Prague

I was in Prague some months ago, but I've been a bit too lazy to write about it, and it's not cause I have no things to tell, just the contrary, such an extraordinary city deserves one million posts.

I had already been there some years ago and I'd been looking forward to going back ever since. This my second visit absolutely lived up to my high expectations. My two favorite architectonic styles (Gothic and Art Noveau) are everywhere in the city, and then you have all those incredibly beautiful buildings of late XIX, early XX. You still can breathe some slight reminiscences of the Soviet times (which sure locals would prefer to forget, but for foreigners are, at least, exotic).

There are tons of sites in the net devoted to this incredible city and I don't think it's worth to repeat here what is already in many other places, so I'll just write about some maybe not so known jewels of this city.

• Nusle Bridge My love for this place might be influenced by the fact that in my first time in Prague one friend of mine took me a picture walking along it that is one of my all times favorite ones. The views of the neighbourhood spreading below the bridge (the five stories buildings with those nice sloping roofs and the park to the east) are amazing, and I also quite like the silhouette of the high rise hotel on the Vysehrad side. It's also nice to have a look from the neighbourhood below.
  
  
  



• St.Michael Ukrainian church in Petrin Hill. This beautiful wooden orthodox church was transferred to Prague from Ukraine in 1929. It's located in the Southern part of Petrin Hill, in the upper part of Kinski garden. I could not find any signal, and it took me a while to find it, but strolling along the trails of this beautiful park is nice in itself. Don't expect something exceptional, it's a small, closed (at least when I visited it) building, but for someone that has never been to Ukraine but has it in his list of places to go... it's pretty interesting.
  
  
  
  



• Zizkov. Maybe this district is not so "alternative" (whatever that means) as I had read on the net, and the high concentration of pubs is not that appealing for a not too partying person like me... but I rather liked the atmosphere in the area. Some old rundown buildings beside others that after restoration look almost equally beatiful, narrow streets poorly iluminated, good amounts of graffiti, much of it with left-anarchist message, a couple of beautiful neogothic churches, music shows posters... in a certain way it reminds me of Berlin, which of course is terribly positive. I absolutely recommend sitting down on a bench in the TV Tower Square looking North, with that freak TV Tower on the right, on the left that beautiful odd building with two towers, and in the middle, the remains of the Jewish cemetery and a nursery with some pandas painted on the wall.
  
  
  
  



• Olsany cemetery. This place is breathtaking. It's hard to explain, but all those family tombs with pictures, drawings, and loved objects of the deceased had such an effect on me that I had to leave when I was just in the middle of my visit. There's also a small Russian chapel surruonded by an orthodox cemetery (check the last paragraph in this article).
  
  
  



• Sure the Prague Castle is one of the top tourist attractions and is in every new visitor's list. What many people don't know is that (same as happens with the also incredibly beautiful Budapest Castle) the castle is open till midnight. That means that you can climb up there after dinner and enjoy this fantastic space almost entirely for yourself. It's not just the feeling of hearing your own steps while strolling around history, but the splendid vision of darkness embracing the whole place.
  I recommend to start the night excursion to the Castle crossing from Stare Mesto to Mala Strana through Manesuv Most. Just when you reach the left margin, turn left and walk along a path by the river. There are some benches slightly illuminated by the nearby street lamps where I could almost see Kafka sitting there, reflecting and coughing his life out prisoner of that damn tuberculosis.
  One more delicious detail of the "Castle experience" are the wide, green, Art Noveau street lamps (with 4 female figures) in the park-square just opposite the main entrance.
  
  
  



• You can't consider your stay in Prague complete without visiting one of the panelák neighbourhoods. I think most of the surroundings of Prague are filled with these constructions (I read somewhere that 2/3 of the population live there). Maybe it's exotic for people in more wealthy countries where this kind of constructions are associated with housing states and dodgy areas, but where I live there are several areas just like that, and same as in Czech republic, they are not slums. So this was not nothing out of the ordinary for me.
  Anyway, I just headed to one of the easiest to reach, Háje, at the end of Metro line C. It's an abrupt contrast (similar to the one you get in London when in just a few minutes of public transport you move from Whitechapel to Canary Dwarf) that in 15 minutes of underground travel you change the incredible historic buidings built to praise God and the higher classes for these Soviet era constructions built to praise the equality of the proletarian masses.
  Not much too see, just stroll around for a few minutes, take some pics and back to downtown.
  
  
  

There are many free maps of Prague, but I think the best I've found is this one by the City Spy folks (don't know how it'll look once printed, I already had a nicely printed copy that I had grabbed in some other hostel, in some other place, in some other time.


Well, this has been a long post, hope it can be of some help to some visitor planning to spend some time in that delightful city that I've come to consider "The capital of Europe".