I finally slept fairly well last night, so when we got up at 07:00 it didn’t feel too bad. It may have only been a little after sunrise, but our goal was to reach Kus Koláče, a bakery in Prague 10, in time for them to open at 08:00. They are a very popular bakery for locals, and one that the Honest Guide says does the best koláč in Prague. With a review like that, we had to try them. They were after all a Czech tradition, unlike the trdelník.
A koláč literally translates to cake, but it’s traditionally a round pastry with a filled centre and optionally sprinkled with crumbs. Whilst poppy seeds are a common filling, most places will do fruit options as well. We’d already seen cheaper, and simpler versions of the koláč in various supermarkets, but knew that ones from this bakery would be considerably better.
By the time we were on the road, it was 07:00 and still a little cool out. We headed south, past Tesco, and turned left at a park by the New Town Hall. This was then a steady climb most of the way to the bakery. I think the hills and stairs from the last couple of days had taken their toll on Carmen, and found we needed to walk a little on the steepest parts of the hills.
We arrived a little before 08:00, with two people ahead of us in the queue. We could see through the window that they were removing freshly baked koláč from the oven. Within minutes of us arriving the queue got bigger and bigger. The first person ahead of us to buy koláče bought three box loads of them. Someone else jumped the queue and took a few more boxes away - it seemed to be a preorder. At this rate they would run out in mere minutes of opening. We bought one blueberry, and one raspberry, and then carried them back to the nearest metro station, and from Můstek walked back to the apartment to try half each.
They were still lukewarm when I cut them in half. The blueberry one had a slightly muted taste and was maybe a little creamy from the quark; whilst the raspberry one was a little more tart.
It wasn’t long before we headed back out, taking the 18 tram to Folimanka Park. We were there to see the airshaft of a Cold War Nuclear bunker that had been painted to look like R2-D2. Unfortunately it meant going up yet another hill. I’d got a feeling that Vyšehrad would mean another hill still to climb after this one, but didn’t really want to mention that just yet. I think we’d probably already spent too much time on our feet, and walking up hills this week.
In the nine years since it was painted, the R2-D2 design has been worn down, graffitied on, and damaged. It’s a shame to see, but the Minions one further down the hill was in a worse state. Above us, between the park and the other side of the valley of the Botic stream, was the Nusle Bridge. It felt like an impressively high road - the sort of construction you wouldn’t really see in England.
Whilst we were in this park, I thought it worth checking out the viewpoint known as Bastion XXXI. It is part of the New Town city walls, and on top of them are some pieces from after the thirty year war. They also get mentioned in the Secret of Secrets, a Robert Langdon story by Dan Brown. It was what put it on my radar, and partly why we were here.
To reach the viewpoint it meant climbing up many steps from the path we’d just walked down. Carmen was sick of stairs by this point, so she decided to sit down and play Candy Crush whilst I tackled the stairs. In the end, it turned out Carmen had the better idea. At the top there was a locked gate in the wall, and on the other side a big drop, and a spiral staircase leading up. With no other way up, I headed back down the stairs and looked at the sign I’d passed on the way up. It was in Czech, and said something about the start of March until the end of July, and most likely it was saying it’d be closed for repairs during these dates.
To reach Vyšehrad we had to walk up another steep hill, possibly the steepest one of the trip. Once through the gateway in the wall, there’s a choice to make: which way do we go to explore? The route we chose led us into a church graveyard that apparently has some notable people buried there. They weren’t names we recognised, but you could clearly see a lot of money had been spent on graves here.
On the other side of the graveyard is the neo-gothic Church of Saints Peter and Paul, a restaurant, and a school. I thought there was probably more to see up there, but once we’d stopped by the public toilets there (25 CZK again), we headed back down. After having gotten us to walk all the way up there, I didn’t really want to suggest we walk around too much. It was pretty cold up there anyway.
When we left, we walked past the Emmaus Monastery and Mladota Palace (Faust House), until we reached the Baroque Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius. I’d thought maybe we were done with steps for the day, but when we got there, we saw there were steps up to this church. Once upstairs we realised that what we wanted to see was actually in the crypt, through the door at ground level. Typical.
