4 days in the Czech Capital

Prague is an amazing city with, I feel anyway, something for everyone. It is fantastically cheap to spend time there, with hostels for about £5 a night and very cheap food and drink. The architecture is amazing, with buildings from just about every style mixed together. The Gothic cathedral that overlooks the city from Prague Castle, the huge number of Baroque and Renaissance buildings, especially in Welceslas Square (Václavské námìstí), the space-age-like pods of the TV mast in Zizkov, and the Frank Ghery "dancing house," to list but a few. (Sorry, but as an architecture student, I may go on about it for a bit!)

The Charles Bridge is the best way to cross into Hradcany from the old town, and is fantastic at night, as it offers wonderful views up and down the river with all the buildings illuminated.

Eating and drinking is a pleasure in Prague. No matter what your budget, you will always find somewhere nice to eat at any time of day. With most places I visited offering a good meal and a couple of beers as well as change for a fiver!

Quick Tips:

Leave yourself several days. I was there for four days and although I saw pretty much all the things I wanted to see, a lot of my time felt a little rushed and I would have liked to have spent at least half a day at the Castle.

Don't overestimate how much money you need. Money goes a long way in Prague, with about 50 crowns to a pound, and there are many cash machines that are usable with most major bank cards. I discovered these were a good way of managing to not arrive back in Germany with unusable currency (as it is hardly worth changing back) as there was only a £1.50 flat charge and I was warned off some of the currency exchange stalls!

Finally, keep your wallet and valuables around your neck or in a bag that you put on your front when boarding trams and trains, NOT in your pocket. Prague has a high petty crime rate, and although the chances of being mugged are very remote, pickpocketing is rife, which I found out personally on the tube, so beware!

Best Way To Get Around:

Internationally speaking, Prague has an international airport accessible from everywhere, and good train and bus services into the surrounding countries. We took the train form Hanover to Berlin, where we caught a train heading through Dresden and Prague that termintated in Vienna. This seven-hour trip ended up costing us only £40, as we are students, and was very comfortable.

Once there, your best bet is a travel pass, costing 250Kc for a week (about a fiver) which gives you unlimited use of trams, buses and the metro that together will get you anywhere you want to go in the city. Passes are checked randomly by plain-clothed transport police, so don't lose your pass!

On the other hand, walking is a good option. I feel the best way to get to know a city is to walk it, and everything in Prague is easily accessible by foot and nothing is a great distance apart.

Absolutely fantastic! I seriously can't rate this place highly enough. I bought the Rough Guide to Prague, and it recommended the Dahab as one of Prague's best tea houses. It was right.

When you first enter off the street, though, this will not appear to be the case. The front section is a grab-and-go kind of place with a few drinks and sandwiches, etc., but venture further back into the restaurant and the change is unbelievable! You'll see the most fantastic decor, with vibrant colours and candles.

The food is very Mediterranean, with lots of couscous and salad/vegetable dishes, all served with their special goat cheese. But for me, the most amazing thing was the tea menu--over 30 different blends, from regular black teas to exotic herbal teas. I had a Bombay tea, which turned out to be tea brewed with a little chocolate, then served with a pot each of milk and honey!

All this was for a good price, too: teas were about 50Kc (£1), and food was also good-value. It's a great place to eat or just relax with an unusual tea. GO TO THIS PLACE!

Arrived out in Vinohrady to see the TV Tower, and on the way back into the city centre stopped off at this very popular vegetarian cafe. The deco, like at Dahab, is out of this world. Lots of sofas and low tables, with light mostly by candle and soft wall lighting. The only why to describe it is a cross between an Arabic hippy tent and a white tiger!!! (Check the pics!!) The music and atmosphere was chilled, the service good and the food fantastic! All kinds of potato and omelet dishes, as well as couscous and bagels, etc. To get to it off the main road, take a short passage past the nightclub and art gallery. Go here!!

Generally, the bar wasn't anything amazing, hence why the name escapes me, but what I do remember were the prices!! As Western tourists, my German friend and I found the Czech capital to be stupidly cheap, especially when it came to eating out and drinking beer, which, being students staying in a very basic hostel, we did an awful lot!! We made it our mission to find the cheapest pint (ish as they were actually 500ml, but at an average of 50p, who really cares about 68ml!?! Not me, that's who!) So after several days of stopping frequently in bars and cafes to rest our feet after hours of touring the city by foot, we walked into this place (just across from the Klementium in the old town and down the road from the Lotos restaurant), a small bar with a minimalist interior mainly lit by candles and small hanging lights, and found Staropramen 10 at a frankly obscene 15Kc...that's about 30p. We spent a while in here!

