Part of the fun of any major trip is buying All The Things, right?  Even though we are in death nesting mode, I still found a few things I could not resist.

In Vienna, the Haus der Musik is open till 11:00 pm, but when we bought our tickets at 9:00 the young man cheerfully told us the gift shop closed in an hour, so of course we went there first.  And the first thing I saw were these wooden drums:

They have a great little tick-tock sound.  They come with little cards for die Kinder, but I plan to make great use of them to annoy the neighbors, if not here then at a burn.  (You hear that, Black Lodge?  You just keep that karaoke going until 2:00 in the morning.)

At Faber-Castell’s gift shop, you will recall that I had no choice but to buy new ink for my brand new replacement fountain pen.

I really wanted the grey ink, but I’ve had correspondents complain that it’s hard to read.  ::sigh::

In Nuremberg, I found this little charm, which I think is supposed to be a Christmas ornament, but it’s going on a little chain I have added to my Utilikilt for burn events.

Likewise in Nuremberg, this little lizard spoke to me at a street vendor’s stall and asked to be added to my collection of lizards.

I did a lot of shopping in Prague mainly because I had the time to do so.  At our first lunch at the cafe, there was a crafts market set up in Republic Square.  I was attracted to the weaver and his wares.  (His young helper who helped me find the right size of shirt and hat had spent last summer in Florida with his girlfriend who was working there; he liked Savannah, he said.)

Strolling back to the hotel one day, my lovely first wife was attracted by the window of a glass art company, and so we popped in.

She wanted just the white champagne flute—we really have no more room for glassware—but the owner was quite piteous with her “but the box is for two..” gambit, and so I picked out the blue one.  Since we have until recently given ourselves a pair of champagne flutes for our anniversary, we were happy with our choice.  (I stopped doing this last year because a) we have no more room; and b) death nesting.)

As we waited for the concert our last night in Prague, I was attracted to a store selling Czech garnets and amber.  After some deliberation, I ended up with another pendant for my kilt chain.

I can’t explain my attraction yet.

And finally, my booze haul.

In the center, the apricot liqueur from the Göttweig Abbey in Krems.  On the left, absinthe from Prague, which is going to the burn with me tomorrow.  (The deal is that Euphoria, the spring Georgia burn, had to be cancelled at the beginning of May; many of us are attending the Tennessee burn, so I’m offering this to the Euphoria refugees as a “shot of Regret.”)

And then there’s the Ayrer’s Malt Gin.

This is the gin that I made a mad dash back to the store in Nuremberg, arriving just as the shopkeeper locked the door.  Was it worth it?

Oh my.

This is a small batch, single malt gin that will never be mixed with anything.  I am going to sip it in thimblefuls.  You may be allowed to watch me, if you’ve been good.

Usually I am not a fan of heavily floral gins, but this one is Elixir.  Very strong citrus notes, both lemon and orange. Undergirdings of hops.

We will now begin searching for an American distributor.

I have one last Danube story, about the cocktail that AnonymouS Bar created for me, but it will have to wait until I get back from Camping with the Hippies™ on Sunday.

 

Monday, May 22, we came home.  Once again, the Viking River Cruise folk were super organized, telling us when to have our bags out in the hall and when to report for the bus.  We were driven to Prague Airport and bade farewell.

One more funny English:

So vending.  Much wow.

The flight home was a lot more bearable than the flight over, mostly because we were not trying to sleep, but soon enough we were home and the jet lag claimed us.

—————

So what advice do I have to give those considering a Viking River Cruise?

First and foremost: do it.  If you can snag a two-for-one deal, that’s awesome, but even though these things are nowhere close to cheap they are exactly what the commercials imply.  The shipboard experience is flawless from the moment they pick you up at the airport till they drop you off again.

Having said that, do not expect anything from the bus tours other than a brief overview of the city you’re touring.  The tour guides are excellent and very knowledgeable, but you won’t actually have a lot of time to stroll or see all the museums and churches they are pointing out to you.

