This is Prague

I should have known Prague wouldn’t be my kind of scene when the Trader Joe’s checkout girl —a punk rock millennial wearing the nametag “Star”—announced it was her favorite place on earth.

“A real party town!” Star exclaimed. “Makes Austin look like Lubbock. You’re gonna love it.”

Star began listing the best bars in Prague, ignoring the economy-sized bottle of pre-menopausal multivitamins in my cart that suggested I was not in the partying stage of my life.

“There’s the Hemingway, Black Angel’s, Tretter’s—they serve dollar shots on Tuesdays—”

A laugh erupted from behind me. My 14-year-old daughter. “You should check it out, Mom. Maybe they serve shots of Metamucil.”

I ignored her and asked Star, “What about the crowds?”

Star laughed. “Oh yeah, it’s crowded.”

“Like how crowded? Like 6th Street on a Saturday night crowded, or like a Gay Pride Parade and 6th Street on a Saturday night crowded?”

“Uhm…like a Gay Pride Parade and a UT football game just let out and 6th Street on a Saturday night crowded.”

Shit. I bit my lip.

“It’s a great chance to meet new people,” Star added encouragingly.

Behind me, my daughter snickered. “Obviously, you don’t know my mom.”

#

Deafening bass pumps through the speakers, rattling the windows on the Uber ride from the Prague airport to our hotel. I press my palms to my ears and share a pained glance with Doug. This wasn’t the first time our Uber lift felt like a mobilized nightclub from hell. I decide that either our Prague Uber driver was the same guy who drove us around in Berlin, or European house-techno cranked at full volume was an EU mandate for Uber rides.

I look out the rattling window to the scenery flying past. It’s nine at night and Prague is shrouded in darkness, illuminated here and there with green and red Christmas lights tangled in trees and the soft glow from windows of cafes and restaurants, where human silhouettes bundled in winterwear trickle out from the entrances. The Uber driver stops at a light, and I note a huge, Australian flag hanging low from the balcony of what looks like a frat house but was probably a Great Moravian palace now used as a youth hostel.

Doug waves a hand in front of me, redirecting my attention. “Prague is cheaper than the other places that we’re visiting, so I got us a nicer hotel. More bang for our buck.” he screams over an auto-tuned voice repeating, sit on my face, girl, sit on my face.

“Is it a boutique hotel?” I scream back.

Doug shakes his head. “Nah, it’s a chain. Fancy schmancy, but in an old school kind of way; not ‘trendy’—so to speak.”

Doug wasn’t lying. The lobby of the Alcron Hotel sparkled with an excessive parade of flair that seemed both elegant and classless, like something Donald Trump might conjure under heavy sedation. Screens of brushed gold partially obscure its lobby; its floor a perfect grid of smooth, white tiles. Columns of dark marble dissect the space, and to the side, tall vases of oversized flower arrangements mark the entrance to the hotel’s Michelin star restaurant.

Our spacious room greets us with mirrored walls, a king-sized bed draped in gold linen and matching gold tassels hanging low over the oak bedside tables.

The Alcron Hotel may not have been the hippest hotel in town, but what it lacked in trendiness, it made up for in garish luxury.

Still, being here, in the presence of such extravagance—garish or not—makes me uneasy. “I feel like a fraud,” I tell Doug. Our house back in South Austin was filled with my parents’ hand-me-down furniture and knick-knacks from charity shops and garage sales. I bought the generic brand of everything. I lied about my kids’ ages at Supercuts to get the “12 and Under” discount. We were decidedly middle-class; even with Doug’s fly miles spent, it would take us years to pay off this trip. We didn’t belong in a place like this.

“Erin, just relax and enjoy it,” Doug advises. “We don’t have to scrimp and save on everything.”

Yeah, just wait until we file our 2018 taxes, I want to say, but think better of it. Instead, I take his advice and relax. I begin unpacking and realize in horror that I am out of clean underwear. I spend the next thirty minutes washing my undies with warm water and hotel soap in the bathroom sink. By the time I exit the bathroom (Operation Clean Underwear complete), Doug is already softy snoring away on top of the gold bedspread.

