Cheering up

One lesson I have learned about travelling (and repeatedly forget, but hey, that’s the benefit of having a wipe-clean mind) is that the happier you are, the more positive the experience is.  And it really does work that way round.  Grumpy traveller means grotty experience, happy traveller and the world smiles back at you.  Just try it sometimes – walk along a street and smile at a random stranger (you might need to practice beforehand if you are not used to smiling, you don’t want to scare them) and they will usually smile back!

And thus it was with Prague.  We arrived injured, frustrated, fed up and despondent and we saw an unappealing town completely overwhelmed by hordes of uncomprehending tourists.

We left rested, with some sort of plan, and having eaten a reasonable amount of ice cream and we saw a town with some really engaging little sights as soon as you got even a few metres off the tourist track.  So here are some of them:

The Franciscan Gardens – full of roses in bloom, with huge numbers of benches and no need to buy coffee to sit on any of them.  And its pair of very marvellous gates.

The logo of our hotel, Il Dominica.  This amused me because at home the Conservative leadership race has begun, and both Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove have allowed themselves to be led into saying that they agree with Mrs Thatcher that there are times when you need to brandish the handbag.

When I first saw this monk I thought he was brandishing a handbag, although now I begin to suspect that it might be a stein of beer.

Any number of fascinating arcades with all sorts of engaging shops in them.  Even purchasers of #virtualsouvenirs could get a bit carried away.  For example this stained glass picture which combines a Bonkers-esque mixture of outdoor sports, epic journeys and book reading, from glavitra.cz.

She had also produced this picture which reminded me extremely of  Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” until I looked it up and realised it wasn’t like it at all.

It did remind me how much I liked American Gothic, though.

A picture I saw in the Technical Museum of an early attempt at speed cycling records when drafting a moped.  Which reminded me again of our Sid & Doris moment in the Netherlands, drafting the Lady Of A Certain Age on her step-through moped.  And that reminds me of Madame Tracy in Good Omens, which is a fun memory again.

 

 

 A beer garden which not only does you a “tasting collection” of six beers from their collection of 100, with any limits you like to put on it (no fruit beers, no stupidly strong beers etc) but also has in its cellar the oldest secular building in Prague – which used to be at street level before the city rose to cope with the floods.  (cf Seattle)

I think the place was called U Kunstatu, however as you know my language skills are mythical rather than legendary, so that may mean “a beer garden”.  Anyway, on my copy of Google it comes up if you search for “U Kunstatu – Craft Beer in Old Prague”.

There is also an extraordinary amount of varied and great architecture if you merely raise your grumpy little tourist eyes above street level and look around you.

Yours, more happily,
Doris.