Prague’s Wonderful Playgrounds
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Prague’s Castle Quarter
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If you only have a couple days in Prague, the two must-see destinations are Old Town and the Castle Quarter. The ideal way to explore the Castle Quarter is to spend a solid day there, taking in the myriad architectural styles of the buildings erected on its grounds over the centuries, and immersing yourself in its sprawling history. But the way our schedule worked out during our weeks in Prague, I ended up making three visits there, each of them for just an hour or two. For that reason I have less to say about it than the other areas we visited – I didn’t get as strong a feel for it as I did for other parts of town.
The Prague Experience site has a good summary, which includes links to more details on some of the main attractions:
Prague Castle is the largest medieval castle complex in Europe and the ancient seat of Czech kings throughout the ages…. Several destructive wars and fires (and the subsequent renovations), along with differing political forces have combined to create an intriguing mix of palaces, churches and fortifications.
The Prague Castle complex consists of Saint Vitus Cathedral (the most recognisable landmark in the city), viewing towers, museums and art galleries, a monastery, Golden Lane, several palaces, including Lobkowicz Palace, and St. George’s Basilica; the latter being a popular venue for early evening classical concerts.
A key thing to understand is that “Prague Castle” is not one particular building. It doesn’t fit the stereotypical image that may come to mind of a single, fortified stone building in the English countryside. Instead it’s a collection of a half dozen palaces, a few churches and monasteries, gardens, and a variety of other attractions. Some of them have their own grounds, while others were built practically on top of each other. This is especially true of the Castle Quarter’s most striking building, the St. Vitus Cathedral – it’s huge, and virtually impossible to take in visually because you can’t get more than perhaps about 50 ft back from it (which is why all my pictures of it look like close-ups).
Visiting Prague Castle introduced me to a word I didn’t know, and to a peculiar habit of the Czechs in Prague over the centuries – defenestration. Here’s the story of one defenestration:
Defenestration is the act of throwing someone out of a window… The Second Defenestration of Prague was central to the start of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618… At Prague Castle on May 23, 1618, an assembly of Protestants, led by Count Thurn, tried two Imperial governors, Vilem Slavata of Chlum (1572–1652) and Jaroslav Borzita of Martinice (1582–1649), for violating the Letter of Majesty (Right of Freedom of Religion), found them guilty, and threw them, together with their scribe Philip Fabricius, out of the windows of the Bohemian Chancellery. They fell 30 metres and landed on a large pile of manure in a dry moat and survived. Philip Fabricius was later ennobled by the emperor and granted the title von Hohenfall (lit. meaning “of Highfall”).
Roman Catholic Imperial officials claimed that the three men survived due to the mercy of angels assisting the righteousness of the Catholic cause. Protestant pamphleteers asserted that their survival had more to do with the horse excrement in which they landed than the benevolent acts of the angels.
In a street outside the Castle Quarter is a statue to the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler who worked together in Prague just before the Thirty Years War. By coincidence I had just watched the old Cosmos episode about Kepler, so I knew that although the statue makes them look like friends, they definitely were not. Kepler was “the last scientific astrologer, the first modern astronomer and the author of the first science fiction novel.” This was my favorite episode of the Cosmos series – The Harmony of the Worlds. Here’s a good 5 minute clip of it on YouTube – if you like it, you can watch the whole episode on hulu.com. It’s equal parts a biography of Kepler’s strange, sad life, his scientific discoveries and what he went through to make them, and a broad historical perspective of life in Europe during those times.
One Day in Plzeň, One Last Night in Prague, and Home
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We departed Munich in the mid-afternoon, and our fast, smooth ride on the German rails abruptly transitioned to slow and bumpy the moment we crossed the border back into the Czech Republic, where the tracks are older. We arrived in Plzeň in the early evening, and – unlike Munich – we successfully navigated the roughly 1 mile walk from the station to our hotel on our own. The Hotel Slovan was both impressive and a bit sad. We only saw a few other guests, and you could tell it was certainly a grand hotel when it was built in the 1890s, but it looked like it did not fare well under communism. It had a bare-bones, 1950s modern-style makeover – probably in the 1950s judging from how worn things looked – which did not sit well with its art nouveau architecture. Its old-fashioned setup – with shared bathrooms and showers on each floor – was fine with me but I imagine it’s not what most tourists are looking for these days.
Finding a dinner suitable for both us and the boys was a bit of a challenge. The streets that night seemed strangely deserted – in an almost Omega Man way – but after wandering for a while we spotted a hole-in-the-wall pizza place with outdoor seating that turned out to be really good.
The next morning we set out for our one day in Plzeň. We ventured by city bus to Dino Park so the boys could have some fun. Kai enjoyed it, but the dinosaurs looked a little too realistic as far as Eidan was concerned, and he kept his distance from all but the smallest ones. Jealous of my bee sting earlier in Prague, Maria got her own bee sting at Dino Park. I think hers hurt more than mine, but it didn’t swell up like mine did.
