Prague! Now You Know Where It Is

Do you have any idea how many people have no idea where Prague is? Guesses included: Russia, Germany, and the Ukraine. All wrong, the correct answer is the Czech Republic, but thank you for playing (and no, it is no longer Czechoslovakia). I remember the days of having to leave hand written directions of a friend's house where I was staying; now people are just guessing at which country I might be in.

So, I loved my stay in Prague. It is beautiful, with so much to see and...buy. It's another one of these giant tourist places with kitschy little shops lining the streets, but there is still plenty to see beyond that. It took me a day to realize that I can understand about a third of the Czech language. Czech and Russian apparently share the same roots and so my Russian helped me out a lot in trying to decipher signs. For some reason I didn't think of that before going there, so at first it felt like I had super powers or something : ) Like this wide-eyed Matrix-esque "I know kung fu" moment.

Prague had everything I like. Scores of multilingual people, every other store selling chessboards and matryoshka dolls (russian nesting dolls), and last but not least: KAFKA. That's right, Kafka grew up in Prague. The highlight of the trip for me was going to the Kafka museum. I loved how they tried to make it a completely immersive and surreal experience for the visitors.
It was quite cold the entire time we were there, so we darted into restaurants and cafes to keep warm. I did an amateur survey of apple pie and coffee from various places in Prague. I also tried a few traditional dishes, which were often similar or identical to German ones. My first day there I had venison in a sweet brown sauce with half a pear filled with pomegranate seeds. It was served with croquettes (fried potato fingers pretty much). It was tasty and strange, but I liked it. My favorite is still duck with Knoedel and red cabbage, though (also in Germany).

The above picture is me standing in front of a tiny house where Kafka once lived for only about a year. He wrote "A Country Doctor" there (one of his short stories) and now it's a tiny store that sells many copies of that story. It's on this teeny tiny little street called the Golden Lane with similar miniature, colorful houses. If my hair looks strange in these, it's because it was really windy and we spent most of the day outside walking around. I have about 100 pictures, so obviously I can't even begin to give the highlights here, but I'll just end this post with a neat shot I got of Prague from high up: