Prague
July–August 2017
I got off the bus and found a taxi at the station. I showed the driver a piece of paper with the address of my Airbnb — northwest side of the river, up the hill from the Vltava, near Park Charlotty G. Masarykové. Thirty dollars a night. He nodded without looking at it for more than a second, like he already knew where I was going, like the city had already decided for me.
We drove through streets that felt older than anything I’d ever known. Not preserved — inhabited. Laundry in windows. Graffiti layered over centuries-old plaster. People moving through it all like it was normal.
I put my luggage in the room — bare bones, clean, a window that opened just enough to let in the sound of the street — and headed out for coffee.
Prague has great káva. Not just the coffee itself, but the way it’s taken. Slow. Intentional. I ordered in broken phrases and gestures, and the barista met me halfway with a smile that said, we’ll figure it out. I sat with the cup longer than I needed to, letting the bitterness settle into something warmer.
I thought about the week behind me in Wrocław. I thought about the month ahead. No strict plan — just a loose constellation of places, and the willingness to follow whatever pulled.
The City Museum of Prague was a smart early visit — it gave me the history I needed to read the streets properly. They had a wooden miniature of the entire city, painstakingly detailed, and I stood over it like a giant trying to memorize the map from above before walking it from below.
I headed down into the old city just to walk and see the center. It was about a forty-five-minute walk downhill, south across the Vltava, through Letná Park — a route I’d take every day for the next month.
At first it was just a path. Then it became a ritual.
Morning light filtering through chestnut trees. Joggers who began to recognize me. An older man who fed pigeons from a paper bag and nodded every time I passed, like we were part of the same quiet agreement. The city opening itself slowly below — red roofs, spires, the river cutting through it all like a line of ink.
I searched for coffee shops and restaurants and galleries along the way, mapping the city with my feet before I mapped it with intent. Sometimes I’d detour just because something looked interesting — a stairway, a doorway, a sign I couldn’t read but wanted to understand.
The Astronomical Clock wasn’t on the hour when I arrived, but I wanted to see it anyway — the mechanism at rest, the painted panels, the apostles waiting behind their doors like actors backstage.
I sat in Old Town Square and looked at the Jan Hus Memorial for a long time.
A street musician nearby played something slow and minor on a violin. A group of tourists passed through, loud and brief, like weather. A kid chased pigeons. Life moved around the monument the way water moves around a stone.
I remembered reading about Hus in church history class — the Bohemian reformer burned at the stake a century before Luther. I knew about his Bohemian roots. I knew about my Bohemian roots. But sitting there, the connection felt different. Less academic. More embodied.
I never expected to see this statue when I was sitting in a classroom in Green Bay.
Now I was here. In his city. With his country in my name.
I sat and listened to street performers while drinking a pilsner. Nearly all the beer here is Pilsner Urquell, poured with a kind of reverence I hadn’t seen before — foam thick and intentional, the bartender correcting the pour if it wasn’t right.
I set myself a goal: collect a coaster from most pubs I stopped at.
The bartenders started to notice. One asked me, in halting English, “Why?”
I didn’t have a great answer. Something about memory. Something about proof I’d been there. He laughed and gave me two.
It was already evening, so I wandered the streets around the main square, scoping out locations for tomorrow. Narrow lanes, golden light on the facades, the sound of footsteps on cobblestone echoing off five centuries of architecture. I was already in love with this city.
The National Marionette Theatre was my first real visit the next morning. I arrived early and waited in a kavárna around the corner, sketchbook open.
A woman at the next table leaned over to see what I was drawing. She pointed to the puppet sketch and said, “Czech tradition.” Then, after a pause, “But also strange.” She smiled like that contradiction mattered.
When the museum opened, we handled the puppets — solid wood, rod-style marionettes, three feet tall, hand-carved by masters in what is an increasingly narrow trade. They demanded attention. Precision. Respect.
One of the guides, an older man with hands that looked like they’d carved wood for decades, adjusted my grip slightly and said, “They teach you how to hold them.”
That stuck.
There was an art gallery attached, with puppet-inspired artwork and production posters spanning decades — bold graphic work, the kind of design that treats theater as a visual art first. I had tickets to come back that evening for their production of Don Giovanni, performed in the original Italian, which has been running at that theater since 1787. The puppets performed Mozart. I sat in the dark and watched wooden figures enact an opera that was older than the country I came from, and I understood something about continuity — how a tradition survives not by being preserved in glass but by being performed, night after night, for two hundred and thirty years.
The Jewish Quarter was different. Heavier.
I paid for the full tour — all the buildings, the synagogues, the museum — because this was something I’d been wanting to see since reading about it in a high school history book. The weight of the place was immediate.
I fell for the gimmicky Golem merchandise in the gift shops and knew I’d come back to buy more. I had more money than during the Florence period, and things in Prague were cheap. But the merchandise was the surface. The substance was underneath.
