the castle has never been the same

I don't see no castle!

 I didn’t stay long in the Czech Republic the first time I visited. I stayed for about two weeks – part of it was a quiet and the other part was a riot. I was traveling all across Europe, a rucksack on my back and pulling along an accordion in a hard case tied down to a luggage dolly. It was rough. Over the cobblestone streets of Prague and the rest of the old towns of Europe, that accordion was bouncing and booming and wreaking havoc. Back then, a man could play just about anywhere on the street. Street music was a thing of celebration and experimentation. When I came back a year ago, I found that the scene of freedom and chaos had died down about. Everything was becoming more and more organized and sullen, a real slap in the face from my three-year life in Tbilisi, Georgia. But perhaps a little quieter is what I need these days – 

But back then was about freedom and chaos. And with an accordion, you’d be surprised about how much easier couchsurfing is. When you’re just a bloke, couchsurfing can be terribly hard. Most women prefer women guests because couchsurfing men are usually on it for sexsurfing, whereas most men just wanted women, because – bet you can’t complete that sentence. But when you’re not a normal bloke, but you’re a bloke with an accordion, things change entirely. Suddenly a new world opens up to you. Both men and women become intrigued, they thing, “Who the hell is this American traveling around with an accordion?! I swear, the CIA or the FSB or whatever spy agency would do a lot of good by investing in some accordions. They can get you anywhere and keep you going for however long. Especially in those days.

It started with couchsurfing. My first request was the golden request. There was Jitka, a student at Charles University, shortish with glasses. Real sweet and living in a flat with six other girls and a guy who slept in the kitchen. An accordion could do worse. Though it meant I ended up sleeping on a small mattress on the floor of one of their rooms, where two of the girls were living. Then once the kitchen man went away for the weekend, I took his spot. The group were environmentalists, vegans, and bicyclists and they complained about all facets of Czech life. There are no vegan restaurants! No bicycle lanes! No nothing. But since I’ve been back, they seem to have been hard at work. There are now lots of vegan restaurants – Plevel and Loving Hut to name a few. As for bicycle lanes – Prague remains to be a not so bicycle friendly town. There are one or two lanes, but the real problem is that the city is so hilly and that the roads are narrow enough as they are and there tend to be a million tourists on any given road. Anyway, trams are cheap, so what’s the point of bicycle? 

A view of Vysehrad, Prague's real castle

While I was staying with the girls, they had a party on the theme of making cities more progressive and we watched a video on the public transit success of Bogota with lots of interviews with the then mayor. After the video, I took my accordion and we went for a midnight jaunt down the main street, Legerova, and across Nuselsky Most (Nusle Bridge) to Vysehrad. What’s weird is that I haven’t been back to Vysrehrad since – not for the entire year and a half that I’ve been living here. The place was beautiful and pristine on that cold, December night. Lamps were lit all up and down the walkways on the ramparts. You see, Vysehrad long ago was the first castle of Prague – according to locals, not according to history – built sometime before the 900s and where the first ideas of building “The Castle” were hashed out. Though the real thing is, is that Prague Castle – “the Castle” – hardly even looks like a castle. Vysehrad, for all you castle mongers out there, looks like a real castle. It’s got all the steep rock walls, the ramparts, ruins, and old stuff. The oldest building in all of Prague is in Vysehrad, the 11th century Rotunda of St. Martin. Someone took off their rucksack and handed out the beers and I started cranking up the squeeze box, singing my small collection of tunes that I knew back then. Let’s leave that to say that walking back was a lot more difficult than walking there.

The mirror maze on Petrin

I was convinced now to see a castle. The Castle. If Vysehrad was that awesome, then the Castle must really be something, especially with how Jitka and the other Czech girls were going on about it. So the next day I set off on my own, finding my way to a bridge and looking out. They had pointed in this direction, hadn’t they? Where was it! I saw a big Gothic church on the hill, lots of spires, lines of beautiful buildings. But no castle! But maybe up on that huge hill, with the wall going down it, maybe there was a castle there? So I walked up the hill, Petrin Hill, and found myself in a weird grove with a very unique, three spired Orthodox Church – the Carpathian Ruthenian Church of Saint Michael the Archangel. The small wooden church was completely out of place to Prague, and historically, it is. It was originally located in Carpathian Ruthenia, in today’s Ukraine, and was brought over in 1929 to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Czechoslovak annexation of that territory. Also on the top of the hill is a weird mirror maze – which isn’t so much a mirror maze, but a mirror tunnel with a painting and cannon in it.

Oh! That castle!