On board, do go for the prepaid tipping.  We did our calculations on the last day and found that the amount pretty much covered what we would have tipped anyway, and it’s a whole lot easier than trying to decide which of the staff you really want/need to tip.  We added some specific tips for specific staff we found especially helpful, like the ever-adorable Sorin.

You probably do not need the alcohol package.  Wine and beer (usually regional) are included with the meals, and even if you have one or two cocktails a night in the lounge, the total comes nowhere close to the $300/cabin package cost.  It may be that the package covers bottles of wine not on the menu; you’d need to check that yourself.  If so, and that’s your thing, then then alcohol package might be economical.

Do not be afraid to use the concierge staff.  That’s what they’re there for.  Ask questions; get them to call you a cab; use their services.

Be bold in your dinner partner choices.  Viking does not assign tables, so it might feel a little like middle school all over again, but we never failed to have a great evening with whomever we sat.  You also get to meet the different servers that way.

The food is first rate.  If you take lunch in the lounge, that may be a buffet, but all meals in the dining room are all white table cloth service with gourmet preparation.  Every meal has a menu with three choices of appetizer, entree, and dessert.  There are also “always available” options for those days when Bavarian chow is just not going to do it for you.

Be sure to attend the “port talks” each night.  That’s when your program director will give you the outline of the next day.  It may save you looking like a clueless oaf the next morning and will certainly save you from having to stand in line at the concierge’s desk with all the clueless oafs.  Also, you may discover that your tour leaves at an ungodly hour in the morning that you were planning to sleep past.

In that same vein, if you’re on a ship with the little lavalier tour guide headsets that you have to charge in your room, please figure out how to do that right.  I’m not going to point fingers, but too many of our shipmates were hapless when it came to getting these things to work.  They were nice enough about it, and the tour guides were unflaggingly positive, but still. Don’t be that guy.

And in that vein, be aware that the average age of the Viking River Cruise patron is north of 65.  There were a handful of couples younger than us, but on the whole these are people who have been retired for a while and who can afford to do this out of boredom.  (There were a couple of tables that never left the ship as far as I could tell, just playing cards in the lounge every time I saw them.)  This fact has nothing to do with your experience; only once did we encounter someone who might be described as crabby, and certainly I never saw anyone being unkind or rude to the staff.

Don’t be afraid to chat with the staff.  They have interesting stories to tell.

If you can afford the time and money, book an extension after the cruise like we did in Prague.  It truly gives you a chance to decompress before being whisked back to real life and wondering if the past week were all a dream.  (We are now also proponents of booking a pre-extension as well.)

If you’re not overly familiar with architectural history, do yourself a favor and learn the major styles: Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neo-Classical.  Google is your friend.  The reason you want to do this is that the tour guides rattle these things off and usually assume you know what they’re talking about.  (In education, that’s called the “curse of knowledge.”)

My lovely first wife is a keen reader of the Top 10… series of travel books, and indeed they are quite handy.  Again, you won’t be getting to many of the items on a Viking River Cruise but the books are a good overview/prep for what you will see.  We make fun of her for her devotion to them, but the truth is we let her do all the research and rely on her for where to eat and what to see whenever we’re traveling on our own.  Also, if you’re determined to see the Klimts in Vienna, for example, knowing ahead of time what you absolutely have to do will let you make plans with the staff’s assistance to make it happen, if possible.

You will need to tip your tour guide and your bus driver every trip, so lay in the small euros when you can.  Public restrooms on your tours are usually not free; your tour guide should be able to warn you how much they are and tell you where free ones are.  (They will always plan for restroom breaks, and they try to make them where the facilities are free.)

There’s at least one tour each day that’s included as part of the tour.  You can add others for an additional charge, and you can do that ahead of time, but it is possible to wait until you’re on board to do so, when you can ask for details from your program director and when you have a better idea of the trip.  Also, be aware of your own stamina.

