Diary – The Travels of That Man, Matt

Prague – Day Three

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.

June 27, 2026

Prague – Day Two

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

June 26, 2026

Prague – Day One

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.

June 25, 2026

The Malls of Bangkok

The shopping mall. You know: that place where the lighting is a bit too bright, the escalators are broken, and there’s a “food court” piled high with teenagers and empty trays.

Bangkok’s malls are… not like that. If the Mall of Berlin is a medium ranking church of capitalism, then the Siam Paragon is the Dom in Köln, centralwOrld (yes, that’s how it’s written) is the Sagrada Família, and ICONSIAM (yes, again) is the Vatican.

These are places where the wealthy come to spend and the curious come to take pictures and snark.

Bangkok is home to two of the top ten largest malls in the world – Central World at number six, Icon Siam at number four. Along the Sukhumvit BTS line where I’m staying, there are six within a six-station distance, all conveniently connected to those stations so one doesn’t even have to touch the ground or barely suffer the humidity outside. Three of them are so close together that they almost merge into one; you never have to step foot outside.

Icon Siam

Icon Siam is the newest kid on the block, opened in 2018 and toppling Central World’s crown as the largest mall in Thailand. It has something like 525,000 sqm of retail space. For comparison, Manchester’s Trafford Centre – third largest in the UK – is about a third of the size.

It has its own BTS spur line connecting it to the rest of the metro system, called – unironically, one assumes – the Gold Line. It’s not the most graceful way to approach, being a glorified airport train, a bit jumpy and lumpy and slow.

BTS Gold Line train at Charoen Nakhon station.

One could also approach from the river by boat, or from the road in one’s Mercedes, but truly the only acceptable arrival is by helicopter to the adjacent Millennium Hilton.

Entering this cathedral is a mind-boggling experience. It’s not just big; it’s ambitiously, blatantly, conspicuously big. And while I essentially dislike the whole idea of twelve floors of luxury stores and Michelin restaurants and lifestyle retail all being thrown in my face… well, they certainly know how to make it work.

The first thing that I saw: a triple-level store with a name I have never heard of, selling… well, hard to say. Two enormous sculptures of semi-naked men (by enormous I mean: 10x10x3m), and at the other end of the store, this:

No, I don’t know either. Sunglasses, I think.

Of course, literally every luxury brand you can name is here, and there’s a curious thing: those same brands are in every other mall too. Luxury is not about exclusivity here.

So at first I was considering making this a half-hour thing, yeah yeah GucciLouisMcQueenDiorLagerfeldHermesYadaYada but… since I’ve come all this way, let’s have a wander about because there has to be more than that. And there is… of course all the usual suspects: Uniqlo, Muji, H&M, Zara, Nike, Adidas, Apple, even JD-fucking-Sports is here. Numerous food outlets selling fancy cakes and less fancy pastries (which I would not have been surprised if Greggs was written above the door). Also, cars: BMW, Mini, Volvo, BYD.

In between: just so. much. stuff. Like, housewares, but for no house such as I’ve ever been to. The kind of items you exactly expect to see being sold in a place like this, but never expect anyone to actually buy.

And restaurants. At least six are Michelin-something’d.

There are more floors: a cinema, a gym, a concert venue, a gallery space. Outside, wide vistas over the Chao Phraya river.

And they really nailed that mall escalators thing: never allow a simple route up or down. Once inside, patrons must be guided past every shop possible just to ascend or descend. (Also: make the lifts slow and inaccessible).

Escalators never where you expect them to be.

Overall, sure, I was impressed. It was a lot less awful than it could have been. And I didn’t spend a single Baht, so I guess I win.

But I might have to go back for this:

April 9, 2026

Bangkok, part 392

Yes, yes, I’ve skipped over the Laos part, I’ll get back to that at some point. TL:DR is that southern Laos is not as interesting as northern Laos, so I bounced back to Bangkok.

So what to do with an extra week here? Well, just explore, wander about, buy stupid stuff from the 7-Eleven at the end of the street.

Today I:

Had breakfast in a place where they played NTWICM Summer Hits 1997 (or similar)
Walked along a walking street (?)
Walked along a regrettable street
Took a boat along the river
Bought stupid stuff from the 7-Eleven at the end of the street.

The Ong Ang walking street is a bit strange. A couple of years ago I think they had a street festival here and wanted to promote the street sellers. But nothing much seems to have come of that. There is some street art, as promised, but it’s not the East Side Gallery (maybe that’s a good thing).

The regrettable street is the infamous Khao San Road. I thought I should see it, just once, and in the daytime it’s just a bit sad. Lots of people trying to sell food, beer, North Face gear, massages, and trips to other touristy places. Plenty of western tourists (heavily skewed to young lads) and by nighttime I am sure all the worse for it. There’s clearly a market for this; I am clearly not that market.

April 8, 2026

How did you get here?

