Prague 11/29/07: Arriving

We found a Prague holiday $549 package which included airfare and 6 nights of hotel from Go-Today.com. We've gone to Paris on a package deal through that agency and had a blast. With this blog I hope to provide tips to people who want to bike in Prague, as well as to show some pretty photos.

We arrived at 11 a.m., took the #119 bus from the airport to the metro and arrived at Hotel Juno, about 5 miles east of the city center. Our neighborhood, Strasnicka, was quiet and predominantly Soviet-era architecture, which looked like American 60's-style architecture to me. The people seemed to all be elderly and walking little dogs. It seemed like a peaceful and safe neighborhood, if unremarkable. There was a BILLA Supermarket near us, which is good for budget travelers. It's always fun to try unfamiliar foods, especially the little cups of dessert items.

The hotel had a pretty, traditional lobby with carved dark wood and chandeliers, in contrast to its concrete high-rise exterior. The web reviews had been pretty lousy, so we were pleasantly surprised to find the most spacious room we'd ever had in a budget hotel. Plenty of closet space, two little bathrooms (not really TWO bathrooms, but all the Czech bathrooms were inefficiently split into separate rooms for toilet and sink/shower-- makes it seem kind of luxurious), high ceilings, wonderfully crisp duvets and thin, scratchy white towels (120-grit, Ulandt the Carpenter said). Our big 6th-floor picture window gave us a view of this:

We spent 30 minutes assembling our Bike Fridays and hit the road with a vague map of Prague's meagre bike paths. It is always a little scary biking in a new foreign city, so I stuck to the sidewalk for the most part. It was very hilly getting into town. We stopped at the first touristy thing we ran into, which was the ugly modern TV Tower, which has giant bronze babies crawling up it.

The light was fading fast, and we went up to the observation deck, which helped Ulandt get his bearings. He amazes me with his ability to navigate in new places. A few floors down, the restaurant was surprisingly cheap and hearty-- meats in cream sauces. If you present your ticket to the observation deck, they give you a 5% discount, which we didn't know until we went home. We were freezing by then. There had been a little snow on the ground, and the observation floor is not heated. Also, bad pop music on a tinny sound system didn't enhance the view. The ride home on Ruuska Street was scary, with lots of traffic and a fast downhill, with lots of parked cars threatening to "door" me at any minute. I don't recommend that road for biking.