Christmas in Prague
Not quite Christmas, but the week before.
So long story short – my company kinda messed up my vacation days in my favor, and I needed to burn a bunch in a hurry. My in-laws and ARR had been campaigning for him to visit them for a few days. But Chuckro couldn’t take an entire extra week off this time of year. So he suggested (since I like traveling more than he does anyway) that I just go somewhere that I wanted to go to that he was less interested in.
So. Prague at Christmas!
Amazingly gorgeous. Also, I ate all the food. All of it. There is no food left in Prague and no room left in my pants.
Highlights:
Sunday:
- Wandering around. Started in Mala Strana, where my hotel was. The Old Town is rather like Venice – amazing architecture, packed to the gills with tourists, kind of abandoned by the actual natives unless they’re trying to sell tourists things. Really delightful while being ever so slightly depressing.
- Mucha Museum. Small but charming museum of the Art Nouveau artist.
- Museum of Communism. Dense and text-heavy, but very interesting.
- Wandering into my first Christmas market in the dark with the lights all lit up as snowflakes were falling, and the air was filled with the scent of roasting sugared almonds and mulled wine. Basically about as Christmas-y as it’s possible to be.
- “Aspects of Alice” black light theater show. Kind of cheesy, but some clever illusions. Very touristy, but glad I did it.
- Ate: Sort of an inverted savory waffle wrapped into a cone and filled with hard boiled egg, avocado, tomato, and real mayonnaise. Cappucino. Rabbit stew with dumplings, and pilsner. Sugared almonds.
Monday:
- Sandeman’s “free” general walking tour. Nice introduction to the city as a whole.
- Jewish Museum: actually a collection of synagogues, civic buildings, and a cemetery. I liked the Klausen Synagogue’s exhibitions best, but I thought the interior of the Spanish Synagogue was the most beautiful. (I later saw the outside of the Jerusalem Synagogue, which is the most impressive of all, but didn’t have a chance to go inside.)
- Don Giovanni puppet show. Also super touristy, but I found much more enjoyable. They mercifully cut out two acts, but it’s critical to either pony up for the program or at least read the Wikipedia synopsis right before, because there are no supertitles and so it’s pretty hard to follow otherwise. If you’ve got a vague clue, though, it’s very entertaining.
- Food highlights: Crepe with apricot, whole wheat croissant. Hot wine. Grog, Svíčková with dumplings. Trdelník (think hollow cinnamon donuts stacked on top of each other to make a chimney) filled with apple pie filling, vanilla custard, whipped cream, and caramel. Hot mead, duck confit with red wine cabbage and dumplings that were actually herbed.
Tuesday:
- Prague Castle. I got the audio tour and did this one pretty thoroughly, with Tour A (skipping the treasury, the picture gallery, and the cathedral tower). The cathedral is gorgeous, and I really enjoyed seeing the window from the Second Defenestration of Prague. I liked all the little rooms in Golden Lane. I wish I’d had a little more time in the Story of Prague Castle.
- Lunchtime concert at Lobkowicz Palace. The actual musicians were competent enough but uninspired, but I did enjoy hearing some Smetana and Dvořák (along with a bunch of other fairly predictable pieces) in a Baroque palace. Skipped the actual museum.
- Christmas markets tour. Lovely tiny walking tour (just two other guests) that included a bunch of information on Prague Christmas traditions, from when to get the tree, to how to get your carp, to people dressed as bishops terrorizing small children, postcards, ludicrous numbers of cookies, and how to get your children to spend all afternoon in their rooms while you set up said tree. Also hit a bunch of slightly-off-the-beaten-path points of interest.
- Met up with xannoside’s dad, who is Czech. (Or rather, is of Slovack descent but grew up in Prague.) Had a lovely long walk all over the place looking for a non-completely slammed place for dinner and hearing stories about coming of age in Communist Czechoslovakia. Ended up riding the metro up to his neighborhood, which was still pretty crowded but had fewer tourists.
- Food highlights: Bramboracky (potato pancakes – after frying them, they brush them with garlic oil. So much oil. The first two were delicious. The third was regrettable. I threw the fourth out.) Amazingly thick hot chocolate. Prague ham. Medovina (hot honey wine mixed with red wine and sugar). Punc (wine with fruit juice.) Beef goulash with more of the ever-present dumplings.
Wednesday:
- Hit several churches, plus the John Lennon wall and Kampa Island.
- Museum of Decorative Arts. Total rip off – turns out that they just finished renovating the building and haven’t actually moved any of the collections back in. This is in no way made clear. Instead, you find yourself in a building full of closed doors. Some of the doors open. Most of them are locked. Absolutely none of them have labels. There are no paper maps. If you accidentally wander into the hidden back area with the elevator, there is a map implying three floors of exhibit halls. If you try all the doors, only one floor actually has exhibits, and only part of it is open. There’s a special exhibit on ugly dresses. There’s a free special exhibit with a handful of glass sculptures. There’s one regular exhibit of mostly identical unadorned modernist glassware. That’s…it. But there’s no way to tell that without wandering in circles and repeatedly trying doors to see if they are or are not locked. It’s like being inside a really frustrating video game, one of the puzzle ones. Only you failed to pick up the secret key in the first level and so all subsequent levels are unplayable. This is one of the few things I went by the guidebook instead of checking Trip Adviser. Huge mistake.
