Wenceslas Square. That was my Christmas feast. I was on my own that time, but it certainly didn't feel like it.

Music
Prague before Christmas is ideal in many respects. All of the churches have concerts, usually running for around an hour at various times of the day from lunchtime onwards, so it is possible to fit several in. Tickets cost from around €8 to €12 and can be bought on the street outside the venue - organ recitals, string quartets, sometimes a soprano. Some of the church interiors are sumptuous beyond description, others outwardly spectacular and inwardly bare, like the Tin Church in Old Town Square. The most moving musical experience I had in a church came by happenstance, when I looked in the door of the Church of St Francis of Assissi at Charles Bridge as a French horn played from the gallery at midday Mass on St Stephen’s Day. And then there was the thunder of the organ at midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in St Nicholas Church on Old Town Square.

I have seen a dozen operas in Prague over the years, most of them booked in advance online through Bohemia Ticket. I have never paid more than €20, and often as little as €10 or €12 for a centre front row seat in the second circle. And I have paid that and more – and happily - to hear a fiddler in the corner of the local bar at home (Ireland). The difference between the fiddler and the opera is that opera is expensive to stage, and opera houses are expensive to maintain, and the fact that you can see three different operas on three consecutive nights of the week in the State Opera House in Prague, featuring the best voices in Europe, and some, such as Aida, having a cast of 90 or 100 including dancers, and all for the price of a round of drinks, must be reason enough to make the journey.

Solo Getaway

I don’t suppose this is a valid reason for most people, but it is for some, and there are places where you will feel that you have a neon sign on your forehead if you are on your own, and equally times when you will feel you have no reason to live if you are stuck in the wrong company, especially at times like Christmas (maybe not – maybe it is just me!). At any rate, you can walk away from the burlesque at home, alone or in company, and be in this place all the way through the season into the New Year if necessary (though year end is harder to book and more expensive than Christmas) and come back laden with gifts (cds, more cds, Czech rum to make chocorum from at home, shoes for everyone from the fabled house of Bata). The city doesn’t shut down for Christmas Day. La Traviata plays traditionally on this day at the State Opera, and there will be an afternoon Mozart opera at the Estates Theatre also, and street markets and restaurants are open. You will not be lonely. You will not be bored. You can chat to strangers or mind your own business and peer in windows. I came back from my first solo voyage revitalised, with a head ringing with music, and I repeated the experience in various forms for four years in a row.

Culture

There are places where culture can be a chore, a foot weary yawn through corridors and halls of artefacts and plaques. Prague has major museums and one of the few exhausting afternoons I spent there was in the National Museum. Of course it was awesome, but huge, and so full, full, full, of pinned insects and rock specimens and beautiful bronze busts of heroes unknown to me. But the architectural heritage of Prague is best experienced just walking down the street, and then back up the other side of the street, and round cobbled corners and over the bridge and back. My sometime partner, Eric, a vicarious traveller if left to his own devices, dragged me into the 400 year old Jesuit library, where he was so overcome by the overwhelming history of the tomes assembled there that he talked of nothing else for three days. The guide was hugely well informed, with the subversive delivery of a post-communist intellectual caught in communist aspic. He spoke of how the Jesuits had found and lost favour in the city, of the manuscripts of Mozart and Tycho Brahe that the library held and of the merchants and freemasons who had frequented the place.

This segment could have been called history instead of culture, but the city is so visually striking that you can settle for looking and adding in bits of history as they make an impression. So the Castle, and St Vitus’s Church, and the gorgeous Art Nouveau Municipal Hall and Towers and the State Opera House and National Theatre and Railway Station are all handsome buildings, some of them in awesome settings, and they can be enjoyed from many aspects before you find out how they came about: over tea and cakes and piano music in the Municipal Hall (Ubecni Dum), amusement on the hour watching the antics at the astrological clock in Town Square, looking down at the river below from the jousting hall in the Castle.

Mozart’s footprints are everywhere. Kafka’s footprints everywhere. Mucha’s artistic legacy is everywhere. The money that was poured into this city was well spent, and the results were well looked after. Two unimposing side street museums left a lasting impression on me: the light fantastic Alphonse Mucha collection and the little museum of the Czech cubists, where you can buy replica vases and bowls. Oh, and a third. The Church of the Infant of Prague, where I counted 23 lit up Christmas trees, has a small museum to one side, of rows and rows of miniature embroidered outfits donated in honour of the saintly child.

Accommodation
When I chose to stay in the Imperial Hostel, it was because I was captivated by the fin de siècle nostalgia of it and the notion of that ceramic café. The ceilings in the rooms were impossibly high and the central heating was not turned up high enough on the first trip. What is more, because it is a listed building, the toilets and showers were down the corridor. (All changed now. See above). It's a much better idea to rent a studio/ apartment if you are travelling with company and I've done that a few times too, always staying as close to the centre as possible – Stare Mesto or Nove Mesto. There is no reason why anyone visiting Prague should ever need to set foot on public transport of any kind, apart from the trip to and from the airport (€3 by minibus). There are so many accommodation sites online now, you just google away until you find what you want. For an overall view of how to navigate around the city, the Prague Events site is very helpful to start with, and come back to.

Deal of the trip
Probably the scores of tiny Little Infant of Prague statuettes, attached to miniature rosary beads, encased in glass lockets or felt pouches, that I brought back and spread around the family and neighbourhood again and again. The Little Infant was a mainstay of every Catholic household in Ireland when I was growing up and carries a peculiar fascination even still. The opera tickets of course, the bottles of Bozkov to introduce choco-rum to the neighbourhood.