#

As it turned out, the Trump Hotel: Prague Edition is in a great location—just around the corner from Wenceslas Square and the National Museum—and in the morning, after a long, much-needed sleep, it becomes our first destination.

The late morning sun reveals Prague’s charm: rows of 19th century buildings nestled together, their pewter facades and Rococo plasterwork capped off with deerstalker roofs painted rustic red; Baroque flourishes along the trim. For the first minutes of our walk, Doug and I enjoy this grimy, faery tale city virtually alone.

Then we turn into Wenceslas Square and are instantly ejected back into a crowded, claustrophobic reality.

Bundled hordes of humanity walk to and fro, circling us in every direction, waves upon waves of them, like fish in a whirlpool with no exit. In surround sound, I hear the shrill voices of Americans (“Daaayvid, did we leave the passports in the hotel? Do we need to tayyke them with us? Daaayvid?”) and fast-talking eastern Europeans. Burly, chapped-face Russians elbow past, followed by a gaggle of Japanese teenagers staring at their phones as they walk in somehow perfect synchronization.

Doug and I don’t need to share our dismay; I feel his and he feels mine. We decide that if we’re going to enjoy Prague, we’re going to need a little help. We make a beeline to a famous, historic Czech institution across the street.

Okay, maybe Starbucks isn’t Czech or historic, but it is certainly famous, and we need the caffeine. We also knew that America’s favorite drug pusher accepts credit cards—a fact that no American travelling abroad should take for granted.

We order the usual—a caramel macchiato for him, a soy matcha green latte for me. I load up my tea with sprinkles of vanilla because the matcha served at European Starbucks contains zero sweetness, and I wasn’t about to adjust my dependency on sugar, even temporarily. Speaking of sugar, we’re waiting for our order when I happen to glance at the breakfast options—a big mistake. My mouth begins to salivate. Fact: Starbucks Prague offers far superior breakfast options than the stale bran muffins and soggy egg sandwiches offered back home. Pastries and desserts like Red velvet cheesecake and chocolate cannolis line the display case. It takes every fiber of my being to remember the fat rolls tipping over my waistline—a new development from this trip—and not take the bait.

Doug and I look for a seat, which turns out to be an impossible mission. The store is crowded with—and I almost laugh at this—the sort of Starbucks regulars that you’d find back home and possibly any other Starbucks in the world—the tired-eyed students, the put-upon businessmen and women just passing through, the two white women having a chat (UGGs included), the wannabe writer, and the other wannabe writer (no judgement, I’m one of them).

Eventually, Doug and I discover there’s a second floor, and we march up the stairs to find a table warm and snug against a corner window overlooking the square.

Sometime later, the caffeinated versions of Doug and I exit the Starbucks and follow the scent of baked pies and roasting meats to the Christmas market located in the square’s center. We join the throng of shoppers lined up among the market’s red tents and begin perusing the inventory.

It doesn’t take long to realize that we’re not in Germany or Denmark anymore. The booths are not craft-specific, not aiming to scratch a single cultural or culinary itch. Instead, each booth offers a miscellany of touristy kitsch identical to the booth before it: snow globes and magnets that bear Prague’s name in its native spelling; “Praha”; chocolate bars wrapped in pictures of vintage cars; hats and t-shirts with glitterized images of Prague’s most famous landmarks. It may be pretty, but there’s no craftmanship in the threads, no originality in the machine, no sense I’m taking a piece of Prague back home with me.

In the end, I buy chocolates for my son and a magnet for my mom—both of whom were turning out to be the easiest family members to shop for. Sidenote: the hardest? My stepfather, John. A chain-smoking, soccer-loving, working-class Brit, who is…let’s just say…“unappreciative” of anything and anyone that isn’t English. Over the course of this trip, whenever I’d determine an item looked John-ish (Zippos, beer koozies, ashtrays), I would immediately hear him in my head, objecting in his thick, barely discernable Midlands accent, and I’d put the item down. An ashtray in Berlin—“Bloody Germans!” A cigarette lighter in Copenhagen—“Bloody Danes!” A beer mug in Prague—“Bloody Eastern Europeans!” I wasn’t even about to entertain the idea of buying him a gift in France, a country that—for reasons beknows only to him—deserved the majority of his contempt (“Bloody Frogs!”).

