My final day in Prague ran until my train home at 16:30. What to do?

Not the Old Town – nice to look at, overrun with tourists / stag do’s / hen parties.

The National Museum kept being recommended and since it was likely temperature controlled – this being anew the hottest day of the year – I took a short metro journey to Muzeum station, and popped up at the entrance to the New Building rather than the Historical Building. I think this accident of geolocation actually worked in my favour.

New Building

Highlight of the New Building is its permanent exhibition History of the 20th Century. Of course, this is presented with a focus on the Czech / Czechoslovakian viewpoint. As the webpage describes, there is an engaging – dare I say immersive – entrance to this exhibition, the Time Elevator. It’s a circular room, with a 360º projection above your head. The “elevator doors” close, and with a literal rumble – the floor actually shakes – you begin to “rise” through time, the projection around you constantly shifting from event to event from the early 1900s to the 2000s.

Following that, a wide-ranging series of artefacts are presented in the rest of the space. The Hall of Busts displays historical Czech figures across the 20th century, a walk through a series of apartments furnished in the styles of the times (the 1990s office was reminiscent of my home setup, replete with bulky CRT monitor and dial-up modem), plus some album covers and posters detailing quite why the 1980s were both awful and amazing.

Down a couple of floors and to a temporary exhibition Františka Plamínková and Us. Unsurprisingly I knew nothing about Františka, but she was, by this account, a prominent campaigner and advocate for women’s rights in Czechoslovakia, before her murder in a WWII concentration camp.

This quote stood out to me, especially given the [gestures hands wildly] state of the world today:

“Certain ways and means are forbidden to a Democrat, ways and means to control others without their consent, ways and means that they would never tolerate for themselves.”

–– Františka Plamínkova to the Czechoslovakian Senate, 1935

Skipping over the Children’s Museum floor, for I am only sometimes a child, the route to the Historical Museum takes you through an underground passageway. Since I was doing the whole tour the “wrong way around”, it was not immediately obvious what I was seeing.

On both sides of the passageway, projectors display a continuous sequence of images, either formed from individual photographs that merge into a panorama, or cleverly crafted animations forming another journey from the origins of the universe to the present day of Prague. It’s a truly impressive way to make use of what would perhaps otherwise be a dull corridor with some paintings hung on the wall. Some images in the gallery below.

Historical Museum

This part is much more the “traditional museum” style: many permanent exhibitions and detailed research into historical themes.

I’ll be honest: I was experiencing museum burnout by now – I can’t last more than an hour or so in a museum – so I only briefly looked through the exhibitions. They are mostly what you would expect: natural history features heavily, and deep dives into theological and nobility studies.

The atrium and cupola are spectacular though, even if my bugbear of people making themselves the subject of photos was in full view.

Nevertheless, I was happy to experience it, and my routing via the New Building first was actually better for me.

Summing it all up

I really enjoyed Prague as a city, as a destination. Despite the heat, I and my travelling partners explored quite a bit. The transport network is extensive, mostly based on street trams, alongside buses and the metro. (A word of caution: those Tatra T3 trams with their huge glass windows and no air-conditioning are not designed for hot days… but rare are air-con trams in Prague at all).

Apart from the accommodation, the city is reasonably affordable – meals, drinks and entrance fees are all reasonable.

My top tip: head out across the river away from the Old Town, into Prague 7. It’s more diverse, less touristy, and has great food options – some with added cats.

Admittedly, spending what was – at that point – the hottest day of the year in Prague walking up a hill to the castle perched high above the city was a bold move. Still, when time is limited, that’s what we did.

Prague Castle

The path up is steep, and doesn’t reveal its destination until you are through the first gate and on a bit further. Consisting of the castle, St George’s Basilica and Cathedral of Saint Vitus, this is a an impressive collection of buildings, with the cathedral a third development of an original church founded in 930CE.

Hot and bothered as we already were (by 10:30am), we skipped the views inside (no doubt I missed the best part), but the queues were long and slow-moving. Ice cream instead 🍦

Heading back down, we took a different route which lead to the Waldstein / Wallenstein Garden, the Parliament buildings and the curious artificial stalactite wall, home to hidden silhouettes of animals such as frogs and snakes or grimacing faces.

Kunsthalle and DOX Centre

Opting for locations with air conditioning, after the castle we headed to the nearby Kunsthalle. With exhibitions spreading over three floors, we explored Mark Dion’s Cabinet of Electrical Curiosities, Memory of Touch: Chapter I and William Kentridge’s The Battle Between YES and NO.

Of those last two, I found the former more accessible, but certainly aspects of Kentridge’s work (YouTube link) are approachable for us non-artists.

Then over to the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art. Here was more challenging for me: a three-storey exhibition by Radka Bodzewicz on the story of Faust was pleasing, if you are familiar with the intricacies of the writing. Hit by News, Press Art from the Nobel Collection detailed how access to and truthfulness in writing was forever changed by the introduction of mass printing and newspapers.

Least meaningful, to me, Jiří Petrbok: Patient Diary, a focus on self-portraiture, could be seen as the expression of a madman in places. It didn’t resonate with me.

More images

Prague? On a Thursday?

Yes. I’m here to meet up with some friends of mine from the UK who are on a motorbiking tour to Czechia and back. Of course they have spent most of the day on the road whereas I spent about four hours on a train from Berlin.

The ComfortJet, operated by České Dráhy as “the Berliner” starts in Köbenhavn via Hamburg and Berlin, to Praha Hbf. It’s all practically brand-new trainset, very comfortable in first class. Despite a delay that DB claimed was “in another country” (actually the stretch from Hamburg to Berlin), the journey was smooth, and the scenery very nice to the east as we travelled south.

Having never been to Prague I expected hoards of stag do’s and hen parties, and I’ve definitely seen some groups that would qualify. Remains to be seen how we can avoid them, given we’re a group of 40+ yo men, but literally not here for that kind of schizzle.

More to come, let’s see how the evening pans out, especially since it’s still 33° at 17:30.