- Food tour! I love food tours. We had so much food. Gingerbread/wedding cookie combo, vanilla crescent, nut roll with plum jam. Open faced sandwiches: potato salad with Prague ham and hard boiled egg drizzled in real mayo (not the tasteless stuff we get here), beet puree with goat cheese and candied walnut, celery root salad. Charcuterie: sausage, salami, ham, smoked beef, amazing pickles. Sauerkraut soup with chanterelles and venison sausage. Duck with potato dumplings rolled in crushed gingerbread and filled with cinnamon and cabbage. More svíčková. Apple strudel with vanilla custard. We ate the soup in a restaurant in the top of a bell tower, and the last course at a historic café. We also saw the tubs of live carp on random corners as people were getting ready for Christmas Eve lunch, with the fishmonger happily cleaning carp as long as my arm, bloody scales flying all over the sidewalk.
- Christmas concert in St. Nicholas Church. Absolutely lovely, much higher quality. Amazing acoustics. None of the churches are heated at all, but when I sat down, I discovered they’d put electric heating pads under the cushions on the pew. Also entertaining – the second violist scrambled up to the altar only at the second piece…and he was missing his bow tie.
- Other food: that was most of it. More hot wine. Late that night, I tried to find cake. Thing is, coffee and cake is an afternoon thing, and I kept being busy in the afternoons. So it’s really hard to find at night. I ended up with a mediocre chocolate pistachio cake but a really excellent hot chocolate. I had to eat the last three bites with a spoon. It was really more pudding than anything else.
Thursday:
- Day trip to Kutná Hora. Silver mining town that weirdly went through a tobacco growing phase a couple decades ago and so accidentally ended up with a UNESCO tobacco factory. More interesting is the ossuary, where they created amazingly beautiful but deeply weird decorations completely out of human bone. Also a really lovely church, and a silver mine the tour I was on no longer goes in because they had too many people get claustrophobic and freak out.
- It snowed like crazy all morning. Gorgeous.
- Food highlights: more sauerkraut soup, wild boar goulash with amazing gingerbread dumplings. Got my cake – medovnik (honey cake). More hot wine. Dark beer. Pork knuckle sandwich (much smaller than full pork knuckle, which really kind of needs two people to take down.) Bombardino, which is the Italian answer to eggnog and crazy delicious/powerful.
Also, Singapore Airlines is AMAZING.
So long story short – my company kinda messed up my vacation days in my favor, and I needed to burn a bunch in a hurry. My in-laws and ARR had been campaigning for him to visit them for a few days. But Chuckro couldn’t take an entire extra week off this time of year. So he suggested (since I like traveling more than he does anyway) that I just go somewhere that I wanted to go to that he was less interested in.
So. Prague at Christmas!
Amazingly gorgeous. Also, I ate all the food. All of it. There is no food left in Prague and no room left in my pants.
Highlights:
Sunday:
- Wandering around. Started in Mala Strana, where my hotel was. The Old Town is rather like Venice – amazing architecture, packed to the gills with tourists, kind of abandoned by the actual natives unless they’re trying to sell tourists things. Really delightful while being ever so slightly depressing.
- Mucha Museum. Small but charming museum of the Art Nouveau artist.
- Museum of Communism. Dense and text-heavy, but very interesting.
- Wandering into my first Christmas market in the dark with the lights all lit up as snowflakes were falling, and the air was filled with the scent of roasting sugared almonds and mulled wine. Basically about as Christmas-y as it’s possible to be.
- “Aspects of Alice” black light theater show. Kind of cheesy, but some clever illusions. Very touristy, but glad I did it.
- Ate: Sort of an inverted savory waffle wrapped into a cone and filled with hard boiled egg, avocado, tomato, and real mayonnaise. Cappucino. Rabbit stew with dumplings, and pilsner. Sugared almonds.
Monday:
- Sandeman’s “free” general walking tour. Nice introduction to the city as a whole.
- Jewish Museum: actually a collection of synagogues, civic buildings, and a cemetery. I liked the Klausen Synagogue’s exhibitions best, but I thought the interior of the Spanish Synagogue was the most beautiful. (I later saw the outside of the Jerusalem Synagogue, which is the most impressive of all, but didn’t have a chance to go inside.)
- Don Giovanni puppet show. Also super touristy, but I found much more enjoyable. They mercifully cut out two acts, but it’s critical to either pony up for the program or at least read the Wikipedia synopsis right before, because there are no supertitles and so it’s pretty hard to follow otherwise. If you’ve got a vague clue, though, it’s very entertaining.
- Food highlights: Crepe with apricot, whole wheat croissant. Hot wine. Grog, Svíčková with dumplings. Trdelník (think hollow cinnamon donuts stacked on top of each other to make a chimney) filled with apple pie filling, vanilla custard, whipped cream, and caramel. Hot mead, duck confit with red wine cabbage and dumplings that were actually herbed.