Speaking of which: buy really good shoes, up to and including orthopedic numbers.  You’ll be walking a lot, often on cobblestones, and this is not the time for those cute little sandals. Or heels.

And DO NOT OMIT THE NAPPING.

One reason we loved Prague so much was that we were there for two and a half days and were able to get out and explore it, which is not really possible on the cruise. And while we had assiduously avoided all the WWII tours, our guide in Passau had encouraged us to take the Jewish Prague walking tour, and so this morning we headed out to the Jewish Museum complex.

Our first stop was the Old-New Synagogue, the oldest in Europe.

Pure Gothic.  It shows my ignorance when I’m always startled at the architecture of European synagogues: I’m not sure why I have it in my head that the Jews would have their own ecclesiastical style divorced from their time and place.

The portal into the sanctuary:

The tree is the symbol of the twelve tribes of Israel bearing fruit.

Seating is still as it was when the synagogue was built: around the periphery.  There are windows in the thick walls for the women’s gallery to be able to see in.

The Ark containing the Torah is behind this tapestry, hand embroidered of course.  The crown indicates that this is a Sephardic congregation; the Ashkenazi Jews used bells as their symbols.

Our next stop was the Pinkas Synagogue.  It was gut-wrenching.

The walls have been covered with the names and villages of the 80,000 Czech Jews who were deported and killed by the Nazis.  And then upstairs is the exhibit of children’s art from Terezin.

Terezin was the Nazis’ “model” concentration camp, a kind of Potemkin village that they used to show the rest of the world how well they were treating the Jews.  There, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, an artist from the Bauhaus school, taught art lessons to the children.  Before she was deported to Auschwitz, she hid 4,500 pieces of art in two suitcases, which were found ten years later.  The Jewish Museum stores them now; the exhibit in the Pinkas Synagogue are reproductions.

All you could do is cry.

The sanctuary itself is a kind of pseudo-Romanesque.  I found the Art Nouveau windows to be particularly lovely:

The Spanish Synagogue is spectacular.  It was built in the 1860s by the Reformed community in the Moorish Revival Style, which you may be familiar with from the rather newer Fox Theatre in Atlanta.

The dome:

There were a couple more stops on the tour: the Jewish Cemetery, the Klausen Synagogue with its exhibit of religious paraments and service vessels, and the Ceremonial Hall of the Jewish Burial Society, which has made no concessions to modern crown control in its narrow stairs.  The restroom in particular was difficult to negotiate via its single narrow spiral staircase down.

Then we were free for the rest of the day.  We wandered back to the Old Town Square to see what we could see.

Art Nouveau details:

Amusing English:

We do not know whether this is high-falutin’ cuisine or comestibles for Kafka snobs.

All the streets in Prague look basically like this:

There is a place on the Old Town Square which has exhibits of Dali, Warhol (née Warhola, i.e., of Czech extraction), and Alphonse Mucha.  It was the latter we wanted to see.  (You paid separately for each exhibit.)

Who is Alphonse Mucha?  You know him:

Also Sarah Bernhardt posters, etc. etc.  The man was prolific and unstoppable, the Czech equivalent of Louis Tiffany.  He designed anything and everything: posters, cookie tins, furniture, calendars, notecards, stained glass—everything.  He was the soul of European Art Nouveau.

The irony?  He was rejected as a student by the Prague Institute and advised to “find another career.”  Oops.

I found this amusing:

Vin des Incas, available, the poster says, in all pharmacies, for convalescents.  And why is this wine “Incan”?  Because its not-so-secret ingredient (in the little white circle to the left of the name) is “la coca du Pèrou.”  Cocaine.  Ah, the Fin de Siècle…

We were thinking we would head back to the Kokorovka Cafe for lunch, but take a different route.  That’s when we saw this poster:

Talk about Top 40.  But the selling point was the Widor “Toccata” from his Organ Symphony No. 5.  Here, go listen to this in the background.  Turn up your speakers.