In the Old Jewish Cemetery, the space compressed time into something almost physical. Centuries of the dead stacked and tilted and layered twelve deep — compressed into a space no bigger than a city block because they weren’t allowed to be buried anywhere else. Stones leaning into each other like a crowd that never dispersed.
A local guide, speaking softly to a small group nearby, said something that carried over: “This is not a place of spectacle. It is a place of endurance.”
I didn’t take photos. I didn’t place a stone. I just sat.
Sometimes the most respectful thing you can do in a sacred place is to not insert yourself into it.
The artifacts in the museum took the rest of the day. The collection was expansive — tracing the full span of Jewish life in Prague, from the medieval community through the Holocaust and beyond. Silver Torah crowns. Embroidered textiles. Documents. The synagogue tour included the story of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel — the Maharal of Prague, the mystic who, according to legend, shaped a figure from river clay and breathed life into it to protect his people. The Golem. I ate up every word. A story about a maker who built something to defend the overlooked — it resonated with me in ways the guide probably didn’t intend.
I walked back up through Letná Park that evening with my head full of puppets and golems and gravestones, the city settling into dusk below me, and thought: I could stay here much longer than a month.
A rhythm formed.
Morning: walk through Letná. Midday: café, gallery, wandering. Evening: beer, music, walking without direction.
I started recognizing people — the same barista who began my order before I spoke, a bookseller who recommended a Czech edition of Kafka I couldn’t read but bought anyway, a bartender who started setting aside coasters for me.
I wasn’t a local, but I wasn’t entirely a stranger anymore either.
So many cafés, each with their own charm. Same with pubs. I felt like I was drinking my way across the city, burning the calories and sweating with all the hill climbs. Coffee became a measure of time. Rain became a kind of companion.
Before sunrise one morning, I crossed Charles Bridge.
The statues were silhouettes. The city hadn’t fully woken yet. A photographer nodded to me like we were part of the same quiet conspiracy.
Halfway across, I stopped.
No phones. No noise. Just the river moving beneath me.
That moment felt unclaimed. Like it belonged to whoever bothered to show up for it.
I climbed toward Prague Castle, though “castle” feels too small for what it is. It unfolds in layers — each courtyard opening into another, like a thought deepening. Inside St. Vitus Cathedral, I sat and watched light move across stone. It felt less like illumination and more like a kind of breathing. The stained glass turned the air into color. The Castle Picture Gallery held Titians and Rubenses — the old masters hanging in rooms that felt like they’d been waiting for me to find them. Golden Lane was a row of tiny houses built into the castle wall, each door an entry into a different story. I started paying attention to thresholds — how a doorway changes what you expect on the other side.
I wandered into Malá Strana, where the streets narrow and something in me slowed with them. Inside St. Nicholas Church, I leaned back and let the painted ceiling hold my gaze. It felt like looking into a sky that remembers being human. The Baroque excess of it should have felt overwrought, but it didn’t. It felt like devotion made visible.
I walked up Petřín Hill instead of riding the funicular — I wanted to earn the view. Past the mirror maze, through the rose garden, up to where the city flattened into a map below me. I stopped thinking in street names. I started thinking in shapes — spires, slopes, the bend of the river. The hill reset my scale. From up there, everything I’d been walking through for days became pattern and proportion.
Kafka has been one of my favorite authors for a long time. I tried to walk in his shoes. Golden Lane house number 22, where he wrote. The House at the Minute on Old Town Square, where he was born. His Pařížská apartment. I sat in his cafés — Café Louvre, Café Arco, Café Slavia — and tried to imagine him there, hunched over a notebook, writing sentences that made the world feel slightly tilted. The Kafka Museum was uneasy and dreamlike inside, which was exactly right. Outside, the Rotating Head of Kafka — David Černý’s mechanical sculpture of mirrored panels shifting and realigning — captured something about the man that a bronze statue never could. He was always in motion, always reconfiguring.
I made two separate trips to the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art. It was that good. The kind of museum where every room challenges the last one, and you leave thinking differently than when you walked in.
But probably my absolute favorite art in Prague — maybe on the entire trip — was at the Waldstein Riding School. František Skála.
The room was large, almost echoing, but his work filled it without crowding it. Driftwood, bones, found objects — things that had lived another life before becoming art.
A man standing near one of the pieces, arms crossed, studying it the way you study something you don’t fully understand yet. We ended up talking. He told me Skála was part of a tradition of Czech artists who didn’t separate craft from imagination. That the materials mattered as much as the form. That humor and reverence could coexist.
“He doesn’t impose meaning,” the man said. “He lets it emerge.”