When Little Simz asks this question, she ends up with a very different song to when Antony Szmierek asks this question. On balance, how I got to be where I am right now leans more to Antony’s go to work, then I did something stupid than Simz’s trust me, this music ting is my prophecy.

Apparently Louis Tomlinson also has a song with a similar title but I guess no one has ever heard it.

Anyhoo. The sequence of steps to how I got here is lengthily and thusly:

Need vacation, ideally around Eastertime to make best use of Jebus holidays.
Decide to tour the Baltic states, all the way up to the armpit of Finland-Sweden. (They probably don’t call it that).
Suffer through the worst Berlin winter since moving there a decade ago.
Decide I’ve had enough of cold, want warm.
Decide to bring forward the plan to visit Taiwan from 2027 to 2026.
Book flights on Etihad to Taipei via Abu Dhabi because I’m not made of direct-flight-on-two-months’-notice money.
Make all sorts of plans! Rent a motorbike! Meet Masto friends! Eat stinky tofu (maybe)!
Watch as a war breaks out in the Middle East.
Curse as the inevitable email arrives to tell me that flight segment Abu Dhabi to Taipei is cancelled.
Fume.
Research alternative ways to Taiwan.
Fume some more.
Go to work, then do something stupid.
Switch plans, book to Thailand via, uh, Dubai 🙈
- Masto friends: this is what I meant by rolling the dice 🎲🎲
Make all sorts of plans! Fly to Laos! Rent a motorbike! Ride Vientiane to Pakse via two or three excursion loops!
Watch as a continuing war in the Middle East causes fuel price shocks and shortages across the world, increasing the price of fuel in Laos by 50% in two weeks.
Cogitate.
Ruminate.
Have a complete crisis of confidence and consider bailing on the whole Laos thing.
Have a word with myself.
Rent the damn motorbike and figure stuff out on the way.

So. That’s how I got here, here being a little guesthouse in a village called Thongnamy (anglicised), somewhere due east of Vientiane.

March 30, 2026

Day 40: That’s All, Folks

I have returned. I’m on the S9 heading into Frankfurt. It’s 18:25 on my phone, but 01:25+1day in my head.

A380 was a dream. Quiet and smooth, even through the turbulence. And the landing was perfect.

Here’s a view, somewhere over Afghanistan (or nearby).

Thanks for coming with. I’ll update here with some extra pictures soon. But first: sleep.

February 28, 2025

Day 39: Botanical Beauty

Contrary to yesterday, today was a pretty good day. Had a decent breakfast (including warm pain au chocolat 😋).

After breakfast I took myself off to Singapore’s Botanic Gardens. The gardens are 166 years old, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Asia’s “top park attraction” (according to trip advisor).

Which makes it all the more satisfying that entrance to the majority of the gardens is free. You could spend several days here exploring all the different areas.

The one area that is chargeable is the National Orchid Garden. Even this is only S$15 (11€, £10), so less than half the price of the rubbish observation deck from yesterday.

And a million times more impressive.

Let’s Talk About Orchids

When I was in school, we were told that an orchid was a flower, singular, and so rare that because we’d never go to tropical South America, we would never see.

Orchids were described to us as some almost mythical plant that we’d only see in textbooks.

Bull. Shit.

Of course, as I grew older I realised that orchids were a broad species and found all over the world. But still, learning about the numbers, distribution, growing and propagating methods, and the sheer variety of them was eye-opening.

Did you know:

There are around 28,000 species of orchid.
There are a kind of herb.
Their seeds are microscopic, and don’t contain enough nutrients to germinate, requiring a symbiotic relationship with fungi to provide the necessary fuel.
Vanilla extract comes from Vanilla planifolia, a species of orchid native to Mexico, Central America, Colombia, and Brazil.

And so on and so on. I took so many pictures I’ll put them all in a separate gallery.

Really, I could have spent more hours here than I did, taking photos of hundreds of different varieties that I didn’t know the name of.

Dendrobium Memoria Princess Diana
(seriously)

However, a) my phone was dying in the heat (the chilly “Cool House” was a blessed relief) and b) I had to find stamps.

Singapore Post

Singapore’s national postal service has the most “1980’s C&A Skiwear” brand logo.

Since the MTR station was near a mall with a branch in it, I thought I’d try my luck with stamps there. They had a vending machine that had a couple of options and, seeing no other outlet, I tried it out.

Result: minus S$5.20 and plus zero stamps. The error message was in Chinese so after tapping every button on screen I gave up and went to the counter. “Oh yeah. You’ll need to ask for a refund via this website [points to QR code],” like this happens regularly.

“And we only print standard POS stamps here. You need to go to the GPO where they have a philatelic shop.”

Off I traipse. And the GPO shop is rather nice. You browse the stamps, choose what ones you want and quaintly write down the codes on a piece of paper like you’re in Argos, and then someone fetches them from a cupboard.