From there we headed to the Pilsner Urquell factory to see and taste what Plzeň is famous for – Pilsner beer! The food at their restaurant was a big disappointment (although Czech food is not exactly high cuisine, it can be good; unfortunately it can also be really bad…) but there’s no arguing with the quality of the beer. I suppose if the beer is good enough the food doesn’t matter.
We had just enough time after that for a short visit to the historical center of town. With the tallest church spire in the Czech Republic, Plzeň’s most famous historical building is the Cathedral of St. Bartholomew, but the building that stood out for me was the Great Synagogue. It’s the second largest synagogue in Europe, and “the mixture of styles is truly bewildering; from the onion domes of a Russian orthodox church, to the Islamic style ceiling, to the distinctly Indian looking Aron kodesh.” We hustled from there back to the station for our train ride back to Prague. This was the one and only time on our trip where we rode a train that was actually older than a typical US train. But unlike most US trains, it at least ran on time.
The place we stayed at previously in Prague was rented out after we left, but the landlord had another place, away from the tourist part of town, where we could spend the night before catching our early morning flight the next day. We ended up having the best (and cheapest) meal of all our time in Prague that night, in a little neighborhood restaurant. Like any other city, you can eat better and cheaper if you follow the locals instead of the tourists.
We left about 5am for the airport, and got there on time. Everything was going smoothly until a Czech Airlines representative told us our connecting United flight from Zurich to Philadelphia had been canceled. And, by the way, United Airlines doesn’t have anyone in the Prague airport to help you, and we’re not going to help you either. So I called United, and the rep on the phone insisted the flight wasn’t canceled and that everything was fine. We crossed our fingers and got on our flight to Zurich, and discovered when we arrived that our connecting flight was in fact not canceled. We just barely made it though, because we had to leave the security area to get our boarding passes issued, since – due to Czech Airlines mistaken belief that the flight was canceled – they refused to issue them in Prague.
The rest of the journey home went well, and the boys were thrilled to be home again after two months away.
I actually have a few more Prague posts brewing – I couldn’t wait to blog about LegoLand and the rest of the trip, so I skipped ahead. Stay tuned – this travelogue isn’t quite done yet!
3 Hours in Munich
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If there is one thing I could change about our trip this summer, I would have spent more time in Munich. We scheduled it as only a stop-over between Legoland and Plzeň. We arrived in the early evening in the modern and busy Munich Central Station, hungry for dinner. I was about to resign myself to Burger King when I noticed that not only was there a small Vietnamese restaurant, but they served pho! It actually wasn’t bad either (for traveling pho hunters, the restaurant is named Asia and it’s on the ground floor – see the final picture in the set above). We then took a subway to where we thought our hotel was, but it wasn’t there. After wandering around for a while with luggage and kids in tow, trying to find it, we finally surrendered to the idea of taking a cab.
After a decent night’s sleep in our tiny hotel room’s bunk beds, we had just a few hours to explore before our train to Plzeň. We didn’t have a chance to do any tourism research before arriving, and unlike Budapest, we couldn’t get online in our hotel room to do last minute planning. The hotel desk attendant gave us a map and some flyers written in German, and so we set out on our most poorly planned venture yet.
But we actually did well. With so little time available, we decided to take the subway to Marienplatz, and then explore on foot from there. After being suitably dazzled by the New Town Hall (Neues Rathaus – I’m not so sure it’s a coincidence that the name for a building full of politicians sounds an awful lot like rat house in English), we headed north to the sprawling Residence Palace. Then we hunted for lunch and a bathroom through Odeonsplatz and the Hofgarten. The day was warm and sunny – the boys got some badly needed running around time in the garden area, and we had a nice lunch in an adjacent outdoor Italian restaurant. After lunch we hurried back to the subway, which got us to the Central Station just in time for our train to Plzeň.
So we got only a small taste of Munich, but it struck both Maria and I as a very pleasant and livable city.
Legoland Deutschland
 Mike with an old friend
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 Eidan enjoying the Water Works
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 Kai in downtown Frankfurt, MiniLand
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 Neuschwanstein Castle, MiniLand – made from more than 300,000 lego bricks
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 Riding on the German trains
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After Maria’s students returned to the US, we did some traveling outside of Prague before coming home ourselves. Our first destination was Legoland, in rural Günzburg, Germany. After that we went to Munich, then back to the Czech Republic, to the town of Plzeň (where pilsner beer was created) and finally back to Prague. Maria did an excellent job researching the logistics, and we discovered the wonders of the Bayern ticket: a family of up to five can travel all day on a single 2nd class ticket, on any regional trains throughout Bavaria (and into the Czech Republic as well) for the equivalent of about $40. German trains are a lot like Japanese trains, so 2nd class is downright posh compared to any American train.