Doug consults Google Maps for directions to the Old Town Square. His arm juts out, his finger extending and pointing past me. “That way,” he says. “Not too far. It won’t take us long.”

But it does take a long time, because walking to Old Town from Wenceslas Square means squeezing past one gazillion groups of guided walking tours, bundles of oblivious teens taking selfies, large families with straggling children, overly affectionate couples stubbornly holding hands (unwilling to break apart, at the inconvenience of other pedestrians), displaced Yankee fans, the Russian mafia, the entire 10th grade class of some high school in Missouri, and a drunk guy dressed in an oversized polar bear costume.

The crowds thicken the closer we get, bottlenecking at the Old Town entrance before spilling out into its large, medieval square. Doug and I sludge through the masses to find a space where we can stand and admire the sites. To our right, the gothic Our Lady before Tyn Church, with its eighty-seven yards high towers capped by four spires poking the cerulean sky. Next to it, the St. Nicholas Church, its creamy front façade accentuated with the blackened statues of medieval heroes.

And of course, here is where we also find the famous Astronomical Clock, a favorite hot spot of the Prague tourist scene since its debut in the 15th century. It’s here where foot traffic comes to a screeching halt. Phones are extracted from purses and pockets and pointed upward to where some beautiful girl or begrudged teenager or a combination of friends pose at a distance, grinning or not grinning under the clock’s massive, adorned eye.

It’s circumventing the space between the amateur photographers and their models that proves the most infuriating part of our day so far. Each pairing seems indisposed to haste, as if under the impression that their spot is reserved, and they can take as long as needed to capture the perfect Instagram-worthy image; to hell with everyone else.

At first, Doug and I indulge this arrogance, stopping midstride whenever a fellow tourist aimed their phone at another in our path. After a while, however, we realize that our courtesy might rob us of precious daylight—not to mention sanity—and we soon become the king and queen of photobombs.

A Christmas Market is set up nearby, and I wander over and inspect it long enough to reassure myself that it’s selling the same cheap crap as the other market. Doug takes my hand and leads me to a platform beside the Jan Hus Memorial.

At this exalted height my view of the square becomes a panoramic postcard of medieval beauty, and it’s hard not to be wooed and won over by this city that time has forgotten. Yes, the major tourist attractions are breathtaking—the churches, the museums, that god damn clock—but also amazing are the little-known constructions and edifices surrounding them: Renaissance buildings painted yellow, pink, or eggshell blue, framed with sloping Mansard roofs; the Jewish Quarter synagogues with their flying buttresses and solemn, copper copulas; cafes and businesses with columns and pilasters adorning their entrances.

I could have come here and seen only the unheralded and still been perfectly content, I realize. Because here’s what European guide books and tour groups fail to understand about Americans—that to us, any building designed without a parking lot, a public bathroom, and an ATM is before our time and thereby ancient—thus making it amazing and swoon-worthy.

I’ll admit it: I’m in awe with the beauty and splendor of medieval Prague. But I’m conscious of another emotion trickling in, one that is dark and ugly, closely resembling resentment.

Many European cities crumbled under the weight of the second world war; capitals of once great empires reduced to mausoleums of death; their landmarks and places of worship—Coventry Cathedral in Coventry, the Brühl Palace in Warsaw, the Golden Rose Synagogue in Lviv, to name a few—burned to ashes or blasted to rubble, ravaged by the insatiable thirst of an invading enemy.

And yet, Prague endured. Why?

Because Czechoslovakia, unlike Poland or the Soviet Union, never felt the one-two punch of a Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe attack. A German Junker never nosedived through Czech clouds, delivering parcels of death. Prague’s cobblestone streets never rumbled under the weight of a Panzer armada bulldozing past, firing shells into hallways of the holy or offices of the governing, demanding an entire city to surrender their history or else. No. They hadn’t needed to, because Czechoslovakia had let the Nazis in through the front door. They never put up a fight.