From there, I found an amazing overlook over the city – you could see the entire expanse of the old town, from the Castle to Charles Bridge, to Our Lady on the Tyn. Wait. Rewind. Castle? On the hill I asked someone where the Castle was and they pointed to the hilltop with the giant church. “That’s the Castle?” Being an American, and having lived in Georgia – the country not the state – for such a long time, I was used to big stone fortress structures, this was more of a sprawling palatial complex. To be fair, there are parts of it that look more like the traditional castle, especially the side closest to the river and facing the Belvedere Garden. But when walking through it, the place is just so massive that it doesn’t really feel like a castle so much. Originally, it was the stereotypical fortress style, a bit over 200 years ago, except Marie Teresa had decided to redesign the place in the high Baroque style, and ever since then, the castle has never been the same.

to visit a rain shelter

The park at Pruhonice

Everyone loves a failure as one defines the viewer as a success. And here I am, a failure of guiding a friend from Georgia about Prague, and now just looking at the bubbles in my beer. It's of course typical Georgian fashion to pop in unexpected and typical American fashion to get annoyed by it, and this cultural miscollaboration is what essentially caused this failure of hosting. Especially as I was in the middle of what I expected to be a working weekend, throwing me somewhat off of my peak. As the event spun around me, I went farther from working and closer to getting nothing done, but that was all right in and of itself.

With my wife urging me to go with her to Pruhonice - a park on the outskirts of Prague - I decided to invite him along to share the adventure. But not everyone wants some adventure, especially when it's raining.

Here is a description of what seems to be typical Prague summer weather. When we left our house in the morning, it was hot and sunny, no clouds in the sky. We picked everyone up, my wife's friend and my friend - we'll call Ushangi - and his girlfriend and drove down to Pruhonice. It's not hard to get there, just metro ride and a bus away, but still, easier to drive. By car it takes about 15 minutes to get to, and by public transit it would take about an hour. Prague's not big, but public transit isn't direct either.

When we arrived at Pruhonice, we had picnic food and a guitar, not really knowing what to expect, thinking it was just a typical beautiful park, as it seemed in its pictures. We parked somewhere near a creek, near the main road, without a clear path to a park in sight. We started walking aroud and soon found a fence. As thunderclaps shook the sky, I decided to look down at a map and suggested we try to find a proper entrance and parking lot, rather than just parking on the side of the road.

To our not real surprise, there was a proper parking lot. When we pulled in there, the weather had made the complete transformation from sunny skies to overcast, cold and pouring.

When we made it back from Pruhonice, it was sunny again. And when I talked to Czechs the next week, they all had a clear memory of that day being sunny and hot. Yes, the little bit of sun that they get here during spring really seems to make a much better impression than the typical low hanging clouds.

The castle at Pruhonice

At the parking lot, we discovered what exactly Pruhonice was. Don't go expecting a typical park. In reality, it's a huge botanical garden and a castle (entry to the park is 50 czk). A castle, in some form, had been there since the medieval days in the 13th century. It's most recent manifestation was built by a rich count, Count Arnost Emanuel Silva-Tarouca. After the count married the heir of the castle in 1885, he decided to hire architect Jiri Stilbran and rebuild it as a premium example of neo-Renaissance architecture, with a vast botanical gardens surrounding it. Much later, the count ran into some financial problems and sold the estate in 1927 to the Czech government.

The castle now houses the Institute of Botany and is off limits to the public besides a cafe, bathrooms and a permanent exhibition about the history of the property. The rest of the property, of course, is open. The park itself contains one of the largest collections of rhododendrons in the world, and over 1,200 various plant species, including a fascinating tree with purple leaves that change to green as you approach. The land contains some hills, a large pond, a stream and a lookout tower. It would be easy to spend half a day roaming around the park and admiring the landscape. 

The backside of Pruhonice castle

As I said, when we first got to Pruhonice, it started to rain. We thought we could wait out the rain, so we brought our lunch and beer to the front porch of the shop where tickets could be bought. As we waited, a wedding party joined us, trying to take shelter. At least we weren't them! And later, our friend tried to play guitar a bit, but the clerk was too much bothered by this and kept telling us to be quiet, as that wedding party must be somewhere near and it was impossible for her to work behind a desk doing nothing while our friend was softly playing guitar. 

Our friend had even gathered a small audience, who couldn't quite understand her hatred of the music. We at last went into the park, Ushangi and his girlfriend decided their nice shoes were completely inadequate for the dirt and muddy paths of the park, so instead they decided to huddle back on the porch, probably regretting coming, as they were stuck on a park porch, when they could be huddled in a pub in the center of town. But whatever. Despite getting thoroughly soaked, I liked the park - especially that color changing tree, a fagus sylvatica. We could have stayed longer - and indeed it would be the ideal place to bring a picnic and a musical instrument or two - but made our trip short because of the increasingly heavy rain, and because we had friends back there waiting on us. So we hurried on back, my feeling bad that they neither were able to see Prague or spend time with me. But forget them, there was a fagus sylvatica!