Tuesday:
- Prague Castle. I got the audio tour and did this one pretty thoroughly, with Tour A (skipping the treasury, the picture gallery, and the cathedral tower). The cathedral is gorgeous, and I really enjoyed seeing the window from the Second Defenestration of Prague. I liked all the little rooms in Golden Lane. I wish I’d had a little more time in the Story of Prague Castle.
- Lunchtime concert at Lobkowicz Palace. The actual musicians were competent enough but uninspired, but I did enjoy hearing some Smetana and Dvořák (along with a bunch of other fairly predictable pieces) in a Baroque palace. Skipped the actual museum.
- Christmas markets tour. Lovely tiny walking tour (just two other guests) that included a bunch of information on Prague Christmas traditions, from when to get the tree, to how to get your carp, to people dressed as bishops terrorizing small children, postcards, ludicrous numbers of cookies, and how to get your children to spend all afternoon in their rooms while you set up said tree. Also hit a bunch of slightly-off-the-beaten-path points of interest.
- Met up with xannoside’s dad, who is Czech. (Or rather, is of Slovack descent but grew up in Prague.) Had a lovely long walk all over the place looking for a non-completely slammed place for dinner and hearing stories about coming of age in Communist Czechoslovakia. Ended up riding the metro up to his neighborhood, which was still pretty crowded but had fewer tourists.
- Food highlights: Bramboracky (potato pancakes – after frying them, they brush them with garlic oil. So much oil. The first two were delicious. The third was regrettable. I threw the fourth out.) Amazingly thick hot chocolate. Prague ham. Medovina (hot honey wine mixed with red wine and sugar). Punc (wine with fruit juice.) Beef goulash with more of the ever-present dumplings.
Wednesday:
- Hit several churches, plus the John Lennon wall and Kampa Island.
- Museum of Decorative Arts. Total rip off – turns out that they just finished renovating the building and haven’t actually moved any of the collections back in. This is in no way made clear. Instead, you find yourself in a building full of closed doors. Some of the doors open. Most of them are locked. Absolutely none of them have labels. There are no paper maps. If you accidentally wander into the hidden back area with the elevator, there is a map implying three floors of exhibit halls. If you try all the doors, only one floor actually has exhibits, and only part of it is open. There’s a special exhibit on ugly dresses. There’s a free special exhibit with a handful of glass sculptures. There’s one regular exhibit of mostly identical unadorned modernist glassware. That’s…it. But there’s no way to tell that without wandering in circles and repeatedly trying doors to see if they are or are not locked. It’s like being inside a really frustrating video game, one of the puzzle ones. Only you failed to pick up the secret key in the first level and so all subsequent levels are unplayable. This is one of the few things I went by the guidebook instead of checking Trip Adviser. Huge mistake.
- Food tour! I love food tours. We had so much food. Gingerbread/wedding cookie combo, vanilla crescent, nut roll with plum jam. Open faced sandwiches: potato salad with Prague ham and hard boiled egg drizzled in real mayo (not the tasteless stuff we get here), beet puree with goat cheese and candied walnut, celery root salad. Charcuterie: sausage, salami, ham, smoked beef, amazing pickles. Sauerkraut soup with chanterelles and venison sausage. Duck with potato dumplings rolled in crushed gingerbread and filled with cinnamon and cabbage. More svíčková. Apple strudel with vanilla custard. We ate the soup in a restaurant in the top of a bell tower, and the last course at a historic café. We also saw the tubs of live carp on random corners as people were getting ready for Christmas Eve lunch, with the fishmonger happily cleaning carp as long as my arm, bloody scales flying all over the sidewalk.
- Christmas concert in St. Nicholas Church. Absolutely lovely, much higher quality. Amazing acoustics. None of the churches are heated at all, but when I sat down, I discovered they’d put electric heating pads under the cushions on the pew. Also entertaining – the second violist scrambled up to the altar only at the second piece…and he was missing his bow tie.
- Other food: that was most of it. More hot wine. Late that night, I tried to find cake. Thing is, coffee and cake is an afternoon thing, and I kept being busy in the afternoons. So it’s really hard to find at night. I ended up with a mediocre chocolate pistachio cake but a really excellent hot chocolate. I had to eat the last three bites with a spoon. It was really more pudding than anything else.
Thursday:
- Day trip to Kutná Hora. Silver mining town that weirdly went through a tobacco growing phase a couple decades ago and so accidentally ended up with a UNESCO tobacco factory. More interesting is the ossuary, where they created amazingly beautiful but deeply weird decorations completely out of human bone. Also a really lovely church, and a silver mine the tour I was on no longer goes in because they had too many people get claustrophobic and freak out.
- It snowed like crazy all morning. Gorgeous.
- Food highlights: more sauerkraut soup, wild boar goulash with amazing gingerbread dumplings. Got my cake – medovnik (honey cake). More hot wine. Dark beer. Pork knuckle sandwich (much smaller than full pork knuckle, which really kind of needs two people to take down.) Bombardino, which is the Italian answer to eggnog and crazy delicious/powerful.
Also, Singapore Airlines is AMAZING.