Falling for Prague: Kolaches, Kafka and one very old castle (no, not that one)
The Czech Republic has always been on the cutting edge of culture — and it still is.
Prague is a place I’d never thought very much about until my friends Mel and Dave moved there eight years ago.
They are the Austin expats behind Strong Sense of Place, a literary travel podcast that launched in 2020, just before the pandemic made armchair travelers out of all of us. (Their new season starts on Friday!)
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I met Mel when she was writing a crazy popular Paleo blog called Well Fed from their little bungalow in South Austin. I interviewed her for a story at the Statesman, and we hit it off and started what I thought would be mostly a professional acquaintanceship.
But after a number of breakfast meetings where we started dishing about more than food, we began a bonafide friendship. Then, she and Dave announced they were leaving Austin to make their dreams of living in Europe come true.
Womp, womp.
Amazing for them. A bummer for the rest of us. Or so I thought.
I moved on with my life; they started building theirs anew in one of Europe’s most historic cities.
That was 2016, but at some point, we started connecting again over social media and then a fun little app called Voxer, which allows you to send voice messages. Mel and I started chatting again, despite the time difference.
It seems like our friendship picked up right where we left off.
And friendships are like seeds. When you water and tend them little by little over a long period of time, you can’t be surprised when they grow into a tree.
That’s how I found myself sipping Aperol spritzes with them on a boat overlooking the city’s famed castle just a few weeks ago.
We were at Loď Tajemství, one of many boat cafes that open each spring to serve light drinks and snacks to both locals and visitors alike. (This is one that draws locals, unlike the tour boats closer to the Old Town, which take tourists up and down the Vltava river.)
Mel and Dave chose to live in this part of Prague because it’s close to Vyšehrad, the old castle compound that overlooks the city from the south side of the river. It’s full of beautiful vistas and neat sculptures and a historic cemetery that, all told, I found much more enjoyable than the famed Prague Castle, the UNESCO World Heritage site that is so flooded with visitors that it wasn’t so much fun. (If you are going to the Prague Castle complex, listen to Rick Steves and go when it opens!)
Mel also took me to the Mucha Museum, which is where I learned about Alphonse Mucha, whose pioneering work in the art nouveau movement influenced everything from the 70s rock posters that my parents had in my house growing up to the tarot cards I was carrying in my bag on this trip.
We stopped by the astronomical clock that dates back to the 1400s, but I was just as impressed with a piece of art from 2014 called Metamorphosis. It’s a mirrored 30-foot kinetic sculpture of Frank Kafka’s head from Czech artist David Cerny, who also designed the babies crawling up a TV tower that you can see from many places in the city. On my next trip, I’ll go to the Kafka Museum to learn more about perhaps the most famous person from Prague, whose work I’m woefully unfamiliar with.
Speaking of my next trip to Prague, I will most certainly be planning it during Letní Letná Prague, an international circus festival that takes place during the last half of August every year. Americans are mostly familiar with the Barnum & Bailey-style of circus that include animals and clowns, but the Czech Republic has a long history of an acrobatic-based circus, and there are hundreds of performers in Prague today who continue to evolve the art form.
We got to see a performance from one of those troupes at a very cool event in one of Prague’s many parks, but the big show is in August. For more than 20 years, hundreds of troupes from around the world have been coming to Prague for this festival that sounds like a spectacle not to be missed.
On the food side of things, we had delicious meals at places like a French cafe called Cafe Louis Vyton and a traditional Czech place called U Kroka, where I had an incredible goulash, a dish strongly associated with the nearby Hungary but that is equally popular here.
The Czechs make open-faced sandwiches called chlebíčky that might be even better than the Scandinavians’; the best I had was topped with ham and potato salad from Sisters Bistro.
For breakfast, take Mel’s advice and go to Sweet and Pepper Days, which has Mediterranean-inspired dishes and the specialty fresh lemonade that is also something I wouldn’t have known about if not for my buddy who lives there.
And now we get to kolaches, a Czech pastry that doubles as a culinary remnant of the many Czech immigrants who came to Texas in the late 19th century. Kolaches have become so popular in the Lone Star State that there are frequent fights over who makes the best kolaches and why you shouldn’t say “kolache” when you really mean klobasnek.
You can find kolaches in nearly every bakery, and — to my surprise — they looked and tasted a lot like the ones you’ll find in Texas. My favorite pastry, however, is a choux pastry topped with caramel and vanilla cream called větrník.
No matter what kind of sweet treat you are having, make sure you have one from U Kalendů, a river-facing bakery where I stopped each morning I was there.
That’s where I sipped on a coffee on my last morning in Prague and thought about my life back in Austin and just how different it felt here, in a city that was occupied by Nazi forces just 85 years earlier and is not that far from the ongoing war in Ukraine. I saw exactly one person asking for money during my time in Prague. I didn’t see anyone that seemed to be unhoused, drugged out or having a mental health crisis. There was a school shooting in Prague last December that left 18 people dead, but politicians responded by tightening gun laws.
My heart sunk thinking about what tourists see when they visit Austin. What my son and I see when we drive to school. I have exactly zero solutions to these sweeping social, economic, and political issues — and I know that no country is a utopia — but as I collect my memories from these treasured days in Prague, these observations are part of them.
But I want to end on a high note.
So let’s go back to that breakfast with Mel, when I sat in awe of how friendships can grow, even over long distances.
It takes two people to make any relationship work, and I’m learning how to pay attention to what it looks like when two people take the time to tend that little sapling that they’ve been growing together. I’ve never had a friendship bloom like this with a whole ocean in between.
But maybe that salty water is just what our little tree needed.
Hello, readers!
I’m back from this whirlwind trip, and I feel like I’m simply bursting with stories. OK, maybe paralyzed. I mean, how can I possibly put into words the experience of reconnecting with family members in a foreign country? That letter that one of them gave me from my beloved Karolina? The soil from her homestead that now lives in a little jar on my desk?
Well, I’ll just have to try.
Thank you so much for your support while I’ve been on the road. I was hoping to post from the road, but there was just too much going on while traveling with my sister, mom, and 12-year-old niece, but I’m settling back into my routine in Austin and am looking forward to sharing new posts over the next few weeks.
And it’s almost June, which means it’s time for another zine!
Sending much love and gratitude to all of you. I hope these travel stories inspire you to feed those relationships that might lead to unforgettable experiences like this one.
Until next time,
Addie
Thank you so much for this armchair trip to Prague! I've always wanted to visit there. There is such a rich culture and history there.
Loved this and love the friendship you two have. Prague is def on our travel list.