The Widor Toccata was played at my lovely first wife’s college graduation, and she made her poor church organist learn it to play as our wedding recessional.  It is a glorious piece.

The poster was one of dozens outside a little shop that sold tickets to these events all over the city.  Prague is and always has been a very musical city; Mozart premiered Don Giovanni there because Prague was a lot more enthusiastic about his music than stuffy old Vienna.  We went inside and bought tickets.

Then we had to change our lunch plans, because we had made reservations at the Café Imperial for dinner.  We went there to cancel our dinner plans and to have lunch instead.

Can you say Belle Epoque?

Walls and ceilings covered in tile.  Food was delicious.

The English again:

Here, have a dessert photo:

We retreated to the hotel for a nap (DO NOT OMIT THE NAPPING!) and then ventured out to our concert.  We arrived super early and strolled the street: art galleries, beer garden with live jazz, shops and restaurants.

And there it was:

Alas, there wasn’t enough time for me to visit and genuflect.  We will return.

Finally it was time to head back to St. Giles Church for the concert.

Simple Romanesque exterior.  But you know how that ends:

The house opened at 7:30, but there was a service going on; the Dominican monks whose monastery is attached were singing mass.  We were allowed to go in and have a seat, but no photos of course.  (A sign asked for reverence with the irreverent advisory, “The monks are not monkeys.”)  Their singing was perfect, reverberating throughout the nave with no amplification: if that had been the concert it would have been enough.

While we were waiting, I found this:

St. Martin of Tours—my name saint, which I didn’t realize at the time because a) the donor of the statue was Spanish and I didn’t make the leap from Torres to Tours; and b)…

… what?  St. Martin’s myth is his cutting his cloak in two to share with a beggar.  I’ve never heard of —and cannot now find —any connection with household animals.  The placard on the wall is completely in Czech other than the title, so I guess I’ll never know.

The monks finished the mass and withdrew.  An elderly Dominican welcomed us to the church and to the concert in a lovely speech about caritas, music, and God.

The concert itself was satisfying: a string quartet alternating with the organist.  Yes, the music was Top 40, but it was flawlessly performed with great musicality so you’ll get no quibbles from me.  If I had wanted 12-tone nonsense I would have stayed in Vienna.

The concert gave ample opportunity for examining the church, and I found myself considering it in terms of entertainment, i.e., for a populace who were largely still illiterate, before our own time of constant stimulation, the exuberance of the altarpiece for example must have been rather exhilarating.

The music of the monks, the organ, the incense, the shining of the gold decor, the drama of the angels — just look at these weightless beings in full flight! —the physical presence of saints and bishops in statuary: what a powerful experience to a person who has never seen a Michael Bay movie.

And the Widor was everything we hoped for.

You will recall that I had arrived in Prague with a list of some twenty bars which, according to my internet research, were highly regarded by the craft cocktail world.  Filip, bartender at the hotel’s Cloud 9, had recommended without hesitation AnonymouS Bar.

I did a little further research at their website, anonymousbar.cz, and found that they had recently opened a second bar, AnonymouS Shrink’s Office, which played off the work of Rorschach. Decisions, decisions.  I finally opted for the original because 1) they opened at 5:00; 2) they took reservations online; 3) they took credit cards (a bar bill in koruna? no thanks); and 4) it was nonsmoking.  Next time we’ll brave the Shrink’s Office.

Our cab driver used his GPS to get us there, except that when we arrived AnonymouS was nowhere to be seen on the narrow cobblestone street.  The driver was a little flustered, but I assured him it was fine.  It was all part of the game.

I led our crew down to a nondescript wooden gate, where there was a courtyard piled with what may have been discarded HVAC equipment, and there across the courtyard was the bar, still without any kind of sign.

Upon entering, I was little nonplussed to find that they did not have our reservations, but it was after all 5:30 and the young pretty people weren’t out yet.  It was not a problem.

