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Destination: Prague

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Prague Trumps Rothenburg

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To commemorate the Smithsonian Presents Travels with Rick Steves magazine — now on sale online, and at newsstands nationwide — Rick is blogging about the 20 top destinations featured in that issue. One of those destinations is Prague, Czech Republic.

I’m currently on a Central European swing, updating my guidebooks: Budapest, Prague, Vienna, Munich. Being back in Prague reminds me of how that city first broke down the Iron Curtain in my guidebooks many years ago.

On a research trip back in the 1990s, I was on a train heading to Rothenburg to update the ultimate medieval town in Germany, as I did nearly every year. For a decade, I’d been diligently visiting to check the woodcarvings, walk the old wall, visit the toy museum and the medieval crime-and-punishment museum, and check in with old friends who run the hotels and restaurants that serve the town’s hordes of tourists. The work was almost mechanical. Socially, it was a happy homecoming. The ramparts and cute lanes were filled with my readers, who cheered me on. I loved going to Rothenburg.

This was just a couple of years after the end of the Cold War. The obvious new frontier of European tourism was the mysterious East. The former Warsaw Pact countries were now wide open and eager to welcome Western travelers. I knew that sooner or later, I’d tackle the region and expand my guidebook coverage there. But it was overwhelming, and, psychologically, it was easy to just keep redoing the Rothenburgs of Western Europe. I was daunted by the job — a bit lazy…dreading the unavoidable truth that if I was to cover Europe, I would now need to stretch east.

I was rattling down the tracks in the direction of Rothenburg, when I realized the very train I was on would end its run in Prague. I started comparing the value of spending the next three days in Rothenburg versus doing a groundbreaking research stint in Prague. I stayed on that train and didn’t get off until the Golden City of a Hundred Spires. I jumbled my itinerary a bit to accommodate the new job, and what followed was one of the most exciting and rewarding weeks of research I can remember. I left with Prague now in the realm of what we covered.

That first Prague chapter needed a home, and the only home we had for it was splicing it into our existing Germany, Austria & Switzerland guidebook. What was called “GAS” in my office would now be “GASP.” (Over the years, GASP became GAS, then GA…until finally there were separate guidebooks for each of the four destinations, including Prague.)

With the beautiful co-author partnership of Honza Vihan (our good friend and super guide from Prague), Prague joined the elite league of cities that merited their own Rick Steves guidebook (along with London, Paris, Venice, Florence, and Rome). Cameron Hewitt took this Czech nucleus and expanded into another five countries (which I termed the “Louisiana Purchase” of Europe) — Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, and Slovenia — co-authoring my Eastern Europe guidebook, and then two others (on Croatia & Slovenia and Budapest). Today Eastern Europe is fully integrated into our Europe-wide program, with four different guidebooks and six different bus tour itineraries.

And it all started in that year when Rothenburg went unresearched and a seed was planted in Prague.

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Cream and Dream in Prague

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Just between you and me, 25 years as a tour guide got me burned out on gelato. I remember as a kid swooning over “Italian Ice Cream” in Germany. And then I oversaw two decades of “it’s to die for” gelato appreciation. Now, as I’m rustling through Europe for four months out of five, I rarely succumb to the temptation to eat ice cream. (It’s a key element to my extremely simple weight-loss program over here.) Yesterday, I was just finishing up my visit to Prague Castle, which brags it’s the biggest anywhere. If exhausting is a measure of big, I’ll buy that claim. You go through the castle like a pinball — it’s all downhill, and everyone funnels out the lower gate.

An incredibly charming schoolboy was hawking Prague’s favorite ice cream. It’s called “Cream and Dream,” which almost makes me blush. Anyway, he lured me in for a taste. Banana was his favorite, so I tried it. I purchased a cone. It almost lived up to its name.

Across the way, I had to update the Barbie Doll Museum. It’s one of those museums that sounds silly, yet is actually great — a vast collection of all things Barbie, dating back to 1959, with social commentary. Looking at the buxom first edition, you can understand why these sirens of capitalist discontent that objectified women’s bodies weren’t allowed here until 1989. (I can’t resist a Nicaragua tangent: Like or loathe their economics, one of the great things about the Sandinistas was that they outlawed using women’s bodies as advertising tools.) I had to tour the Barbie Museum fast because they didn’t let in ice cream. I parked my guide at the stairwell, licking hers and protecting mine.

Barbie in the can and ice cream gone, our next stop was just across the castle lane — the Lobkowicz Palace. I’ve been 10 days now in Hungary and the Czech Republic. They both have a passion for charging admission to dreary palaces stripped bare by the communists and today offering little more than new stucco on high vaulted ceilings as a rack upon which to hang boring stories of local nobles from centuries past.

Just an hour earlier, I had hated the Rosenberg Palace, which is now included in the Prague Castle combo-ticket to make up for the fact that the Golden Lane is closed. I have never understood the appeal of the Golden Lane (even though it’s one of the “Thousand Places to See Before You Die”), and hoped this would be a net plus. It wasn’t.