The crypt was where Czechoslovak parachutists had hidden, and then fought and died between 27th May and 18th June of 1942, after their attack on Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich had been a high-ranking SS officer who was one of the most zealous advocates of the Nazi’s ‘final solution’ - as one of the principal architects of the Holocaust. Their attack hadn’t killed him outright, but he did later die of his wounds. The crypt is now a National Memorial to the Heroes of the Heydrich Terror.
Slightly further down the road is the ‘Dancing House’, originally called ‘Ginger and Fred’ by the Canadian-American architect, in reference to the dancers Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. We didn’t walk over to it, as it was past lunchtime, so we photographed it from where we were, and then headed towards the New Town Hall. The town hall has a tower you can pay to go up, but based on the location, what we’d seen so far, and what we still planned on seeing, it didn’t seem worthwhile. The weather also seemed to be threatening rain - we were convinced we’d already felt a few spots.
For lunch, we stopped at Bageterie Boulevard. This is a Czech fast food chain that specialises in baguettes, and was a place Carmen had got vouchers for from her half marathon race pack. The vouchers were for very specific meals, and I didn’t really want tartar sauce on my potato wedges, so I decided to pay a little extra and pick options I did actually want to eat. I went for a caesar baguette with wedges. Here, the sauce included isn’t smothered over the wedges, but is in a little pouch on the side of the cone they come in - so would have been fine in the case of those discounted options.
Across the road from where we ate was the entrance to another shopping mall - the Lucerna Palace. It was built by the grandfather of former Czech Republic president Václav Havel between 1907 and 1921, but was nationalised by the Communist government in 1952. After the Velvet Revolution, it was returned to the brothers Václav and Ivan. Inside you can find a functioning paternoster (something I experience frequently whilst at the University of Leicester), and a functioning cinema built in 1909 - one of the earliest in Europe. Neither of those was what I’d put it on our list for though, as they also have another art piece by David Černý. This one is a king, potentially Wenceslas, sitting on an upside down horse, suspended from the ceiling.
Wenceslas Square was busy when we exited the mall, but we only stayed there long enough to photograph the National Museum, and visit another souvenir shop, before making our way back to the apartment. Before we got there, we stopped by the Choco Café for tea and cake - this one is a table service cafe. I had a peanut butter cheesecake that was far too filling for me. Carmen made a better choice: chocolate cake. It was a lot busier and noisier in this cafe than the other one we’d been in, but it was worth trying due to it being so close to the apartment also. By the time we got back, it was 15:00.
At 18:00 we decided we needed to head back out into the Old Town to find somewhere to eat. That should be simple enough, you can’t walk for more than a few minutes without finding somewhere, but the challenge was finding somewhere that didn’t feel like a tourist trap, and was something we both wanted to eat. Our wandering made us realise just how close Havel’s Market actually was as we found shortcuts through backstreets we’d not previously explored. Sure it’s handy to have a list of potential sights to see, but it’s the actual exploring that tends to be the enjoyable part.
We found ourselves once again at the Old Town Square, where live music and dancing were captivating audiences. Slightly further round, Czech football fans were being filmed cheering outside of a pub. From what we understood, Czechia had just qualified for the World Cup for the first time since 2006. The Honest Guide, a few years back, had recommended Restaurace Mincovna as a decent place to eat on this square, and also as a place where you can get Czech meatloaf. Sadly the place has changed hands since then - the prices have gone up, and meatloaf is no longer on the menu.
Looking around some more, we were seeing that most places would mean the equivalent of about €20 per person for just pasta or a burger. After the places we’d eaten so far, it seemed a lot. Ultimately, we returned to Havel's Crown (Havelská Koruna) where we’d had lunch yesterday. This time I went for the pork schnitzel and potato salad for 200 CZK. With a short diversion for Carmen to get a mint tea, we returned to the apartment for the remainder of the evening.