AnonymouS Bar looks like a place the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen would congregate, mixed with overtones of the hacker group Anonymous.  Our waiter was bright, friendly, and ever so arch, as if he knew a secret.  Which he did.

The menu is a little booklet, with the first page a list of descriptors followed by cryptic instructions: Follow the Script.  Follow the Vision.   Then there’s a simple list of five cocktails, each based on a standard classic like the Negroni or Manhattan.  Between these five drinks there are large blank rectangles, labeled OP, which we never did figure out.  There are boxes: Follow the Vision—Ask for More.  Then there’s the standard listing of beers, wines, and spirits.

We ordered our first round, and while we were waiting our server donned an Anonymous mask trimmed with EL wire and snapped a Polaroid:

That’s me in the Anonymous mask.  At this point we were hooked, trying to read a message into random events, like the weird b in Remember.  (Who knows?  It might have been a puzzle we never tumbled to.)

Marc and I had ordered a V’s Blood, their version of the Negroni.  It arrived first, and thus it began:

Yes, presented in IV bags and drained into our glasses.

I will say right now that all this gimmickry would have been enough to drive me from the bar if it were nothing but gimmickry.  But this place knows its show biz, and the drinks were nothing short of the best cocktails I have ever had in my life.

My lovely first wife got a Remember Remember the 5th of November, a Manhattan:

This was by far the best Manhattan I’ve ever had: bourbon, sherry, and black walnut bitters.  I will be desperately trying to reconstruct this one.

MF had The Scarlet Rose:

Yes, those are rose petals.  This was a version of the Ramos Gin Fizz, and it was tasty.

At this point I felt the need to send photos of these marvels to a Facebook group I belong to that updates everyone on their drinking habits, mostly beer but some cocktails, because what’s the point of being in the best bar in Europe if you can’t make everyone else jealous, amirite?  I noticed that the bar had wifi, so I asked our waiter if I could get the password.

“Yes of course,” he said and shimmered away.

With that settled, I got online and began posting.

SPOILER ALERT: If you want to go to Prague and experience the fun and games of AnonymouS Bar for yourself, read no further.  I am not kidding.  I almost don’t want to tell the rest of this experience because it would be a shame to short circuit someone else’s delight, but given that most of you will very likely never be in Anonymous I will go on.

But seriously, if you think you want to go do this yourself, stop reading right now.

As we were mulling our choices for our first round, I made so bold as to “ask for more” like the menu instructed.  We were told that that option would be available after our first round.

When the time came, there were two options for More: one for vision, one for smell.  I asked for the olfactory menu.  We were brought a wooden case that slid open to reveal five tiny bejeweled flasks, each a different color.  We were instructed to smell them and choose one.  That would be our next cocktail.  There was a printed menu for reference.

My lovely first wife then asked for the visual menu, and we were brought a ViewMaster.  There the cocktails were linked to video games.

Round two:

THE SCRAP (Resident Evil)

Vodka, pickled beets, lemon, pistachio syrup—entirely too sweet we decided… until the gelatin eyeball dissolved enough to release citric acid crystals into the drink which, sucked up through the straw, were a perfect balance.

EAU DE BLEU

Bourbon, peated honey, vermouth, jasmine aperitif—and under that little bell?

Dried ham, to be munched on while sipping to complement the drink.  Amazing concept.

EAU DE VERT

apricot-infused cognac, syrup of oyster mushrooms/truffles, bittering spices/herbs, accompanied this time by mushrooms.

EZIO AUDITORE (Assassin’s Creed)

wine blend, vanilla syrup, lemon, egg white, honey; probably our least favorite, but still tasty

Round Three—oh yes, at this point we were on a roll.

Now here’s an odd thing: we seemed to be the only patrons in the place who were actually thrilling to the chase, as it were.  It was a light crowd, still very early in the evening for young barflies, and everyone else seemed to be ordering your basic drinks, and mostly bottled beer at that.  Of course, it was Czech beer so that’s something, but who goes to one of the world’s premiere craft cocktail bars and orders nothing but Pilsner?

