I’d like to tell you some grand story about why I moved to Prague in 1991, but the truth is I was a runaway, slipping off the map just when I was supposed to be distinguishing myself from hundreds of other smart young journalists in Washington, D.C.
Prague was a giddy adolescent then, a place where the playwright president Václav Havel was rumored to ride a tricycle through the Castle. Just two years earlier, he had stood on a balcony of the Melantrich building, in Wenceslas Square, leading the people as they toppled Communism simply by shaking their house keys—and the building’s squat, beige face was a daily reminder that the utterly impossible had become possible. But four decades of Soviet rule had left the city of a hundred spires—Golden Prague—a black-and-white photo of coal-silted domes and near-empty stores with signs that said “Vegetables” and “Meat.” Prague and its soul were bare then, stripped to their essence, and I wanted to be, too. I landed a fellowship to disguise my wandering, and stayed four years.
I returned last fall for the same reason you have lunch with your first love, out of curiosity and nostalgia. Neither of us was stripped anymore: I had demanding deadlines, a mortgage, a husband; Prague had just joined the European Union—and had erupted into Technicolor.
A kaleidoscope of BMWs swirled outside my hotel, and a torrent of tour guides—headset microphones on full—swept me to Old Town Square, where red and green café umbrellas bloomed like mushrooms under the 15th-century astrological clock. The warm almond vanilla scent of fresh oplatky (wafers) carried me up Celetná Street to Na Prˇíkopeˇ—now among the world’s top 20 shopping boulevards—where a hulking steel and glass retail complex twisted like Oz up from the ancient cobblestones. I picked out the Czechs—dressed now in fleece and olive suede like the other Europeans—only by the short, hard consonants they fed into their cellphones. Cellphones! Prague had leapfrogged into the 21st century, skipping several steps entirely, and my head tingled with the city’s infectious buzz.
The human river carried me to Wenceslas Square, and I saw the Melantrich building. Above its iconic balcony blazed a neon-green emblem of Prague’s brave new world that read “Marks & Spencer.”
Whoa! It was like waking up and finding all your furniture rearranged. I suddenly remembered the other reminder that justice always prevails—photos of Havel, paired with others of Tomásˇ Masaryk, creator of the independent, prewar Czechoslovakia, a place of cafés and concerts, architecture and industry, one of Europe’s richest nations. Czechs had hung these images in their shops and restaurants the way Irish-Americans hang photos of JFK. I ducked into doorways to look for them. Where had they gone?
A few days later, I put the question to my old friend Jaroslav Veis. Jarda had been a reporter at a formerly dissident newspaper, and we used to smoke cigarettes at a café near the newsroom, both of us in tatty jeans, lunch meandering into herbal Becherovka liqueur. Now he wore a jacket and tie, I wore tailored woolen pants, and we ate in the dining room of the Senate building, where he is an adviser to the body’s president. He’d been too busy to notice the photos were gone. But he had an idea what had replaced them.
“The twelve golden stars of prosperity,” he said wryly.
Golden Prague. The golden stars. Joined in a circle, they are the symbol of the European Union, and they shone from royal blue “Welcome” banners everywhere I went in the city. But when I left Jarda that day, I noticed something I hadn’t before. Like the Havel photos, the banners often had a twin, a flag for the huge South Korean electronics and appliance company LG. These said “Life’s Good.”
It certainly looked that way. Prague today is a 24-hour party, an all-night rave for aspiring go-getters. A tight-coiled energy ricochets through the once languid streets, from the canyons of Nové Meˇsto to the wide cobblestones of Na Prˇíkopeˇ, where men cut deals in accented English. At the Cuban watering hole La Bodeguita del Medio, boisterous young Czechs quaffed Mojitos, and at Universal, I eavesdropped on Chuppies, what some call Czech yuppies, strategizing for a meeting over beef tour-nedos and Stella Artois. The Hotel Josef, Prague’s answer to the W, bills its absinthe-green-lit bar as the best place to “catch Prague’s new spirit.”
“I love it here,” said a young transplant from the countryside named Petra. “Just the bravest, the strongest, survive.”
