Rick Steves - Best of Eastern Europe: Prague

Everyone said we would love Prague - and we did once we stopped being lost!

Our train ride from Berlin to Prague was very nice - beautiful scenery along the Elbe River, reminiscent of the train ride from St.Paul to Winona along the Mississippi.  We shared our train car with an Indian couple from Scotland and a couple from the Czech Republic and the afternoon passed quickly with interesting conversation about travel, health care, life under communism , and assorted topics about family, parenthood and aging. These moments are the best part of travel, when strangers meet and instantly form connections - reinforcing my belief that people all over the world want the same thing - to just live as happily as possible.

Finding the hotel was a challenge!  We easily managed the Metro system but once we surfaced the confusing street names and layout completely baffled us.  After walking in the wrong direction (pulling our suitcases over the rough cobblestones) we finally were set in the right direction by a very helpful policeman.  After more wandering we made a call to the hotel for directions but were told to just ask someone on the street!  This is not very helpful advice when you are lost in a city of other equally lost tourists! Jim finally solved our problem by asking a very helpful young woman at a hotel we entered.  She delivered the best news we had heard all afternoon, "you are very close."

I did enjoy Prague but I think after being told the past few years by so many how beautiful the city is and how much fun it is to visit, my expectations were very high.  That said, we did love the red roofs viewed from many vistas, the great food and beer, the impressive buildings and squares, and the city's long and interesting history.  Our delightful guide "Katka" is from "Praha" and she is the "jewel in the crown" of this tour.  Born and raised in a small town about an hour from Prague she lived under communist rule until she was 14 and fascinated us with stories of that time as it effected her and her family. It was chilling to stand in Wenceslas Square  and recall those televised reports from 1969 when the Russian tanks rolled in and Czechoslovakia came under communist rule.  Wenceslas Square was also the place where over 300,000 Czechs gathered every evening in November, 1969 awaiting word that the freedom that had already come to Berliners would soon be theirs.

Jim and I visited the Museum of Communism in Prague which traces the story of communism in Czecholovakia from the beginning, including the promise, the reality and the Velvet Revolution when communism ended without bloodshed.   The exhibits depicting the austere life under the communists and a short video with interviews of people who lived through that time confirm what we believed about communism, growing up in the US..

As we visited the various countries Katka spoke frequently about communism and we learned that some people had a difficult time after the Iron Curtain was lifted.  Older people especially found security in having so much of life taken care of by the State - they had jobs they didn't have to work very hard at, health care and pensions.  Because life was bare and basic families spent a lot of time together; that was their entertainment and they relied on one another. There were no homeless people.   When all this disappeared many of them struggled with their new freedom.  Young people, on the other hand yearned for freedom and many of them left their homelands, to work and travel and experience life in ways they had never known.  There were "grades" of communism among the countries we visited - some had stricter leaders and suffered more oppression than others.


We saw many memorable sites in Prague but one of my favorites was a walk to the Strahov Monastery where we has a tasty lunch (cheese and meat board) and the best beer of the trip - a dark beer that was unexpectantly different from what we know as dark beer.

It was fitting that we ended our visit to Prague  with yet another fruitless search as we became lost and never found the famed Monastery Gardens!