There were a couple of groups of young men, which we assumed were bachelor parties.  (Prague is a destination for young parties like that, especially Brits.)  One of them at least ordered a showy coffee:

Later in the evening two young women came in, one of whom was doing a dead-on Scarlett Johansson.  As far as we know, it could have been.  ScarJo, where were you the night of May 20, 2017?

Anyway, Round Three:

CODENAME 47 (didn’t get the video reference written down..)

Sorry for the fuzzy photo: Scotch, absinthe bitters, maple syrup

Marc enjoying himself:

EAU DE ROUGE

Vodka, gin, wine leaves, blend of French aperitifs, “forest fruits,” dried candied hibiscus

And for my last drink, I played a game of my own.  I showed the waiter the recipe for my Smoky Topaz and explained that this was my favorite drink in the world.  He began to tell me they didn’t have all the ingredients, and I told him I knew they didn’t because I had scoped out the bar.  I wasn’t asking them to make the Smoky Topaz—I was asking them to use that information to make a drink that would please me.

The results were stunning:

Genever, green chartreuse, Grand Marnier, Amaro (but which one?)  It was, if I’m being honest, better than the Smoky Topaz.  It precipitated a bit of an existential crisis.

I’m going to work on this one, and if I’m successful it will be the Smoky Quartz. (Update: see here for how that turned out.)

Three rounds of phenomenal cocktails being more than enough for anyone, we asked for restaurant recommendations and were sent to MANU, an Italian seafood restaurant floating in the Moldau.  It was top shelf, a lovely way to end our day.  (Our waiter had been an au pair in Dunwoody.  Yep.)

And when you absolutely have to connect your Art Nouveau hotel to the Renaissance guard tower:

Bright and early Friday morning, we were loaded onto a bus and taken to Prague.

This trip was an extension of the cruise itself.  Some people start their cruise with a three-day extension; we ended it.  It’s still managed by Viking River Cruise, albeit without the meals.  You still have included tours and you can still opt for extra tours, but except for breakfast at the hotel you have to feed yourself.  It’s one way to start easing back into real life if by real life you mean dining out at really good restaurants.

The Czech Republic is a member of the European Union and participates in the Schengen Area agreement (no border checks) but not in the Eurozone.  In other words, you don’t have to show your papers to get in, but your euros don’t work and you have to start doing math in your head again.  For the record, the exchange rate while we were there was 23.9 korunas to the dollar, so that a 100CZK bill was about $4.  An easy estimate, therefore, was to knock two zeros off the price and multiply by 4: a restaurant bill of 729CZK was actually about $28.

I do not have a picture of the border when we passed it, with its languishing Iron Curtain checkpoints.  I wish I did, because planted squarely where you would have been interrogated by unsmiling Commie guards was a KFC, which has made great inroads in the eastern bloc.

Instead, here’s where we stopped a couple of miles down the road:

I’ve said for 40 years that if we were serious about toppling Castro, just make nice with him and send in McDonald’s to take over the country.

We arrived at the Prague Hilton (not to be confused with the Hilton Old Town) before lunch.  Our bags were stowed for us, a VRC guide took us to Republic Square and gave us a few pointers for lunch and how to get back to the hotel, and left us to our own devices.

Prague is a gorgeous city, actually prettier I think than Vienna.

I don’t know why I don’t have any photos of most of this day other than I was exhausted, not having slept well for the last two nights of the cruise.  We ate lunch at the Kolkovna Café, where the meal for the two of us, plus two drinks each, came to the aforementioned $28.  Prague is not only lovely, it is affordable.

I did take a photo of this:

Why?  Because in the opera world, “Toi toi toi” is what one says rather than “Break a leg,” and I have several friends who would find this hysterical.

Anyway, we browsed around the crafts market there in the square before staggering back to the hotel and napping.  Napping is an important part of your tour.  DO NOT SKIP THE NAPPING!