I didn’t love it. This was not my Prague. So I went looking for the old one in Smíchov, an industrial neighborhood where I’d lived near a train station under the hop-sweetened steam of a brewery. And when I got off the tram, the old Prague was there. Staunch, square, soot-covered, the station hadn’t changed at all. Its sign said simply that it was the Smíchov station. And then it hit me.
Nothing was wrong here. Prague and I had simply grown up. When the world was black-and-white—when there was only “Fruit” and “Shoes” and “Havel good, Communists bad,” when the stores had only soft, brown-spotted onions, when Prague was building itself from scratch—there was nothing to want, the world was unspoiled, and everything was possible. Not so for grown-ups. When you are grown up, choices have already been made, paths already set. I love my life, but some mornings I miss when it fit in a suitcase. Czechs, originally convinced that capitalism would make everyone rich, have discovered 10 percent unemployment and a resurgent Communist party that polls nearly 20 percent. (“For this I shook my keys?” my friend Sˇárka’s mother says as she watches the news.) And the Holy Grail—that shiny EU membership—has come with higher prices and, some fear, a dilution of national identity.
But few would go back. Neither of us, I had to admit, would live in the idealistic but deprived Prague I had come to more than a decade before. We had both grown too spoiled.
Prague is its own biggest attraction, the gold-tipped spires and red-tiled roofs like the centerfold of a pop-up book, its spine the silver-gray Vltava. Now, scrubbed and polished, the city has never looked more attractive. “Even the French say Prague is beautiful!” a cabdriver crowed to me.
The best way to see Prague is to walk it from top to bottom. When my husband, Satu, arrived, we began at the Castle, where the blackened St. Vitus’s Cathedral flashed pink-beige flesh under its scaffolding. We lingered amid the short doorways of Golden Lane, where legend has it that Rudolf II once imprisoned an alchemist for failing to turn lead into gold, and ambled down the steep cobblestones of Nerudova Street toward the Charles Bridge. Hand-carved marionettes danced in the little shops on canal-crossed Kampa Island, sometimes called Prague’s Venice, which had been nearly restored after the devastating 2002 summer floods. A meander through snaking alleys so familiar I could have traversed them in a blackout led to Old Town Square, whose sparkling pink and yellow façades had never looked so much like a perfect box of petits fours. But it was at Frank Gehry’s “Fred and Ginger,” a recently built tower of concrete and glass comfortably snuggled against Art Nouveau neighbors as though it had been there all along, that I realized Prague has always been about change, about lead into gold.
In the 20th century alone, the city has successively been part of an empire; a German protectorate; a Soviet satellite; and two versions of an independent country. Prague even changes from day to night, when darkness forces its most dramatic elements into the foreground like a Caravaggio, the Castle perched on the hill like a high-set diamond. At night, Prague is calmer, its overwhelming detail subdued. In the light, you get exhausted just looking at Prague.
Today, Bohemia is a lot less bohemian than it used to be, but in some ways it has more texture. The absinthe-drinking “novelists” have been pushed out by real rents and real leases, but international entrepreneurs offer exotica from kimchi to kebabs. Much that was authentic has been packaged and polished. The Municipal House, now restored to shining Art Nouveau grandeur, was my favorite place for winter balls and hearing Smetana played in the hall named for him. But my only access this time was a formal tour and a 900-crown ($37) concert where workaday musicians sawed through part of Má Vlast in 59 minutes, 59 seconds. Still, music now tumbles from dozens of churches and chambers, with concerts practically every hour. Even the Velvet Revolution is being sold. At the new Museum of Communism, you can see a video of the famous key-shaking and buy purple wax candles of Lenin’s head that used to be sold table-to-table in pubs by a scruffy giant I think we called Petr.
But there’s still some Prague left in Prague. Only the city that bore Kafka would decide to create a Speaker’s Corner—and then argue about whether to put up surveillance cameras. And while Hollywood has often seduced it into playing places like Paris, Vienna, and Zurich, what other city rewards blood donors with two pints of beer? Or gets a good giggle out of a guy caught tossing bags of urine into a café’s courtyard and the owner’s frazzled attempts to capture him on videotape?
