The Last City - Prague, Oct. 18

Welcome to the Czech Republic, a place I know very little about! The main reason I came here is because it was recommended to me by a few people, and I had one more day on my Eurail pass, so I decided I should visit while I'm here. It was also one of the few places near Vienna that I could find a cheap flight to England, so that was another motivator.

I don't even know an ounce of the language, but that hasn't been a problem so far, everyone I've interacted with spoke English well. From what I've heard, English isn't as commonly learned as other countries I've visited, but I've also overheard several people having conversations in English here. So I'm hoping I can get through easily enough for the next couple days!

The train ride was fairly decent. I'm not certain, but it seemed to me like I may have been sitting in the wrong car or something. I did double check, and it was a second class car, but it felt a lot more like first class. All the seats were made of a black leather-like material and were fairly wide, only 3 seats per row. I also had to shift around at a couple stations since I was sitting in seats people had reserved, even though there was no indication of that. Was I meant to reserve a seat? I was never told to, and no one ever checked my ticket to correct me.

Regardless, I made it without getting into any trouble, so I'm not gonna worry about it. The scenery passing by was nice, still close enough to the Alps to get some hilly terrain. And the trees do seem to be turning more yellow and orange now, you can see that in a couple of the photos.

The hostel I'm staying at is just east of the city center. It's not an a&o since that was a few km from the center, and I wanted to be closer than that. The interior decoration is definitely quite old, the pictures on the listing even showed CRT TVs in the rooms (but those appear to have been updated). I did notice a faint smell of smoke when I first came in, but it's not too strong.

I also noticed the prices for hostels around here are crazy cheap. Normally dorms have been around $20 per night, but I saw several here for less than $10. One was even $6 per night! The single rooms weren't as dramatically cheaper, best I could find was around $30-40 per night, but still less than the $50 or so per night I've usually found elsewhere.

I didn't have a lot of time to explore today, so I left the city center for another day and instead explored the area just north of me. There were a couple small parks along the way, each roughly a couple blocks in size. Not really big enough to get away from buildings and streets, but still nice regardless. I also passed by the Zizkov TV Tower, which apparently has large metal babies climbing up it.

I found another much larger park just west of that, which has a few beer gardens in it. I was exploring around it just before sunset, which made for some nice lighting. It's on a hill and is large enough to get away from all the city life, so I quite enjoyed it.

It also seems that everyone around here owns a dog, there were so many around! I came up to one area and heard lots of barking, I counted 15 dogs all in one spot! And it wasn't a dedicated dog area or anything, they all just happened to be there. And there weren't even 15 people, there were more dogs than humans!

I've walked through several streets around this area, and they seem to be pretty light on car traffic, which is definitely a bonus for me. There is a lot of street parking, but most of the traffic seems to be well routed through a few larger main roads. As a pedestrian, those main roads are easy to get away from, so that's definitely been appreciated.

I also don't mind the architecture around here. I don't know whether I like it or not, but I don't hate it. Lots of the buildings are very colorful and many have detailed patters on them to keep them interesting. They do tend to be fairly flat, but they make up for it in the design. We'll see whether they grow on me over the next couple days.

I've had a decent experience as a pedestrian so far. Like I've said, most of the side streets have very little traffic, all of which is low speed, so they feel pretty safe. They've even got labelled crosswalks with signs for drivers, unlike what I found in Vienna. The major roads usually have typical traffic lights controlling pedestrians and cars, though I did come across one clever solution here. There's an underground metro station below this intersection, so pedestrians just cross by going under the road. Neat!

Unfortunately, I have the same complaint about shops that I've had in other soviet-style buildings. Many of the store fronts have very few windows, making it difficult to see inside. I've found this makes it hard to know whether a place it actually open, or even see what it sells. Below is just one of many examples. The shop on the right does actually has a sign to say it's open, plus pictures of food, so I can at least tell it's a restaurant. Be the one on the left, I had no idea what it was until I translated the text above the door. Apparently it's for stationary supplies, but there's no way to tell just by looking through that one tiny window!

Another thing I noticed were piles of trash around these dumpsters. I believe these have a large storage container below the ground, so they're bigger than what you see on top. But they still appear to be too small, I passed multiple spots like this where people have had to pile up trash around the containers. Seems to me like either the garbage trucks don't come frequently enough, or there aren't enough of these dumpsters around. But hey, at least it's sorted!

And that's all I've got from Prague so far. I can't yet say whether I like it, but I definitely don't hate it at all. The infrastructure seems well designed, albeit maybe a bit underfunded. It definitely seems to be a cheaper place to live, and it shows in some places. But it's been a decent experience overall so far, I'm looking forward to what I find next!