A city that takes a small step every century
The only difference left for a hipster to find is in the order of factors to which we will add the two or three most modern things of a city that takes a small step every century . The route mixes without complexes avant-garde buildings, restaurants with tables reserved for Hollywood stars and inns with unfiltered beer where to eat the knuckle with your hands. All a little beyond what all the tourists do, but not too far, because here you are never much more than 20 meters from a Russian, a Chinese or a Korean , the latest buzz in potential new tourists in Prague.
DINNER AT THE KAMPA RESTAURANT
The coolest park in Prague owes its fame to the restaurant of the same name inside. They even describe it on their website as the celebrity dining room and display a photo gallery featuring Bruce Willis, Bill Clinton, Kilye Minogue, Stallone and a whole republic of multidisciplinary celebrities. You can choose to sit outside, on the waterfront and overlooking the Charles Bridge, or in a chic interior with rustic touches . The cuisine is similar to the traditional cuisine served in all restaurants in Prague, but with a mutant touch; namely, innovation but based on what is here. The prices are not to discourage anyone: a dinner at the hype restaurant in Prague can be around 40-50 euros per person.
Kampa, a place overlooking the river
**EAT LOCAL**
Local are three restaurants scattered around the center of Prague that mix design touches here and there (like the wallpaper in the toilets, which look like 80s trucker cabins), home-made food and craft beer . If the recipe book, completely Czech, does not want to know anything about shortcuts and precooked, the beer does not touch the gas. They keep it under vacuum in aluminum tanks with a plastic interior so that the first contact it has with oxygen is in your glass. The bins have the date they were filled so we know how long it's been in there and they know when to pick it up. Although the truth is that they usually end before that day arrives. Sausages and other meats they are provided by a butcher accredited in the letter and they only come from the local Prestice pigs and Chester cows.
A meal at Local
SEE PICTURES OF A LOT
The latest addition of Mucha's works to Prague is the exhibition of the collection of tennis player Ivan Lendl. It is in Veletrzní Palác, where the author's Epic of the Slavs is also permanently exhibited. Are 20 large paintings, the work for which Mucha wanted to go down in history . As a bonus, you can get to the museum by tram and discover that the monumentality of Prague is not only a matter of the center and extends through a succession of Parisian-style neighborhoods.
See Mucha paintings in Prague
LOUNGE IN THE GARDEN OF THE FRANCISCANS
Right in the center, the garden of the Franciscans is one of those urban oases where all haste has its grave . It is the ghost of a monastic orchard, a place of rest and slow pace in the commercial center of Prague. It often goes unnoticed by tourists. It is entered from Jungmann square and invigorates like a tea.
PIMPLAR IN A CLASSIC BREWERY
If you have gone to Prague for beer, it would be a shame if you only drank the typical industrial ones. Come to one of the classic breweries, with that air of sleepy interwar elegance , when things were simpler and a good meal was the one with the best sauces and the one with the most meat. Sausages, knuckle, goulash and other traditional Central European dishes at almost popular prices . There is Pivovaski Drum and there is also Staropramen and they both serve their own unfiltered beer.
SEE MODERN ARCHITECTURE
Gothic, baroque, art deco, functionalism... what is wonderful about the architecture of Prague is that all this hodgepodge fits together like a secular puzzle , including Soviet buildings that only (or mostly) excite purists. There are a few opportunities to see if the 21st century is going to continue to suit the center this well. One of them is offered by Frank Gehry's Dancing House, which seems to pass with flying colors, and another by the award-winning River City offices, which remains to be seen.
Frank Gehry's Dancing House
LIGHT UP WITH A CUBIST STREETLIGHT
You've seen cubist paintings and maybe even cubist buildings, but what you've never seen is a cubist lamppost. At least until you get to Prague, which has the only one in the world. Is in the New Square (Jungmannovo Namesti), next to the Franciscan Garden , and evidences the kinship with pictorial and sculptural cubism: mathematical reasoning embodied in lines and volumes, but of a scientism dynamited by a composition the sea of dream.
Prague, step by step
GO CRAZY WITH DAVID CERNY
Guns, giant babies that climb buildings, Wenceslao on horseback, but upside down, a man hanging from a beam at the top of a building and two men who pee in front of each other and draw letters with their squirts. It is the legacy of David Cerny, the craziest sculptor we know of and who happens to love they have allowed to play with the center of Prague.
David Cerny frolicking in Prague
GO UP TO PETRIN PARK
You take the funicular in Ujezd street, you climb the 500 meters of rails and you are already in front of the Petrin tower, which is reminiscent of the Eiffel Tower. Built two years after the one in Paris, it was completed in four months. Now all that remains is to climb its 299 steps and reach one of the most complete views of the city, with the castle very close. The park, little intervened for the most part, is a place frequented by native pedestrians . Couples come here on May 1, Czech Valentine's Day, to kiss under the leaves of the trees below. If you do, they say, you get another year of marital prorogation in which everything will be fine.
Petrin Park, the best views of Prague
DISCO
The most famous club in Prague is next to the bridge, it has five floors, it is advertised as the biggest club in Central Europe and it is called Karlovy Láznê. It has that generic eurodisco look to which tourists of all ages who manage to fill it contribute a lot. Literally, of all ages: in front of me, in the queue, there was a group of spring breakers followed by two very old ladies and much more partying than them and me. On each floor there is a different atmosphere and music that is indicated on the screens at the entrance. Your easygoing hipster soul might as well find the one to dislike the least between the disco on the first floor or the 80s and 90s music on the second floor. And if not, you always have the views of the Charles Bridge area. You can also try it at the Lucerna Music Bar , a dance hall full of nooks and crannies in the basement of a shopping center where the locals beat the foreigners (in number and dance). Everything here is eighties and nineties nostalgia reinforced by videos of when we all had more hair or less belly. And then there is the Duplex, in the very central Vaclavske Namesti square, a rooftop disco in which the main show is, of course, the views of the center.
SLEEP AT THE AMBASSADOR HOTEL
It may not be the most modern, but it is well located, its five stars do not cost what their Spanish equivalents and it is one step away from everything the novice tourist wants to see. Of course, its rooms have an air conditioning that cannot be regulated and a carpet that cannot be escaped.
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