The Globe was just around the corner from our hostel, and I had seen it mentioned in my Rough Guide to Prague. It is an English-language bookshop, specialising in mostly fiction. It also stocks other books, though (I found a good buy in the form of a thick book on 20th-century architecture) such as history, design, and travel literature, with copious new and secondhand Rough Guides and Lonely Planets. English newspapers are also available at a reasonable cost. Currency in the form of £, $US, Euro and Czech Crowns (Kc) is all accepted.

There is also a cafe attached serving a good brunch menu, and Internet access is available in the shop. Definitely worth checking out if you run out of books, fancy catching up with affairs at home and around the world in a familiar language, or fancy grabbing a coffee if you're walking along the river to the Ghery building.

We picked up a flyer for a live jazz gig at the underground jazz bar and went along for a look. The bar is on several levels, down to a basement bar and performance room. The basement level was amazing, quite small in area, but very tall with vaulted stone ceiling and stone walls and bar. The bar was free, and the live room had a small cover charge but the music lasted for hours so you get your money's worth. Drinks were the priciest of the trip, but still cheap, really, at 50Kc (about £1) for a large beer. They also sold, as many bars we found did, proper absinthe in both shooters and cocktails, which was great! We sat for hours drinking Czech beer (which is very good, by the way) and absinthe until it was time to move on to the whiskey bar!! This place, as with the Dahab Tea House, is definitely worth checking out and gets Dan's five-star approval!

For those of you who like a bit of rock music, this bar off the main street is pretty good. The beer is pretty cheap at 27Kc for Pills (taken from our "who sells the cheapest beer competition" stats), and the atmosphere fairly good. Kind of a letdown on the decor though - the wall/ceiling in the main bar area is pretty cool, a kinda weird psychedelic pattern, and the sofas are great, but the chairs and tables let it down as they are a little cheap and plastic-y. An OK place that's worth a look if you like your music a little heavy, but not half as good as other places we visited.

Prgaue Castle is a huge hilltop complex that looks out over the city from accross the river Vltava. It has controlled the Czech lands since the ninth century, and has the wonderful Gothic cathedral to St Vitus at its centre. Entry to the castle is free, and at the main gates every hour (I guess it's every hour, as we turned up by fluke just before 3pm) the motionless guards, similar to those at Buckingham Palace, London (not as cool-looking without the busbees!) go through the change-over ceremony. On this occasion one of them started to snigger and got a stern talking-to by his commanding officer as everyone watching took photographs and tried to make him laugh more! Mean, but very funny at the time!

As well as the wonderful Gothic cathedral, which unfortunately on the day of our visit was closed, one of the highlights for me was Zlata ulicka (Golden lane), which is a tiny street lined with tiny cottages that have now become shops. The contrast in size between this street and the castle around it is amazing. The views from the castle walls and gardens extend over the whole city, and I felt a lot more comfortable surveying Prague from here than I did at the top of the TV Tower and the miniature Eiffel Tower at Petrin!!!

Charles Bridge, with its two towers, was the first link between the two halves of the city, and is now one of its most recognisable and popular monuments. The bridge is always busy - during the day, little stalls are set up selling souvenirs, and at night, these are replaced by musicians. From the bridge you get excellent views up and down the river, and at night, you get a wonderful view of the illuminated castle on the hill above. The bridge is totally pedestrianised, as trams and buses take other routes across the river, and so you can sit or wonder slowly, and we found this the nicest way to cross into Hradcany.

When I say "popular sight," I'm not entirely sure if that's the right expression as I have read that the TV Tower is very unpopular with the local population. It is, however, quite popular with the tourists as, from the pods 100m above the street, you get a 360-degree view of the city. Work on the tower began in 1985, and it is a futuristic-looking, grey, three-legged structure with three viewing pods attached just below the mast. We only visited it to get the views, and to see the giant babies that are currently attached to the tubular legs! Although I did read that Zizkov has more pubs and brothels per head than any other area in the city, so was kinda disappointed I couldn't explore further! To be honest, views are just as good from the miniature Eiffel Tower, and it has a nicer setting, sat atop a hill next to the castle and overlooking the river. On the other hand, it doesn't have giant babies crawling up it.

Exploring by night brings a whole new feel to a city, especially one as well illuminated as Prague. We made it a point of our trip to catch trams and the metro as little as possible, only when a long journey warranted it. Walking through the old town in Stare Mesto at night was wonderful - the streets were busy as people made their way to and from restaurants and bars, and all of the historic buildings were illuminated.

I added this section mainly as an excuse to post some nighttime photos, as they show just how beautiful the city is after dark. The city is also pretty safe at night - although petty crime such as pickpocketing is a bit of a problem, especially on the metro, the streets are pretty safe, mainly because they are fairly busy.

The city is also fairly compact, and I found myself getting used to it pretty quickly, especially as there are so many landmark buildings and streets. Our hostel was located just off Narodni, one of the main streets leading to Wenceslas Square, so we tended to head off in different directions each night, exploring the streets and bars.