In April 2011, I took an InterCityExpress (ICE) train from Frankfurt to Nürnberg and changed there for an ALEX train to Prague, leaving Nürnberg at 14:05 and arriving Prague at 18:54. ALEX is a private railroad company that belongs to Netintera, which in turn is now (since December 2020) a Read More …
Czech and German nationalists used to get all sentimental about this river, and some still do, for instance the obnoxious Sudeten-German refugees in Bavaria, now in their third or fourth generation of exile and still suffering volubly while driving to refugee conventions in their fat BMWs. (I am distantly related Read More …
The National Theater (Národní divadlo) has a great location right on the Vltava (Moldau) River in the center of Prague at the end of the Legií most (Legion Bridge), just one bridge upstream from the Charles Bridge. This theater was called the National Theater even before there was a nation to Read More …
The State Opera in Prague (Státní Opera Praha) has the most dreadful location of any opera house I can think of. The front entrance is cut off from the city by a high-speed four-lane motorway called Wilsonova with no pedestrian crossing, just a dark narrow tunnel that looks like the Read More …
This is an historic theater that was inaugurated in 1783 with a performance of the play Emilia Galotti (in German) by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781). But the truly historic thing happened here just five years later in 1787 when the world’s greatest composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) conducted the world premiere Read More …
If only I understood a bit of Czech, I would have gone to a play at this lovely old theater which was just a couple blocks from my hotel in the Prague district of Vinohradech. I would love to have seen their staging of Friedrich Schiller’s play Marie Stuartovna (Mary Read More …
These are the three main opera venues in Prague, Czechia: The larger photo on the left shows The National Theater (Národní divadlo), which first opened in 1881. It currently seats 986 spectators. The opera I saw at the National Theater was Nápoj lásky (better known in Italian as L’elisir d’amore 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 …