I really loved Prague, I think I’d like to live there some day. I had originally planned to stay in Prague for 4 days but ended up extending it to 9 because I was having such an amazing time. I probably would have actually stayed longer, but I had friends I was meeting up with in Italy. En route to Prague, I also broke up the train ride by staying a night in Bratislava and checking out a bit of Slovakia. I was there less than 24 hours so it doesn’t warrant a full blog post, but I did spend a day walking around Bratislava and went up to the castle which houses an interesting museum which takes you through the rise and fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, which I wasn’t really familiar with.
My first day there, I found a great little burger spot called the Sad Man’s Tongue Bar & Bistro. The owner was actually from Pittsburgh but had been living in Prague the past 20 years and I talked with him for a while, it was a really cool spot with excellent burgers. They had a section in the menu containing their big burgers or “chokers” and each was named after a famous person who choked to death. I went with the Jimi Hendrix burger and was not disappointed. As I was leaving my waitress gave me this huge list non-touristy of bars, restaurants, clubs and music venues to check while I was in Prague, which served as a great guide for the remainder of my stay. I also discovered a cool little bar nearby on that first day, where I met a ton of awesome people both from Prague and expats from around Europe and the US. I found that most people in Prague were extremely friendly and most spoke English so it was really easy to meet people.
Prague is just a beautiful city to walk around and get lost in. It was not really bombed during WWII, so it has maintained a lot more historical architecture than many other European cities. It felt like every other time I walked around a corner there was another really cool looking building waiting for me. I checked out Old Town, Charles Bridge, St Vitus Cathedral, Prague Castle, the Prague Zoon, several parks around the city and many other attractions I’m sure I’m forgetting. Prague Old Town is also home to the oldest working clock in the world, the Astronomical Clock which was built over 600 years ago and is still working to this day (with some renovations). It puts on quite the show every hour, with these little figurines coming out and doing random things while the bells are tolling.
Additionally, the beer in Prague is excellent and very affordable (to be clear, the food is also very inexpensive). You can get a big (500 ml) beer for like $2. One day, I took a day trip to the city of Pilsen, which is the birthplace of the Pilsner beer. The factory for the inventors of Pilsner, Pilsner Erquell is located there and I did a tour. Unfortunately I was completely not paying attention at the train station and got on the wrong train, which turned my 1 hour trip into closer to 3 hours. When I got there I learned that I had missed the last tour in English (by like 20 min). After traveling 3 hours to get somewhere that was an hour away, I was not leaving Pilsen until I did my brewery tour, so I did the tour in Czech😂.
So the lady starts the tour and asks if there is anyone in the group who can’t speak Czech, I raise my hand and she says there are 2 movies she can show me in English and she can fill me in on things along the way. She starts the tour with this like 5 minute long introduction in Czech in which she was explaining the rules. When she finished she looks at me and says “basically what I said was please don’t bring guns in”. At this point I started laughing (loudly, of course, I can’t help it) and I’m pretty sure my Czech counterparts of my tour group thought I was a psychopath for laughing at the no guns safety briefing. Whoops. I just found it absolutely hilarious that after that 5 minute intro, the only thing she felt was important to summarize for the American is “please don’t shoot up our brewery”. After that I thought the tour went pretty well. They were basically just explaining how beer is made, which I’m familiar with so I could mostly follow along. Plus, I know the Czech word for beer (pivo), which was probably the most frequently used word on the tour.
If I had one knock on Prague it would be related to the food. It probably isn’t fair to solely blame this on Prague, as a lot of their Eastern European neighbors have very similar food, which I had been eating for a few weeks leading up to this. A lot of Eastern European food is just grilled meats of some sort, which is good, but it gets old after awhile. Their food is very bland and I found myself crazing spicy food. A man can only eat so much damn goulash in August 😂. Luckily I found a good Indian and Vietnamese spot to help to mix things up.
That pretty much wraps up my Prague adventure. Definitely a place I’d like to spend some more time and highly recommend visiting if you’ve never been. Incredible architecture, great people, excellent beer and extremely affordable, what more could you want?
