Prague 11/30/07: Making Our Way To Prague Castle

Hotel Juno's breakfast was an all-you-can-eat processed-food fest. Lots of questionable ham salad, potato salad, cabbage, shredded carrots, soggy dumplings, dry cakes, yogurt, granola, fruit, coffee with hot milk (yum), cheese and cold cuts. We always eat as much as possible in these situations, and the first morning I was delighted because we'd expected continental breakfast only. But by the last day of our stay, I was heartily sick of the plentiful-but-gross food. Bad pop music and the dead animal heads on the walls didn't help. Wooden rafters and paintings of saints on the walls, possibly reclaimed from a deconsecrated church, were interesting.

Today's mission was to find a good bike route into the historic center of town. We used the vague bike map from the Prague biking website. The map has no labeled streets! It's just an aerial map with lines on it.

With much futzing around, we found our way to this park on a high hill with a huge monument on it.

We had a hell of a time finding out how to get across railroad tracks that obstructed our way to the next bit of riding, but an English-speaking passerby told us to go downhill to the left of the monument; at the bottom, there is a pedestrian tunnel underlying the park that leads onto the next part of the bike route. The ancient tunnel is cobblestoned, long and downhill. Make sure you strap everything securely onto your bike! It was cool! I've never seen anything like it. (Note: Everyone says that all Czechs speak English, but it is not true. Thank you, Pimsleur Audio language cassettes, for teaching me essential Czech! Which I will promptly forget.)

We popped out onto roads that led us to a steep hill that led up to Letenske Park. Here were stunning views of old Prague.


























We discovered gorgeous Hanavsky Pavilion restaurant (very expensive) with a great view of the city.

Also in that park:
We rolled past the Royal Garden, which was closed for the season, and arrived at the tourist mecca of Prague Castle. We parked our bikes (double locked with Kryptonite U-lock and Kryptonite cable lock around the wheels; we'd been warned several times that our bikes would get stolen) and went to the entrance's cafe for coffee and cake. Here's the lovely cafe:


After snacking, we rode our bikes into the courtyard, which we later found out was illegal. A very nice Czech photographer, Ivan Maly, informed us of this, and he also happened to know exactly what make and model our bikes were. He himself is the owner of a folding Dahon bike. It was nice to meet a friendly, English-speaking bike enthusiast. See his website at www.ivanmaly.cz.

Even though there was much to see in Prague Castle (Hradcany), this was the only day, supposedly, where there would be no rain, so we decided to keep biking down the left bank of the Vltava River.





We biked down from the high hills to the city and stopped at a pizza place on the river. I liked the hanging putti from the ceiling.
We continued our bike ride as the light failed.
It was lovely.

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.