🇨🇿 Four days in Prague brought us unexpected train cuisine, a deeply overachieving medieval clock, monastery beer, and proof that Czech beer logistics operate on a different scale entirely.
Day One: The Train, the Clock, and the Communist Cola
The journey from Vienna to Prague took just under five hours, and we loved every minute of it. Trains remain a firm favourite — downtown to downtown, no security theatre, proper seats, and actual scenery rolling past the window. What’s not to love?
We travelled with RegioJet, a Czech independent train company whose reviews are, shall we say, spirited. We’d booked months ahead, paid a reasonable fare, and felt quietly pleased with ourselves. Then, a few days before departure, we received an email saying our carriage had been changed — same class of service, no big deal. Then, the morning of departure, a second email: another change, and this time a downgrade. A refund, apparently, was on its way in five business days. We have heard that before.
Moving platforms…again
We arrived at the station in good time, positioned ourselves confidently at our platform, and watched — with increasing unease — as everyone around us suddenly picked up their bags and walked away. A glance at the departures board confirmed our suspicions: the train had shifted platforms. We schlepped our luggage up and down stairs and arrived at the new platform with minutes to spare, joining the mild chaos of a couple of hundred people trying to board at once.
Despite the preamble, the train itself was genuinely excellent. Our “Relax Class” seats were leather, in a two-and-one configuration — just that bit more generous than regular coach. The class comes with a bottle of water, unlimited tea and coffee, and table service for food. We had, of course, packed snacks, operating on the reasonable assumption that train food would be overpriced and underwhelming. We were wrong on both counts.
The menu was cheap and surprisingly diverse. Between us, we managed: cappuccino, mint tea, prosecco, a ham and cheese croissant, a sushi tray, potato chips, apple cake, honey cake, pop, and water — the whole lot coming to around $18 CAD. Cam’s ginger shot, ordered mostly out of curiosity, turned out to be the best he’d ever had. The sushi was, in fairness, firmly in the grocery-store tier, but for under three euros it was hard to object. The ham and cheese croissant was excellent.
🥤 Meeting Kofola
And then there was Kofola.
If you haven’t heard of Kofola, here is the condensed history: during the communist era, Coca-Cola was capitalist and therefore bad. Kofola was Czech and therefore good. It is dark brown, fizzy, sweet, and comes in plastic bottles. That is where the resemblance to Coke ends. When Cam ordered one, the conductor — a man of excellent English and admirable patience — fixed him with a look that suggested this happened more often than it should. He warned, diplomatically, that Czech people liked Kofola but visitors sometimes found it difficult to take. Cam replied that he was a guest in the country and wanted to try local things, which earned a genuine smile and, shortly afterwards, a glass of Kofola.
The verdict: somewhere between Coca-Cola, Dr Pepper, root beer, and something faintly herbal that nobody could quite identify — Vimto, perhaps, after a long day. Meg, fresh from her fermented tea adventure in Albania, elected to stick with prosecco and made no apologies for this. Cam is glad he tried it. He will not be seeking it out again.
A Fairytale City
The train pulled into Prague on time, which felt like a minor triumph after the morning’s adventures. A light rain was falling — our remarkable streak of good weather quietly ending — but we dropped our bags and set out anyway. Old Town Prague is a labyrinth: cobblestones, alleys, facades that look as though they were designed by someone who had read too many fairy tales and decided to simply build one. In places, it really does feel like a Disney set, which sounds like a criticism but somehow isn’t. There is a quality to it — particularly on a cool, damp evening in mid-May, when the crowds have thinned and whole stretches feel almost deserted — that is genuinely unworldly. We hadn’t felt it in any other city on this trip.
We found dinner in a traditional tavern just beyond the main tourist radius. There was a twenty-minute wait for a table. It was entirely worth it.
Before bed, we stopped to watch the Astronomical Clock — more on that tomorrow, because it deserves more than a footnote.
Day Two: Walking Tours, Gas Lamps, and a Clock That Does Too Much
The walking tour ran nearly four hours. With hindsight, this was ambitious. The first two hours were excellent; the second two were the mental equivalent of trying to pour water into a full glass. We nodded, we noted, we absorbed considerably less than we intended. The Jewish Quarter section, in particular, deserved more of our attention than our flagging concentration was able to give it.
What stuck, though, stuck well.
Prague’s history follows a pattern familiar from our weeks in Central Europe: alliances, betrayals, occupation, and Hitler. Always Hitler. But the tour surfaced a few details that set Prague apart. One was the gas lamps. The city converted its old town streetlighting to electricity in the 1980s and almost immediately regretted it. By the early 2000s, the gas lamps had begun returning. Today, from the Old Town Square to the Charles Bridge, the streets are lit by faithful replicas of the originals — and every night, a lamplighter makes the rounds to light them by hand. It is a choice that says something nice about the city.