The Lobkowicz Palace is a new addition to our guidebook; it just opened a couple of years ago, and I’d yet to visit it. As it was late and I was running out of steam fast, I was going to wimp out and just check the details at the ticket booth, but a banner outside claimed it was “Prague’s Best Palace to Visit.” Those kinds of claims generally make me want to disprove them — as they are generally misleading come-ons. So I rallied and got a ticket. It included an audioguide narrated by the count of the palace himself, William Lobkowicz. Audioguides like this one — in which noble heirs of palaces actually walk you through their grand halls and introduce you to great-great-grandpapa in musty old family portraits — are often wonderfully quirky and intimate.

The Lobkowicz audioguide was fabulous. I’m into these lately, with the work we’re doing on our own audio tours, and this one was lovingly designed and produced…and Mr. Lobkowicz had a perfect voice for the project. (Being a count has been outlawed now in the Czech Republic, so I need to bring him down to earth — “Mister” rather than “Count.”)

I was happy to be turned on by the Lobkowicz Palace. I appreciate that they include the audioguide in the visit, and that it brings the place to life and lets you get to know the family — which lost all their possession to the Nazis, got them back for three years after World War II, and then lost them all again to the communists. Now they are embracing the challenge of sharing their noble heritage with their country, and it’s a great gift to locals and foreign visitors alike.

Turning in the audioguide and ready to leave, I gave the clerk my card and told her to thank the count. She asked me if I’d like to meet him. Turns out he, his wife Sandra (a Romanian American he met at Boston College while in exile during the Cold War), and their key curator knew my work and were thrilled to be in the book. Like nobility all over 21st-century Europe, they are working hard to make their vast palaces economically viable as cultural attractions, and need the publicity guidebooks provide.

William and Sandra took me through the palace for a more intimate peek at things. We talked about post-Nazi restitution challenges and triumphs, and the fact that many nobles get a bad rap since the French Revolution. (“We’re just real people who own lots of big palaces.”)

Sitting down to coffee with the best view possible of Prague from their noble loggia, we brainstormed ways to get the palace more recognition. Suddenly a cute schoolboy joined the conversation. It was William junior… done selling ice cream for the day.

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Yellow Lampposts and Czech Flypaper

The honey-colored flypaper spirals down from a thumbtack, anchored in midair by its now-empty canister. Speckled with lifeless flies, it swings each time the violin bow pokes it.

It’s very tight quarters as the string quartet plays everything from Bach and Smetana to Czech folk favorites and 1930s anti-fascism blues. The string bass player grooves like a white Satchmo — his bow sliding in and out between diners under the table. My sweater is just in the way.

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The bandleader plays a 100-year-old black wood flute. During a break, I finger its mouthpiece — worn like an ancient marble relic by countless nights of music-making. The flautist sports a big bushy moustache just like the emperor — Franz Josef — who looks down from a yellowed poster.

Above the quartet is a high window. Teenage heads bob into sight — straining and craning on tiptoes to look in. Each time a song ends, beers giggle golden on rough wood tables as the roaring crowd claps and cheers for more. As the night wears on, there are fewer tourists clicking photos and more locals singing along. As the quartet sways together like seaweed in a nostalgic musical tide, it occurs to me that in little towns all over the world, no-name bands are causing strangers to smile…and drink more beer.

Crossing the Czech border, I stow my love of wine away, and become a beer-lover. Here, the beer hits your table like a glass of water does in the States. On my early trips — before I learned Czech beer is more powerful than the beer your father drank — I used to have a big beer at lunch and spend the rest of the day wobbly…sightseeing on what I called “Czech knees.” Now, when in the Czech Republic, I resist a momentum-killing beer at lunch and finish each day with a fresh draft beer (tonight’s is still trying to kill my momentum as I type).

Honza, the co-author of my Prague guidebook and my sidekick this week as we film a TV show on “The Czech Republic Beyond Prague,” told our camera, “These days, with the EU opening things up, so many Poles and Hungarians are going west to France and Germany to get jobs. But not the Czechs. We can’t find good enough beer anywhere but here. This beer keeps us glued to these bar chairs.”

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Back in my hotel, I climb to my attic room — careful not to bean myself on a medieval wooden beam. (I feel like I’m sleeping in a playground structure built before the age of steel piping.) I lean out my tiny dormer window, the sound of the boisterous bar small in the distance.

I am so happy for the freedom, peace, and prosperity countries like this are enjoying. The new, sturdy roof tiles around me are slick with a light rain. The street, wet and shiny, is as clean as a model-railroad town. Cars, while not expensive, are new and parked tidy as a jukebox. The scene is lit by cheap yellow lampposts. After forty bleak years of communism, the lampposts seem to be intentionally cheery…like a fashion accent decorating the line of pastel facades that arcs out of sight.

In small Czech towns, the facades are humble. Three centuries ago, each was given an individual personality — with far more variety and fun designed into them than even the famous gables of Amsterdam. And today — after a grime-filled 20th century — they sport new paint jobs: A mellow rainbow of simple solid pastels, with lines that accent the individuality of each facade. And behind each facade lives a family.