Urine tossers aside, the city has never been more welcoming. It’s lighter and brighter, and the people have lost their nasty. At a concert in the neo-Renaissance Rudolfinum, I was happily enjoying the Czech Philharmonic’s Dvorˇák from my obstructed-view seat when an elegant older woman begged me to switch places with her. “Please,” she said in beautiful English. “You are a guest in Prague.” Simple signs point visitors to the Castle, to the Charles Bridge, to Old Town Square. And in place of the word bohuzˇel, which means “unfortunately” and was used to deny even small requests (i.e., “Bohuzˇel, you cannot have potatoes instead of dumplings”), is a linguistic novelty: samo-zrˇejmeˇ, “of course.”
“Samozrˇejmeˇ,” a wine tasting could be arranged for two people, a waiter told me, even though the sign said you needed ten. “Samozrˇejmeˇ,” I could see a room, even though the hotel was fully booked. And just for variety, “No problem,” said a waitress when I finally did ask for potatoes instead of dumplings.
Which doesn’t mean the Czechs have lost their trademark cynicism. Despite their functioning economy and stable democracy, a survey found they are the most pessimistic people in post-Communist Europe. “Skepticism is in our DNA,” said my friend Honza one night over homemade slivovice.
It’s easy to understand. Sometime before the tenth century, the Princess Libusˇe envisioned “a great city whose fame will touch the stars,” a city that would make armies “bow their heads.” But armies never did much bowing. Sitting delectably at the center of central Europe, Prague has belonged to the Holy Roman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, been plunder for Germans, French, and even Swedes. Twice betrayed in the last century—first when Europe gave them to Hitler, then when they were left to the Soviets—the Czechs have a well-developed sense of impermanence.
The beauty of black-and-white Prague, the Prague of no distractions, was that it made life’s little moments stand out—running into a friend on the tram and spending the afternoon at coffee was like finding a single sprig of dark green mint at the vegetable stand; watching the pears turn gold in my grime-spattered courtyard inspired the same kind of awe as the homemade dresses of gossiping girls in the bathroom at a winter ball. Those moments still live in this noisier, fuller, more complicated city. They are just a little harder to find.
One night I barreled through Zˇizˇkov, a working-class neighborhood suddenly chic, bound for a trendy cocktail bar I’d heard about. But as I turned a corner, sharp, loud laughter burst from behind a door. I stopped. Heard it again. Turned the knob and poked my head in. It was a tiny wine bar. A bunch of men, who’d apparently stopped home for their slippers, sipped small, frothy glasses of new wine, called burcˇák, as the barkeep filled their empty plastic soda bottles with dark red and wheaty yellow liquids from spigots. A round woman in a Minnie Pearl hat and tulle earrings patted the seat next to her, and I joined in. They peppered me with questions and competed to teach me tongue twisters. After too much burcˇák and too small a bill (Czech hospitality), I realized I would have found my Prague much sooner if I hadn’t looked so hard.
On my last evening, Satu and I walked across the Charles Bridge, its statues reaching out to me as I passed, each of them moving, breathing, seeming to shift just a little from the last time I looked, giving the city a kinetic energy, and the sense that it is somehow as alive as you are, with a being all its own. I remembered what Kafka said about Prague: “This old crone has claws.” But Prague doesn’t need claws. Paris is a city of light and romance, an extrovert that smothers you with kisses, but Prague beckons softly, confident in the draw of its mournful martyrdom. It is weighty, oppressed—and it knows you will be back.
The Details
Staying There
Live like the bourgeoisie at the all-apartment The Iron Gate (011-420-2-25-77-77-77; www.irongate.cz; from $244), a 14th-century building where cherubs cavort on original frescoed ceilings just steps from Old Town Square.
Step into a Sarah Bernhardt performance in the spectacularly restored Art Nouveau café and restaurant at Hotel Parˇízˇ (011-420-2-22-19-56-66; hotel-pariz.cz; from $390), on the Old Town’s edge, but forgo the hotel’s lackluster rooms and dismal service for the nearby K + K Hotel Central (011-420-2-25-02-20-00; www.kkhotels.com; from $350), a refurbished turn-of-the-20th-century cabaret house where Belle Epoque meets boutique chic in brass curlicues offset by ultramodern furnishings.
It does not get cooler than the Hotel Josef (011-420-2-21-70-09-01; hoteljosef.com; from $267), all sans-serif urbanity near the town’s center, from the glass, glass, more glass, and chrome of its guest rooms to the Milan-clad clientele perpetually sipping espresso in the lobby’s square-backed chairs.