The only glitch happened when we arrived late in the day in Günzburg, which is in the middle of nowhere. The train station was small, and there was no one around to ask how to get to our hotel, and there were no cabs. We tried to call the hotel but for some reason we couldn’t connect. The only transportation other than the train was a shuttle bus to Legoland that came every 20 minutes. We decided to go even though it was late, figuring someone there could help us. They did help us, and we got to our hotel in the end, but the price we paid was a total meltdown from Eidan. The park was about to close when we got there – standing outside its amazing gate and not being able to go in was too much for him after spending most of the day on trains.
The next two days were great, and the four of us had a blast – check out the pictures!. This is the first theme park I’ve visited that I really got into, probably because of all the time I spent as a kid playing with legos (score one more successful brainwashing by the lego marketers 
). The highlight for me was Captain Nick’s Splash Battle simply because, after more than 10 years together, I got to see a look on Maria’s face I’d never seen before: bloodlust and the thrill of battle. The highlight for Kai was the Bionicle Power Builder ride (he went on it twice), where you get to program your own ride on a touchscreen before climbing aboard a gigantic robotic arm that spins and rotates you according to your programmed instructions. And Eidan pretty much loved all the attractions that involved him getting soaked. Overall though, the most impressive part of the park is MiniLand, featuring large, highly detailed lego scale models of landmarks from all over Europe.
Prague’s New Town
New Town is “new” since the 14th century. King Charles IV made Prague his residence, and established New Town, between the Old Town on the south side and Vysehrad Castle to the north. It is by far the largest area in the tourist section of Prague (about 3 times the size of Old Town). It features a wide variety of architectural styles, including several very homely communist era buildings, amidst the beautiful older buildings.
For me it was the most interesting part of the city, as I spent a lot of time in college and grad school studying the history of the Soviet Union and communism, and several important events happened in Prague. New Town was the center of activity in both the Soviet military clampdown following the 1969 Prague Spring (with students Jan Palach and others burning themselves alive in protest), and the 1989 Velvet Revolution, when Czechoslovakia’s communist government was finally deposed. Look for the mismatched plaster patches in the picture of the National Museum – this was a subtle protest by Prague’s masons, who were ordered to repair the building after the Soviets shelled it in 1969.
The entire city fell into a serious state of disrepair under 50 years of communist rule. Private property ownership was abolished, and the government did not have the resources or the interest in maintaining Prague’s historic architecture. In at least a few desperate situations, massive wooden beams were wedged between buildings, high above the streets, to prevent them collapsing on each other. It amazed me how utterly pristine the city is now, and what an impressive job was done restoring Prague’s thousands of beautiful buildings.
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Prague’s Old Town and Charles Bridge
 The Tyn Church in Old Town Square
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 The Astronomical Clock in Old Town Square
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 The Jan Hus Memorial in Old Town Square
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 The Charles Bridge
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The Old Town area is where the city of Prague was first settled around the 9th century (whereas the New Town area is “new” since the 14th century). With its multitude of beautiful historical buildings, it’s ground zero for tourism in Prague. Its history and architecture make it one of the most interesting parts of town, but it’s also teeming with overpriced tourist traps, which get annoying really quickly (hint: if a restaurant has a big sign reading “typical Czech food,” its not a good place to eat Czech food).
Since it’s such a popular destination, it’s also been written about a great deal. The best short write-up I’ve found is at the Prague Experience site.
Charles Bridge connects Old Town with Malá Strana (Lesser Town), and is open to foot traffic only. With its amazing views of the city in every direction, it is also a top tourist destination. It was built in the 14th century, is adorned with 30 Baroque statues, and has impressive towers at each end. Like Old Town, many have written about it already – see the Prague Experience site for a good description, but come back here for pictures .
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Custom Car in Prague
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I still have several Prague posts in the works, but I’ve had a crazy couple of weeks with everyone in the house being sick (except Kai), and getting our living room and porch fixed up. So until I have the other posts ready, here are a couple pictures of a cool custom car we saw in Prague. I think it’s supposed to be reminiscent of a U-boat (which is a bit odd to see in a country that was among the first conquered by the Nazis).
Vysehrad Castle
 The Vysehrad cemetery is the final resting place of many famous Czechs
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The first thing you’ll notice when visiting Vysehrad Castle is that there is no castle:
Charles IV converted Vyšehrad into a stone fortress [in the 14th century], joining it to the ramparts of the New Town of Prague, built a Gothic Royal Palace, the Capitular church, and the great new Špička (Peak) Gate. During the Hussite Wars, however, the whole royal precinct was destroyed… The present appearance of Vyšehrad was largely determined in the second half of the 19th century… its major landmark, the neo-Gothic Church of SS Peter & Paul was rebuilt in the Neo-Gothic style… the present Vyšehrad Cemetery is a unique artistic whole, harmoniously fitting its surroundings. At the same time it is also a unique gallery of funerary sculpture, and an expression of Czech artistic development from the second half of the 19th century to the present day. It is the final resting place of over 600 personalities from the fields of culture and intellectual endeavour.
