A Europian favourite

by Klara Visnjic (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

Making a local connection Czech Republic

A Bavarian Eastern-European city which fulfilled all my fantasies about bars, beer, parks and food (read: pastries). This was my second time in Prague and, I don’t know if it was the company or the fact that we enjoyed it like locals, with the help of –almost a local- Martina, but it climbed the lift of my favourite cities fairly high. It is a huge city and the magic of it is that there are so many cool spots on every corner. This is why it’s better not to make a plan and go where the city takes you. And take the locals’ advice. It never fails. Our Airbnb was in Praha 2. We met Martina there on our first night and went to a nearby pub Beergeek and almost became ones ourselves looking at their extensive beer map. For our first breakfast, we had to go to a bakery because Slavs do it the best! After a coffee and first-class pastries, we met Martina in Vaclavske Namesti and roamed through Old Town eyeing up good restaurants and discussing what we want to do on the trip. “Vietnamese is the new black” in Prague so we gave this Vietnamese food chain a go – which was next to our go-to tram stop for the next few days: Narodni Trida. We stopped by the Franz Kafka rotating head and went in quite a few charity shops. The last one was a jackpot so now we walked around with bags overflowing with our iconic matching ski suits. I can’t believe I was questioning getting them – this was in my “I have too much crap to take” period. Then we found ourselves next to Narodni Divadlo (National Theatre) and followed the main road parallel to Vltava, and passed Martina’s Uni. We sat in a café right on the river bank overlooking the Castle fallen into a sunset and seagulls fighting for fish. And a gang of Chinese with selfie sticks. After the sun fall and a cigarette, we headed separate ways to get ready for a night out. DOGSBAR. This is one of the coolest bars I’ve ever been to! It seemed like a maze at first and had different music in every room. We stuck around a live Rock & Roll concert performed by a young guy singing, playing the guitar and the foot drum. He was crazy good! Best song performance: Seven Nations Army. We met a few of Martina’s friends: two Portugese to whom I expressed my love for Portugese people instantly and talked about my friend Nadia… There was no time to talk during the concert but after it we found a risen deck and talked about cats and dogs. I also remember going to buy three big beers for us and one for the singer but I dropped one of them and told him the sad story anyway. He didn’t find it as funny as I did. We were feeling r o u g h the next day and only left the apartment at 3PM. We walked to Vinohradska Park where they do a market day. Jac and I stopped at Cafefin and had Vietnamese spring rolls and pork belly rice dish, and a lovely maracuja lemonade. We met Martina and roamed the market where we found a Bosnian guy selling ćevapi and burek! This is another reason why I love Prague so much: it’s so culturally diverse but in the subtlest ways. You could be talking to a fellow national for hours before realising they are your national, which actually happened at Kenny’s once. After the sun went down and we still had no plan – we went home for a couple of drinks before hitting the town. We ended up in Hard Rock Café where a Harley Davidson meetup was happening with a cool band playing who played a Russkaja song and we might’ve been the only ones besides them who knew it. Day 4 was probably my favourite day…