My first visit to Prague was on the 10,959th day of my life, or so I used to think. Actually it was only the 10,958th day, as I have since determined by a simple calculation in Excel, but at that time Excel had not yet been invented, so I tried Read More …
This is a story about my thirtieth birthday that I wrote a few years later. Copyright © 1975 by Remington Review, Inc. As a young man I don’t think I ever once explicitly wondered what I would be doing on my 30th birthday. Which is just as well because if Read More …
When I was in Prague there were two companies, City Bike and Praha Bikes, which offered guided bicycle tours of the city. Both companies made a friendly and competent impression when I visited them. Their tours sounded quite similar. The tours at City Bike were a tick more expensive but Read More …
This unusual and wonderfully creative museum consists of a long-term exhibition called “The City of K., Franz Kafka and Prague”, which originated in another city entirely, namely Barcelona, where it opened in 1999. Numerous people from Barcelona were involved in creating the exhibition, which seems to have benefited enormously from Read More …
This statue of the composer Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884) is appropriately located on the right bank of the Vltava River, perhaps better known internationally by its German name Moldau. Behind the Smetana statue in my photo is the Vlatava (Moldau) River, the Charles Bridge, Prague Castle and the St. Vitus Cathedral. Read More …
This baroque two-story house was built in Prague at the beginning of the 18th century. It is now a museum devoted to the life and works of the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904). Dvořák was a Czech nationalist who incorporated elements of Czech and Moravian folk music into his many Read More …
From 2009 to 2017 there was a small museum in a little passage near the east end of Charles Bridge, at Karlova 4, in a house where the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) used to live. This was no doubt one of the world’s smallest museums, consisting of one room Read More …
Prague Castle is on a low hill overlooking the city. It claims to be “the largest coherent castle complex in the world,” with an area of almost 70,000 m². When I was there in 2011 they offered two types of admission tickets, the “long visit” and the “short visit”. I took Read More …
Before visiting his cathedral, all I knew about St. Vitus was that there is a disease named after him, St. Vitus dance, otherwise known as Sydenham chorea, in which the patient makes jerky movements that look vaguely like some sort of dance. It turns out that St. Vitus dance is Read More …
The second Prague defenestration took place here in the Old Royal Palace in the year 1618, when a group of angry Protestants bribed their way into the castle and threw two high Catholic officials and their secretary out of a third-story window. This bizarre incident had far-reaching consequences, since it Read More …