PRAGUE: ARCHITECTURE & TRANSIT

We toured Prague with a wonderful ToursByLocals guide, Eva, for three days. We did not overdo the usual churches but hit a couple.  One delightful pitstop was at a sculptural installation of Franz Kaftka. What was fun about it was that the piece had multiple layers that would swivel the head around on a regular basis.

There are many gothic cathedrals, Romanesque and Baroque palaces.

In addition, there are interesting examples of Cubist architecture from the 1920’s. It’s only been 35 years since the communists gave up power, but  there remain interesting examples of the more brutalist Socialist architecture.

We learned a lot about the history of the Velvet Revolution of 1989 which followed the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and led to independence of Czechoslovakia. The Czech Republic was clearly not given its recognition as part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire but given how established the city appears from high quality residences, it was a major player, just not given its due recognition.

Prague is a very clean and safe city. The streets are cleaned, and the sidewalks are vacuumed. No butts. Garbage is in cans and not on the street.  And no homeless people with shopping carts or tents. I literally only saw maybe two “bums” in 4 days, and they were looking for some left-over bottles of schnapps. We used the trams and subways with our guide to get around and their transit system is very impressive and vast, complements of the communist era, so some good came with those years.