Hotel Adria (011-420-2-21-08-11-11; www.adria.cz; from $234) offers clean, tourist-class functionality smack amid the hype and hustle of Wenceslas Square.
The butter-yellow blandness of Prague’s Four Seasons Hotel (800-332-3442; fourseasons.com/prague; from $380) is outweighed by its superlative views of the Castle and the Italian-influenced cuisine of its restaurant, Allegro.
Only a short walk away, hardwood floors, simple florals, and garretlike rooms give U Zlaté Studne (011-420-2-57-01-12-13; www.zlatastudna.cz; from $177) a French country feel beneath the Castle’s hulking ramparts.
Eating There
Prague has always been rich with culinary choice: red or white cabbage, potato or bread dumplings, roasted or fried pork. Today, samosas and sushi broaden the range, but hearty Czech comfort food is still the city’s forte.
Tender, full-bodied haluˇsky—Slovak gnocchi—bathed in sheep’s milk cheese star at Posezení U Cˇiriny (Navrátilova 6; 2-22-23-17-09), and the crispy, garlic-laced potato pancakes stuffed with pork are worth the years that indulging in them will take off your life.
Wild boar and haunch of venison conjure a medieval feast at U Modré Kachnicˇky (Nebovidská 6; 2-57-32-03-08), but desserts triumph.
Zahrada V Operˇe (Legerova 75; 2-24-23-96-85) updates classics like pheasant with contemporary flair: Think wasabi potatoes. Save room for the roasted bananas dolloped with tangy mascarpone.
Iranian caviar and an abundance of truffles make Kampa Park (Na Kampeˇ 8b; 2-96-82-61-02) Prague’s special-occasion restaurant.
Kolkovna (V Kolkovneˇ 8; 2-24-81-97-01) significantly elevates the pub experience (i.e., the bathrooms are clean) but still delivers the goods: free-flowing pilsner, steaming goulash, darkly fragrant goose, and, yes, fried cheese.
Once a hangout for Kafka, Dvorˇák, and Havel (not together), Café Slavia (Národní at Smetanovo Nabr.; 2-24-21-84-93) offers mere mortals passable food with spectacular Castle views and the deep scent of history.
The 1902-vintage Café Louvre (Národní Trˇída 20; 2-24-93-09-49) captures central Europe in its high ceilings and cosmopolitan clientele reading the newspapers over soft-boiled eggs.
Václav IV was said to toss pubkeepers into the Vltava for serving short measures, and Pivní Galerie (U Pru˚honu 9; 2-20-87-06-13) takes Czech beer at least that seriously, offering 180 handcrafted regional brews for sale and prearranged tastings. Sample Rulandské Bílé, Frankovka, and other vastly improved Czech wines at any wine bar and many of the city’s newly sprung bottle shops.
Being There
Once you overload on the Old Town’s twisting alleys, the Jewish Quarter’s mournful memorials, the Castle’s battlements, and the ever-changing views, head for Prague’s cultural diversions.
Overpriced concerts by groups of varying quality may be the only way to hear Mozart ringing from the High Baroque flourishes of St. Nicholas Church or Smetana sounding amid the Art Nouveau glory of the Municipal House (tickets at the venues or Ticketpro, Na Prˇíkopeˇ 20; 2-96-32-99-99; www.ticketpro.cz). But try to catch the Czech Philharmonic at the Rudolfinum, where you’ll find real prices and actual Praguers (Nam. Jana Palacha; 2-27-05-92-27; www.ceskafilharmonie.cz).
Check out the country’s excellent collection of 19th- and 20th-century art at Veletrzˇní Palace, a 1928 Functionalist building created to host trade fairs. (Dukelsky´ch Hrdinu˚ 47; 2-24-30-10-24). Originally built as a department store in the Cubist style, House of the Black Madonna (Celetná 34; 2-24-21-17-46) offers a small but well-focused display of Czech Cubism. And do not miss the Museum of Communism (Na Prˇíkopeˇ 10; 2-24-21-29-66), worth visiting just to see what Wenceslas Square looked like before Marks & Spencer. —M.K.