The Clock That Refuses to Be Normal
The other thing that stood apart was the Astronomical Clock, which we had already seen but now properly understood. The hourly show — the twelve apostles parading above the dial — is the thing that draws the crowds, but it is honestly the least interesting thing about it. The clock itself was built in the 1400s and tracks, simultaneously: three different time systems (modern time, old Czech time, and Babylonian time), the current zodiac sign, the height of the sun, sunrise and sunset, and the phase of the moon. The feast day appears as well, along with which saint is celebrated — at least one for every day of the year. All of this was engineered without computers, without precision machinery, without anything we would recognise as modern tooling. It has been doing its job for over six hundred years. The 9 AM showing, we discovered, is the best: the full performance, the fewest people.
Prague’s Slightly Mischievous Side
Prague also has a playful streak in its public art. Beyond the famous rotating head of Franz Kafka and the Dancing House, we came across whimsical statues scattered through the streets — mushroom umbrellas, figures floating above the pavement à la Mary Poppins, automated aeroplanes with butterfly wings. It gives the old town an additional layer of surprise, as if the city occasionally winks at you.
Lunch on this day was a genuine find. Our guide pointed us toward a cafeteria-style restaurant — a proper Czech cafeteria, not a café in disguise. You collect a tray and an order slip from the cashier, work your way along, have food written down as you go, eat, and then pay at the end. Cam described it as eating at IKEA, which is accurate, and meant as a compliment. The prices were genuinely remarkable for central Prague.
🍺 Day Three: Uphill Both Ways, Monastery Beer, and the Beer Delivery
We set out on the morning of May 14th with a plan to do some walking in the wooded hills above the city. The destination was Petřín Hill and its lookout tower — a scaled-down Eiffel Tower built for the 1891 Prague Jubilee Exhibition, with commanding views over the old town.
We took the bus to get close, which helped with most of the climbing. Most of it. The remaining ascent still took a solid half hour and covered 150 metres of vertical, which is enough to reclassify a casual walk as a hike, particularly when you hadn’t entirely planned for it. At the top, we looked at the tower, looked at each other, and agreed to take the elevator. For fifty extra Czech koruna, it seemed a reasonable investment.
The views were worth it. The city spread out below in that particular way that medieval European cities do — layers of red rooftops, stone bridges, the river curving through it all.
Beer as Motivation
Coming down through the forested paths of Petřín, we noticed a large building on the map: the Strahov Monastery. Right next to it, almost as an afterthought: the Strahov Monastery Brewery. It was approaching lunchtime. The brewery had exceptional reviews. The decision required very little deliberation.
The food was good. The beer was exceptional — the best of the entire trip, and we have been covering some ground on this particular metric. Made on-site, sampled with the appropriate reverence, it made the uphill slog feel entirely worthwhile. Perhaps more worthwhile than it strictly was, but that is what good beer does.
Beer Delivery, Czech Style
Later that afternoon, back near our hotel, Cam witnessed something that tied together a theme that had been running through our Prague days. A truck pulled up outside the pub on the ground floor of our building. The driver climbed out, opened the back, and began feeding a large hose — the diameter of a fire hose — through a small opening in the basement wall. Cam, curious, went over and asked if this was a beer delivery. The driver looked at him with a broad grin and said with a heavy Czech accent: “This is the Czech Republic.” He waved Cam around to the side panel of the truck, which opened to reveal six tanks. Each tank held 1,000 litres. He would be delivering 3,000 litres to this one pub.
The Czechs take their standing as the world’s highest per-capita beer consumers very seriously. Kegs, it turns out, are simply not sufficient to the task. Earlier in the trip, our Bratislava guide had told us that the old town sat atop miles of beer cellars — tunnels and caves running beneath the streets. Prague is the same. Many of those cellars are now restaurants: small and apparently modest at street level, then descending through a staircase or two into dramatically atmospheric spaces with exposed stone walls and copper holding tanks. On our first visit to one, we watched group after group disappear through a door that looked like it should fit perhaps thirty people. We were eventually led through that door, down one flight of stairs to a larger room, and then down again to the second basement. The tanks, Cam had assumed, meant the place brewed its own beer. They are, in fact, holding tanks. The beer arrives by hose from the street.
For dinner, we found another traditional Czech restaurant away from the tourist drag. It was, again, excellent. We are beginning to suspect that Prague simply does this well.
🌅 Day Four: Early Morning, Empty Bridge, and On to Poland
On the final morning, Cam rose early and walked to the Charles Bridge before the city had properly woken up. In high season, the bridge is perpetually crowded; at that hour, in mid-May, it was nearly empty — just the bridge, the statues, the river, and the light. Worth the early alarm.
We then made our way to the train station, luggage in hand, for the journey to Poland — the country where Cam’s mother was born.
Prague surprised us. The reputation for beauty is entirely deserved, but it is also a city with a sense of humour, a willingness to invest in its own history, and a serious commitment to beer that goes well beyond the performative. We arrived sceptical of train food and left unexpectedly converted. We arrived vaguely aware of the Astronomical Clock and departed genuinely awed by it.
We would not hesitate to return.
Travel Quote – Life is a journey. Make the most of it.
Thanks for reading, feel free to leave any comments or reach out with the link above.
— Cam and Meg