I rather went overboard so I hope I’m not fuelling my mother’s habit again. Maybe I’ll drip-feed them to her over a few months 😅

And That’s Almost It 😭

Tomorrow morning I head back to Changi T3. There I’ll board a Singapore Airlines Airbus A380, and I’m not ashamed to say that that aircraft is part of the reason I’m even in Singapore.

I figured that airlines were phasing out usage of the A380 and really only Emirates and SingAir were still committed to them. Seems there’s been a post-pandemic revival in fortune and some are being brought back into service by (e.g.) Lufthansa.

Anyhoo, here’s my chance to fly this super-big-boy plane. And with wifi, so my last post for this trip may be from 10km straight up.

February 27, 2025

Day 38: High-Lying, Nerd

By any rational measure, Singapore should be a near-ideal city/state for me:

Good, cheap public transport (including driverless underground trains where you can see right down the tunnel ahead).
Spotlessly clean streets and gardens.
Wide interplay of cultures and cuisines.
English as one of their official languages.

And yet. I’m missing something. Maybe I just had a bad day.

I went to a “recommended” cafe for breakfast that turned out to be a Starbucks-like chain, and where my reheated sandwich was still partly chilled.

I took a bus and underground to Chinatown expecting to see some evidence of its historic past, but found a tourist market and some (nice) artwork.

The abundant gold leaf in the Buddhist temple felt a bit excessive next to the pleas for donations.

Everything felt like it was a bit sanitised and tourist-friendly. Except then I decided (against my initial instinct) to do a tourist-favourite attraction, the so-called SkyPark perched on top of the Marina Bay Sands hotel towers.

Roughly, the deck at the 56th floor looks like this, a slightly curved sweep across the three towers of the hotel.

And for S$35 (25€, £21) you can visit, well, a tiny part of that deck, on the right-hand-side here:

All the rest of it is either for hotel guests only (like the infinity pool, fair enough) or for other access uses like a restaurant. You get to explore an area about 30×20 metres. It all feels like a bit of a con. I eked out twenty minutes up there, half of which was trying to shelter from the intermittent rain.

It left a bad taste in my mouth and a general ambivalence toward any of the other attractions in the area (all costing similar sums).

Hawker Redemption

It’s not all bad though, by any means. I had a late lunch at a hawker place near my hotel.

(“What’s a hawker place?” I hear you ask. Basically, a food market, like an indoor market in the UK but mostly with small, independent food outlets.)

I dutifully ordered my food, waited for it to be prepared and then went to pay with card.

Oops. Only QR or cash.

I don’t have cash (didn’t think it necessary here), and QR only works for locals.

“It’s OK,” says the guy. “Eat your food, then there’s a cash machine just over there. I can keep tabs on you because you’re so tall and also the only white guy around.”

There’s still a place for trust and honesty here 🙂

February 26, 2025

Day 37: Singapore Fling

After another early start I was ridiculously early to the airport in Siem Reap for a short flight to Singapore.

Relatively few people on the flight, maybe 40% full. Somehow I’d landed first row, 1F so was on and off ahead of the crowd.

Terminal 4 at Singapore’s Changi airport is designed for low-cost airlines but has the look of a modern, high-class terminal. Even something as mundane as the baggage retrieval conveyors are a nice place to be.

The other novelty on entering Singapore is that (having completed your pre-arrival information online) you can swan through an automated immigration gate, never having to be interrogated by border agents. The downside is that you don’t get a stamp in your passport.

The Jewel

A cursory glance at Changi airport’s website will quickly make obvious that it’s not just an airport, it’s a destination.

What this effectively means is that nestled between Terminals 1, 2 and 3 is a huge luxury shopping centre, and the centrepiece of the centre is the Rain Vortex. As “the world’s tallest indoor waterfall”, up to about 40,000 litres of water per minute fall from the glass ceiling to the basement level. It’s undeniably impressive, but not something I spent much more than 10 minutes gawking at.

What I actually found more compelling was the Forest Valley areas, where thousands of shrubs and trees climb terraces around the waterfall.

The rest of the affair is rather pedestrian, just a luxury mall wrapping the fancy waterfall and gardens, and a few pricey tourist attractions mainly aimed at kids.

The Hotel Indigo

Finding a half-decent, reasonably-priced hotel with a window is not easy in Singapore. Only through a clever combination of my employer’s corporate code and being an IHG member did I settle on the Hotel Indigo Singapore Katong. It’s really nice, and that membership thing got me a room upgrade, that looks out over the city from the floor-to-ceiling windows in the bathroom.

Gardens By The Bay

Another of Singapore’s top tourist attractions, I took a look in the evening after dinner. Again, there are paid attractions to visit, but wandering around is free and I was just in time for the twice a nightly “Garden Rhapsody” which was a medley of opera classics booming while the huge metal trees (designed as ventilation for other buildings) swim in LEDs. It’s ever so slightly on the wrong side of classy.

Still, there’s more to see there so I’ll try to get back in the daytime and have a proper mooch about.

February 25, 2025

Tag: Diary