And this was the reward for their gutlessness—the most beautiful medieval city in Europe.

I can hear my father, ever the history professor, silently admonish me.

“That’s not fair…they were trying to be diplomatic…they didn’t want bloodshed…the Munich Pact was Chamberlain’s folly…and Prague was bombed in the end, by American forces. The Emmaus Monastery, Faust House, the Vinohrady Synagogue—you don’t see those still standing, do you?”

Still, the resentment remains, and it stays with me as Doug and I make our way out of the town square to Prague’s most famous bridge.

According to my quick Google search this morning, the Charles Bridge straddles the Vltava River, linking the Lesser Town and the Old Town. Completed in 1390 and named after Charles IV, the bridge has played a crucial role in Prague's history—first in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, when the invading Swedes were halted here, then in 1744, when the Prussians met their defeat along its Bohemian sandstone surface.

Today, however, the bridge acts not as an obstruction, but a key destination for a different sort of invader. Tourists gather here en masse, stopping to taking pictures or buy junk merchandise from the kiosks stationed at the various statues of patrons and patron saints poised along the bridge.

It’s like the scene from the Astronomical Clock, but ten times worse and in a much more confined space.

Doug and I push our way through the crowd, pausing momentarily at the statue of St. John of Nepomuk. Now, I don’t know who the hell he is, but I had also read in my aforementioned Google search that it’s customary for tourists to place a hand on St. John and make a wish. I tell Doug this, and we take turns making wishes.

As we’re leaving, I ask Doug, “What did you wish for?”

“World peace. What about you?”

I wished everyone on the bridge would fall off and disappear into the river. “Same thing,” I say.

I come to a halt when my path is suddenly obstructed by a girl walking in the other direction. This scenario has become a common one on the trip—that is, me walking a straight path and intercepting someone walking the same path but in the opposite direction, followed by several embarrassing seconds of us performing a sort of macabre dance as we try to untangle and get the hell out of each other’s way.

I decided last night while I was washing my undies (hand-washing your undies gives you a lot of time to think) that the next time this happened, I was just going to stand there and let the other person move first.

But this girl must have also been hand-washing her undies or doing something else that gave her time to think, because she doesn’t move either. So we just stay here in a standoff for what feels like centuries, looking like assholes, like the North-going Zax and the South-going Zax, neither of us willing to budge.

Finally, the girl huffs loudly and moves to my left, accidentally-on-purpose nudging my side as she passes. “Americans!” I hear her complain loudly to a friend who had walked on without her.

I flinch and reach my hand to my lips. How did she know I was American? Was I smiling too much? I glance at Doug.

“Shake it off,” he advices. He motions with a wave to keep moving.

We cross the bridge without another incident and make our way to the Church of the Infant Jesus of Prague, which for some reason sounds creepy to me, like we’ll walk in there and see a baby with a withered face dressed in priest robes passing out bread wafers and milk bottles. But my mom, when hearing Prague was on the itinerary, insisted that we go. As she tells it, when she was a child, four-hundred years ago, she lived with a group of mean nuns, and she kept an infant Jesus amulet under her pillow for protection against their fury. That amulet was on its last leg these days, so my mom requested that I bring her back something similar.

By the time we reach the creepy baby infant church, the sky is already darkening, the three hours of winter daylight in Europe already dimming to a hazy glow. The clouds dip lower and the sky drains of birds. Doug and I enter the church and gaze at the white walls and archways long enough to say we’ve been here, we’ve seen it. Yeah, the sentiment is a tad discourteous, but that is the problem with seeing too much beauty at once—the enjoyment wanes, the appreciation reaches a tipping point. I know when I was back home to live among the depressing strip malls and dollar stores and Starbucks with the sad breakfasts, that I will look back and wish I had studied every pane of stained glass, every Baroque molding of this enchanting continent—but at this moment, all I wanted to do was relax in our big hotel bathtub with its fluffy gold towels and cheap body soap disguised in little silver containers and rinse myself of the day.