Prague Castle, which I haven’t blogged about yet, is “the” castle to see in Prague. The Vysehrad Castle isn’t more than a few miles away, and before it was destroyed, “…the two castles maintained opposing spheres of influence for approximately two centuries.”
I visited Vysehrad one evening on another solo outing, and little did I know this was the perfect time to go. Vysehrad is on the highest ground in the southern part of town, and the sunset was spectacular. Apparently the sunsets are spectacular on a regular basis, as there were makeshift bars set up along the top of the northwestern wall, and a small, leisurely crowd was quietly chatting and enjoying the view.
I only had an hour or so to explore the sprawling grounds before it got dark, so I saw just a small part of what Vysehrad has to offer. See the “Plan of Vysehrad” section of the official site to get a sense of everything that’s there. It’s a quiet, green, and peaceful place, but with its huge walls on every side and its commanding view of the city, you can feel its history as a former center of power.
Maria and the boys visited Vysehrad before I joined them in Prague – the photos above include some shots of them enjoying its wonderful playground.
Another remarkable thing is that Vysehrad goes completely unmentioned in the popular Rick Steve’s Prague guidebook. It’s a couple miles from the center of town, but if you have more than a few days to spend in Prague, it’s worth a visit.
Prague’s Little Hanoi
 Pho at the Dong Do restaurant
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 Shopping outlets in Little Hanoi
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Getting the first bee sting of your life while alone at a bus station in a foreign country, not being able to find the friends you were planning to meet, and knowing you’re about to miss the bus you can’t find, isn’t the best way to start the day.
I was supposed to meet Tai – one of Maria’s students – and Peter – a Prague native who was assisting Maria with the student activities. Our destination was Little Hanoi – the Vietnamese community on the southern outskirts of Prague. I knew which bus we were supposed to take, but I couldn’t find it. Luckily Tai found me just a minute before the bus was leaving (it was at a small terminal hidden behind a wall of tall shrubs). We ran back to the bus and got on just in time. The ride was about 30 minutes, and it was my first time venturing out of Prague’s tourist areas. As we left Smichov station, the beautiful old buildings gave way to row upon row of communist-era concrete apartment buildings. Peter explained to me that after the Velvet Revolution, President Václav Havel hoped that people would abandon these buildings (he referred to them as “rabbit cages”). But as drab and unpleasant as they were, people had been living in them for decades and had created communities around them. So instead the buildings are being renovated and painted bright, cheerful colors.
While Peter educated Tai and I about the history of the area, we educated him about Vietnam. My knowledge of Vietnam is limited to two subjects: the Vietnam War, which I studied off and on for years, and phở – Vietnamese beef noodle soup – my favorite food. But Tai did most of the talking, since he is a 2nd generation Vietnamese-American. Tai was also our ticket into Little Hanoi: to get in, you have to pass through an entrance and either 1. have a wholesale vendor’s license, or 2. look Vietnamese (or be with someone who looks Vietnamese).
It turned out the “Sapa” building at the entrance used to be an office building where Peter had worked many years ago, and he hadn’t been back in at least 10 years. So for him it was an unusual experience, coming to a place that was familiar in some ways and very unfamiliar in others. As for me, I was happy that the pain in my hand from the bee sting had subsided (but since it was my first sting, the swelling and itching had just begun).
Our first stop was the Dong Do restaurant for lunch, which of course meant phở. Peter was very curious, as he had never had Vietnamese food before, and I was excited to have my first bowl of phở in Europe. It was a restaurant with a full menu, not a specialty phở shop, so the phở wasn’t amazing, but it was still very enjoyable. One of the best aspects of phở is there’s something about it that inspires lively conversation. Peter told us stories of life under communism, and Tai shared stories of his father’s life in the South Vietnamese army during the Vietnam War.
After lunch Tai took us for a quick tour around the markets (this was his second trip to Little Hanoi). It’s primarily a wholesale, business-to-business district, not a retail market, so there’s nothing especially attractive about the surroundings, which consisted of simple concrete and metal buildings. They primarily sold imported clothing, which wasn’t something I needed, but it was still fun to look around.
If you’re visiting Prague and want to venture out to Little Hanoi, the article here has more information, as well as directions. Remember though, you need to either look Asian or have a local vendor’s license to get in. There’s also another group of Vietnamese shops in Prague 4, described here.
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