If you plan to make Prague tourism in the near future, what follows are the best recommendations for your visit, which are based on my recent trip to Prague.
Who to travel with?
I planned this trip with my partner, and would do that again. Prague is magical, romantic and inviting for this type of tourism. It is also, however, a city with a lot of fun and an interesting nightlife, so it can be very appropriate for groups of friends. Prague may be a little stressful for older people, especially in the cold months. I did see some seniors during my trip, but generally traveling in organized tours and accompanied by guides.
Food and drinks you must try in Prague
For eating, avoid touristy restaurants. Try to walk a few blocks farther from the sights and find places where the menu in English, if any, is not the most visible, and the crowd seems local. This, however, may also mean you'll have problems to communicate with the waiters, as happened to me in a local canteen in the center of the city. With the menu in Czech only, we took a while to figure out the functioning of the buffet and choose the meat for our main course. The meals are always very cheap; so do not pay more than 150 CZK for a main course. As alternatives to Czech food, there are many Italian restaurants offering a variety of good quality food at reasonable prices.
If you are staying at a hotel, you will notice the breakfasts are super heavy. In my case, the breakfast included a main dish, which was a choice of omelets, sausages and eggs, bacon and potatoes, and many others that I cannot remember. This came on top of the typical continental breakfast buffet. Having breakfast between 9.30 and 10am, and a small snack mid-afternoon, I was not hungry until dinner. Twice in the trip I had dinner at Italian restaurants, once in a local canteen and the last in “Pivovarsky Dum”. This restaurant, located in the less touristy area of Prague 2 (as compared to Prague 1), offers Czech local food of good quality, and is also a brewery making its own beer.
The best of Pivovarsky Dum is the house beer, which is offered unfiltered and in blonde, black and amber varieties. The food is heavy, like all Czech food, and has a strong taste, as well as prices which are not as cheap as the others we found. The restaurant is always busy and the service is, therefore,a rushing one, similar to what happens in the United States: they take away your plate while you are sort of still chewing your last bite. If the place is full and you are only 2 or 3, you may have to split a table with another small group.
The best hot wine, plus the best customer service I received in Prague was inKellykirthe coffee and wine bar we randomly found in the Museum of the Alchemist. This is located in a small passage which you can easily reach from the Prague Castle, just going down the Nerudovastreet for a block or two and taking the stairs on the right hand a side to a street called JanskyVrsek. There is no need to enter the museum to visit the bar, which will welcome you with a colorful atmosphere, pleasant temperatures and good drinks at reasonable prices.
You can also eat and drink variety of products on the market in Central Square. Currently this is the Christmas Market, but one of the guides we met on the trip told me that this market has been there since the summer, and changes its name depending on the time of the year. The prices of the products on the market, however, are not the cheapest … We bought postcards at twice the price than in the rest of Prague!
Be careful also with taking drinks on the streets or in small taverns. In a nice little bar downtown, which had individual hammocks instead of regular seats at the bar, the hot wine tasted a bit sour and my stomach was quick to reject it. Usually my stomach is strong and resists these things, which makes me assume it was a very bad drink, and therefore comes the warning!
The hot chocolate is delicious almost everywhere, and the sweets that are offered in bakeries are also worthwhile. The coffee is usually good.
General orientation of the city: choosing the best tour in Prague
When travelling, I usually take the free tours offered by the company Sandemans. In Prague, however, there was another free tour offered in a similar fashion, the “Prague Extravaganza” free tour. I chose to start by taking this second tour, thinking it would be a local initiative, but soon learned that it is part of a second company, “United Europe tours”, which is mainly based in Eastern Europe.
Thursday at 11 am we meet Robert, our guide, waiting for the tourists under its umbrella in light blue color in the main square, right on the corner where the Parizskastreet begins. Not many people know this company, and it was a Thursday morning on a working day, so the tour ended up being private, just for us.
Since they work on a tip basis, the tour guides in free tours are usually more motivated than those who are employees of a company. The stories usually are also more fun and interesting. In the case of Prague Extravaganza, the guide failed to transmit his enthusiasm for the city, as I finished the tour with a rather bitter idea of the city of Prague, its tourist traps and the fact that many of the touristy activities were judged by the guide as not worth our time and money. This, however, was probably because it was a local guide, aiming to be objective and balance the positive and negative aspects of his city.
Days later, after losing for the second time the bus to Terezin concentration camp (if you plan to go, be sure to check the departure time, day of the week and exact starting point in advance) we also took the Sandemans tour, this time with an American guide who had been living in Prague for a while. The guide succeeded at getting us enthusiastic about the city, though the information provided was more superficial than in the previous tour.