For Christmas, my lovely first wife gave me a book which chronicled the rise of the craft cocktail culture in the 90s and 00s.  It was mostly 400 pages of name-dropping, but one thing I retained from it was that Prague—weirdly enough—had some world-class bars.  I was determined to hit at least one of them; I had a list prepared from my online research. So AFTER MY NAP I went down to the concierge to ask for advice.

The phrase “craft cocktail” stymied them.  They hemmed and hawed, recommended two bars on the list in a way that suggested to me they were going by the names and not by experience or reputation, and finally—in what I thought was a pretty defensive tone—suggested I try their swank bar, Cloud 9 Sky Bar & Lounge, up on the roof.  I smiled politely.

Then it occurred to me that while the concierge was ignorant of Prague’s cocktail scene, the bartenders at Cloud 9 would know exactly whom to recommend.  So at precisely 6:00 I hit the elevator to the 9th floor.

I wish I had taken photos: ultra-cool design, white marble, LED lighting, gentle EDM piped through the sound system, and a long long hall overlooking Prague… I thought I might be lost, actually.  Then I turned the corner and there was the bar, all black and white and gleaming purple.  I parked at the bar, ordered a funky gin & tonic (with star anise and cinnamon sticks as garnish), and plopped down my list in front of Filip.

“That one,” he said without hesitation.  AnonymouS Bar.

Hold that thought.

I was joined by the others, we went out to the terrace overlooking the Moldau River, and had a nice relaxing evening with good drinks, fabulous french fries, and a tasty cheese plate.

—————

The next morning, we boarded a bus and were taken up to Prague Castle, which once again is a whole complex of buildings overlooking the Moldau.

Our tour guide had been rather sheep dog-ish in getting us onto the bus and on the road, and a good thing too: there’s a security checkpoint to enter the area, and while we stood in line for maybe 20 minutes to get in, those who began arriving after us stood in line for probably over an hour.

Here’s a fun thing:

This is one of the first buildings in the complex, Renaissance, decorated using the sfgraffito technique: you paint the wall brown, overpaint it with white, then scratch through to the brown.  In this case it’s a real cheap way to look like you had the money to build your house out of stonework:

The highpoint was St. Vitus Cathedral, the only real Gothic church we went into on the trip.

The church was started in 1344 but was not finished until 1929.  They had gotten the choir and transept built when war interrupted the process for good in the 15th century.  It was not until the 19th century that word resumed on the nave; for 400 years they had a temporary wall where the nave should have been.  (You can see the same sort of thing at St. John the Divine in NYC, only their wall is where the transept will be.)

All the stained glass windows, therefore, are 20th century creations.  Here’s one by Alphonse Mucha:

Back down to the city, where we were shown other architectural things, walked across the Charles Bridge (supercrowded with tourists walking across the Charles Bridge), and then were released for the rest of the day.  We strolled.

Lots o’ Kafka.  I refrained from making cockroach jokes, and so should you.

The Old Square.

Prague’s intact 18th-century look attracts filmmakers, of course.  It usually stands in for Vienna in movies like Amadeus.

The famous astronomical clock on the city hall.  Pre-Copernican, of course.

For when you absolutely have to connect your Beaux-Arts hotel to the Medieval tower.

Well, we had to stop in, didn’t we?  I did buy some absinthe, but not the enhanced kind.  For one thing, customs/felonies/etc.  For another (as I have determined through dogged research), the cannabis-infused liquors available everywhere in Prague are a bit of a scam.  While cannabis has been decriminalized in the Czech Republic, it’s still illegal to buy or sell and the cannabis absinthe has no pyschoactive ingredients.  It just tastes like weed, which not even I can imagine being useful (or desirable) in a cocktail.

Finally, waiting in the lobby that evening before heading out, I noticed this fine establishment in our luxury hotel:

The English she is hard, no?

And where were we heading out to?  AnonymouS Bar.