I stayed for hours. At some point I stopped looking at individual pieces and started feeling the logic of the whole space. It felt familiar — like something I’d been circling in my own work without naming it. The bricolage. The reverence for humble materials. The refusal to separate wonder from craft. Here was someone who’d found it.
I hoped to run into Jan Švankmajer somewhere in the city — the animator, the surrealist, the man who made puppets and clay and meat into nightmares and poetry. He lived in Prague. I never did find him. But his spirit was in the walls.
One afternoon in Letná Park, I stumbled into a performance.
No stage. No announcement.
Just figures emerging through the crowd — stilts, masks, layered costumes that felt like they belonged to another century. They moved slowly, deliberately, interacting with people in ways that blurred performer and audience.
A kid reached out and touched one of them, then pulled back, unsure if it was allowed.
I sketched as fast as I could.
This was it. Not just puppets — but living puppetry. Not objects on strings — but people becoming the objects.
I walked to Vyšehrad, where the city felt less observed and more itself. The fortress sits above the river on a bluff, older and quieter and more mythic than the tourist center. I sat along the walls and watched the Vltava bend away to the south. The cemetery there held the graves of Dvořák, Mucha, Smetana — the people who’d made Czech culture what it was, all resting in the same hillside.
The Dancing House surprised me — its movement frozen in architecture. Gehry and Milunić had built a building that looked like two people mid-waltz. It reminded me that this city was not only old. It was still becoming.
I found Nový Svět — a tiny, almost secret street near the castle, cobblestone and quiet, where the houses looked like they’d been there since alchemy was a science. Which led me to Speculum Alchemiae, a hidden laboratory beneath the city — vaulted stone chambers, alembics and retorts, tunnels running toward the castle. Whether it was genuine or reconstructed didn’t matter. The space itself felt like a secret the city had been keeping.
The Strahov Library was one of the most beautiful rooms I’d ever stood in. Two baroque halls — the Theological Hall and the Philosophical Hall — with frescoed ceilings and floor-to-ceiling books and the particular hush that only exists in rooms built to hold knowledge. I thought about all the information in those spines, all the arguments and discoveries and dead ends, preserved in leather and gilt, and felt the same vertigo I’d felt looking at the cemetery. Deep time, just stored differently.
I found places that weren’t on any list.
A tiny gallery tucked behind a courtyard where an artist was installing work while I stood there, asking me what I thought. A basement bar where a three-piece band played experimental jazz to ten people who listened like it mattered. A narrow alley where someone had strung lights overhead and turned it into a temporary performance space for one night.
None of it was advertised. You had to be there.
Vrtba Garden was hidden behind a wall in Malá Strana — a baroque garden climbing a hillside in terraces, with statues and balustrades and a view of the city that felt stolen. Břevnov Monastery sat outside the tourist flow, quiet and functioning, monks still living the pattern they’d been living for a thousand years. Divoká Šárka, on the city’s edge, was a wild nature reserve — almost mythic, a forested gorge with rock walls and trails that felt more like the Driftless than Central Europe. I walked it barefoot in places, the way I walk trails when I want to feel the ground tell me where I am.
Olšany Cemetery was vast and haunting and nearly empty of visitors. I wandered for hours.
At Wallenstein Garden, I found the dripstone wall. Artificial, but pretending not to be. Faces emerging from stone if you looked long enough. I stood there longer than I meant to, letting my eyes adjust until patterns became forms.
A man nearby said, half to himself, “You see it too?”
I nodded.
The Devil’s Stream ran behind Kampa Island, turning an old water mill, shadows playing on the surface. I found a cubist staircase — architecture breaking its own rules, geometry refusing to behave. I ate chocolate golems from the Jewish Quarter shops and felt no guilt about it.
I found markets along the river — bread, fruit, small exchanges that felt grounded and real. I attended a concert in a church, and the sound rose upward as if it had somewhere to go. I sat inside the music, not just listening but being rearranged by it.
At night, the city shifted. Light pooled on cobblestones. Shadows stretched. I walked without direction, and it felt like the city was guiding me rather than the other way around.
By the third week I stopped checking maps.
I had a bakery I returned to. A bench that felt like mine. A route that formed naturally under my feet.
I noticed small things: how doors close differently in old cities, how footsteps echo on stone versus wood, how the copper rooftops age into green the way a patina ages into character. The trams hummed past me, and I began to feel like I was inside a system I didn’t need to control.
I started recognizing the city’s rhythms — the morning delivery trucks, the afternoon lull, the way the light changed on the Vltava between four and five o’clock. I wasn’t a local. But I wasn’t entirely a stranger anymore either.
On my final morning, I returned to Charles Bridge before sunrise.
Same statues. Same river.
Different person.
I didn’t spend a month in Prague.
I spent a month being slowly translated by it — from tourist to inhabitant, from observer to participant, from someone looking at a city to someone the city had looked back at and, in its quiet way, rearranged.