Day 1, Prague

We started our trip out on the right foot from the airport with a delicious tomato mozzarella with basil sandwich. Since delta doesn’t fly to Prague directly we had a connection in New York. There Jerry and I selected our reading material for the trip. Jerry went with Paved, a cycling magazine, a Triathlete magazine and he brought his running book. I brought The Five Love Languages by Dr. Gary Chapman, a book that’s been on my to read list for a long time and now I’m finally able to get to it with school being over and get to the bottom of what this love language I speak is, and I purchased a Science Illustrated magazine. The flight went well apart from the fact that Jerry lost his fairly new cashmere sports coat…very sad, bet we left it in JFK. We left JFK Thursday evening.

From the plane you can clearly see all the rapeseed fields, patches of yellow all over the towns surrounding Prague.

We arrived in Prague Friday at noon local time. We checked our bags at the hotel, The Alchymist, and began walking around the cobblestone streets of Prague to find a place for lunch. I loved looking at all the buildings, their architecture and details never cease to amaze me.We found a nice lunch spot where Jerry enjoyed some Czech beer with salmon and I settled for the caviar and tomato salad.The restaurant was adorable and lunch was great. We walked the streets a bit more before heading back to our hotel to check in.

The Alchymist is a historic hotel decked out in beautiful Victorian decor, paintings, and souvenirs.Each room in the Alchymist is named after a famous person, we had the privilege of staying in the room named after the brilliant Johannes Kepler. After checking in we headed southeast to the New City area. We saw the Charles Bridge from a bridge south of it and enjoyed the views it had to offer. We made it to the National Museum seeing many great sites and buildings along the way. After that we continued into the shopping streets of Prague. We kept seeing a lot of the same stores we have at home at first, but later on we found areas with unique shops and boutiques.

Why Prague? My mom grew up in Lviv, Ukraine and would often talk about their frequent trips to then Prague, Czechoslovakia. As a child my mom had a couple skirts that were made in Czechoslovakia and after she grew out of them her younger sister wore them, then my older sister wore the skirts when she grew up, Kristina and I wore them when we grew into them, and Dina, and now Lydia my youngest sister as well. My mother always used these skirts as her proof that clothing made in Czechoslovakia was the best quality clothing to date. Today the Czech Republic is separate from Slovakia but I always had that sentiment of Prague that I got from her and wanted to see the city for myself.

Charles Bridge in the distance with the “New City” on the right of it.

The National Museum

As we searched for a place to have dinner we stumbled onto this chocolate store. Since we were hungry we hopped in there are grabbed a few unique pieces of chocolate some including almond truffle, rum truffle, and marzipan dipped in chocolate.
We tried to find a Czech cuisine restaurant but ran into a great looking French restaurant so we ended up eating dinner there. For appetizers we has escargot, first time I had it in the shell still and had to pull it out, and foie-gras. For dinner I went with the baked fish casserole with a side of rice and Jerry chose a steak topped with truffles and a side of potatoes.

Our meals were delicious and as we sat finishing our bottle of wine the waitress brought us each a cordial, it was, from what I understood, a pear infused liquor mixed with cognac and it was unbelievably smooth and delicious. We asked to see the bottle it came in in hopes of finding it in a local liquor store. They showed us the bottle but pretty much told us that we won’t find it in the local stores. Their supplier was having dinner there at the time and gave us his card, etc…we’ll see if we come home with a couple of these bottles.

After dinner we made made our way back to our hotel unintentionally taking the long scenic route and stopped at out hotel dinning room for dessert where we enjoyed teramisu with amaretto before heading up to Sir Kepler’s room to call it a day. First day in Prague was a great success!