My first impression of Prague was when I saw the public piano in the train station entrance. It wasn’t a keyboard—it was a full-size upright piano, there for the general public to use. Someone was playing it beautifully as we left the station heading to our Airbnb.
I knew before we even arrived that we wouldn’t have enough time in Prague. We’d had to cut one of our three planned nights because of the train strike in Italy, and two nights is a shamefully tiny window to try cramming in a new city that’s been high on your travel list for years. But if you have to choose one time of year to get a sample serving of Prague, the Christmas season is definitely the right time.
Our Airbnb was cheap ($50 per night) and a short tram ride from the city center. Getting the key entailed going to a convenience store around the corner and asking the cashier for an envelope with my name on it, and then figuring out how to actually unlock the apartment building door took at least 10 minutes in a dark hallway. But once we finally got in, the apartment was lovely. I’d heard that the days of Prague being an affordable and off-the-beaten-path travel destination were over. And while it’s certainly not far off any beaten paths, I found it to be far more affordable than I assumed it would be. We got lunch at a brew pub near our apartment, and my assumption was that I’d reached a part of Europe where I would be very underwhelmed by the food. I envisioned menus of nothing but bratwurst, sauerkraut, and pretzels. But for lunch I got goulash, which was delicious, and I ended up eating consistently interesting and tasty meals throughout the Czech Republic, Germany, and Austria.
The medieval Old Town of Prague is a mismatch of Gothic architecture and vibrant colors that make it look like it could be the setting for a Disney film. It was as stunning as I hoped it would be. The iconic Astronomical Clock sits in the center of the Old Town Square, and a huge crowd gathers every night to watch the clock show. (The creepy little figures surrounding the clock move when the hour strikes. It’s an odd activity that’s worth doing once) The clock was first installed in 1410 and is currently the oldest clock still in operation.
The main Christmas market in Prague takes up the entire Old Town Square and smells like every scent you’ve ever associated with Christmas magnified tenfold. The square is surrounded by booth-after-booth of svařák (Prague’s version of mulled wine), grog (a rum, lemon, and sugar drink), hot chocolate, tredelnik (a cinnamon and dough pastry), and all manner of gingerbreads. Smoke rises from the booths as they fry potatoes or cook meat on skewers, and it makes the market look like a miniature neighborhood of cozy cottages with lit fireplaces. Horses pull carriages over the cobbled streets between the booths. A group was singing carols on a corner stage. There were more food booths than there were arts and crafts, and you could spend weeks trying all the treats and then passing out from excessive sugar intake. We wandered the booths until our fingers went numb.
It was the last day of November which felt like an official mark of winter and Christmas time. It was also the last day of NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month—the writing challenge that I’d spent the month working on. I spent that night writing the last 1,000 words to reach my goal of 50,000 in a month—a goal I’d had since I was about 14. I’ve written a book manuscript before, much longer than 50,000 words, but that was a task I completed over a couple of years with deadlines and workshops and classrooms full of peer-feedback. In a way this felt more significant because it was only for me.
We celebrated me successfully completing the challenge and the first day of December with a feast. I found the restaurant with the best reviews in town (that was affordable), and I ate duck with red cabbage, a spiced cranberry sauce, and potato dumplings while my mom ate goulash in a bread bowl. It tasted like Christmas and decadence. We waddled our way up the hill to the castle—the largest castle in the world according to the Guinness Book of Records. It’s less a castle in the traditional sense and more a giant complex. Inside the castle grounds, we found another Christmas market, full of metal workers and a nativity scene for photo ops. In the center of the castle stands St. Vitus Cathedral, an astonishing Gothic masterpiece with perhaps the most beautiful stained glass I’ve seen outside of Paris’s Sainte-Chappelle. St. Wenceslas is buried there. Yes, St. Wenceslas, like in the Christmas song. He was real! He was a 10th century Duke in Bohemia who was known for building churches and helping the poor, widows, and orphans, and he was posthumously made a king and saint. (No, I had no idea that he lived here or was even a real person before visiting.)
On the way back down the hill, we stopped to shop in craft shops, boutiques, bookstores, a store entirely devoted to gingerbread cookies, and yet another small Christmas market nestled in a park. It was dark by the time we reached the Charles Bridge, and the statues on either side of it stood guard as we crossed back into Old Town. We had just enough time to squeeze in a visit to the Klementinum Library, often considered one of the most beautiful libraries in the world. It was opened in 1722 and looks too perfect to step foot in. It probably looks this way because, in fact, you can’t step foot in it. You can only visit with a tour, and the tour only allows you to gaze at the library from the entryway behind a rope barricade. But I did sneak a photo that I’m not sure was allowed.
After another tour around the Christmas market and the astronomical clock show, my mom headed back to our room while I joined a late-night ghost tour. Even Christmas cheer couldn’t stop me from doing a ghost tour in Bohemia, home of golems and Kafka. Our guide was charismatic and convincing, and it was easily one of the best ghost tours I’ve ever done. I had to return to the light of the market and Christmas cheer after my journey to the spooky shadows. And then because all of the restaurants had closed by the time I headed back to the apartment, I spent the evening eating my body weight in gingerbread and potato chips.
Sometimes I hear travelers say that you may as well not visit a city if you only plan to visit for one or two nights, and if you can’t give a city the time it deserves, you’d be better off consolidating your time in one location instead. During my mom’s visit, we moved faster than I’d moved at any other point in my trip, and I don’t feel like we gave ANY place we visited the full number of days they deserved. But it was a deliberate choice. It was my mom’s first time in Europe, and she doesn’t have the kind of lifestyle where she could assume that she’d be making casual, annual trips back again. I wanted her to get to see as much as possible in the limited time we had. And while I’m a big proponent of slow travel, I also think that if you have to choose between going to Prague for just two nights or not going at all, you should always choose to go to Prague and eat all the gingerbread in sight.
