JUNE12

June 12 — Prague

Prague feels like the city. The buildings are packed so tightly together that even when they’re only five or six stories tall, they start to feel like skyscrapers. No gaps, no breathing room, just walls of old stone and ornament pressing in from every side.

I started the day with chlebíček from what felt like the perfect chlebíček place. It was busy, which made it even better. I was walking up the street and kept seeing people carrying them, eating them on the way to work, just casually having these beautiful little open-faced sandwiches as part of a normal morning.

The first one I had was basically the most ornate bagel-adjacent thing imaginable. It had this rider-cream-cheese-type spread on it, ham folded very neatly, parsley, little garnishes, everything arranged with complete confidence. It was delicious. And honestly, it’s much easier to chomp than a bagel.

That’s the American problem, I think. We take a bagel, which is already a perfect chewy object, and then turn it into a sandwich. But a bagel sandwich is an incredibly difficult sandwich to eat. That’s why I almost never get them. You can’t have that much chew and also expect to cleanly bite through ham and egg and whatever else is inside. It becomes a full structural failure unless the bagel is specifically engineered to be easy to bite through, which kind of defeats the whole point of a bagel.

But chlebíček? Infinitely easier. It knows what it is.

I got three of them, and the second one was even better than the first. It looked like it had ground beef on it, but the texture was almost like sushi or tartare or something. I still don’t really know what it was, but it was absolutely fantastic. There was a quarter of a hard-boiled egg, piped cream cheese around the border, and more garnish that somehow wasn’t just decorative. It actually made the whole thing better.

The bread was different too. That was part of it. This whole thing was an insane experience. There were probably twenty-five different kinds in the case. I should’ve taken a picture, or pulled up the website, but I’m sure the selection changes all the time anyway. I don’t know what kind of breakfast place in America gives you that many options at that level of quality.

Their bread game over here absolutely slaps.

Yesterday I had pork knuckle, which I still don’t fully understand. It looked like a knee. Or a ham hock. Or maybe a turkey leg if the turkey had been doing medieval labor. They called it pork knuckle, so I accepted that. They served it with rye bread, and the rye was fantastic. Beautiful smell, perfect texture. They didn’t give me butter, which was the only problem, but still. The bread alone was elite.

The third chlebíček had rye bread too, and it went perfectly with whatever the sushi-ground-beef mystery topping was.

At one point I FaceTimed Mum near this tower. I’m going to call it Baroque, though I’m not sure. It had spires, no buttresses, and there was some kind of monument in front of it. Very strange. The guy in the monument looked like a communist. He had the communist mustache. There were two Sphinx-looking things with cannons and boobs inside the fencing. These things put the Egyptian Sphinx to shame. They weren’t house-cat-bodied Sphinxes. They were buff puma-cat Sphinxes.

On the way into Prague, we had talked bread with our Uber driver. He was from Ukraine and had been here for three years, for reasons you can probably guess. We got onto the subject of bread, and honestly, the bread situation in America is pathetic. When most people hear “bread,” they think of square Wonder Bread. Plastic bread. An atrocity. It’s so bad.

Later I chatted with a mother and son from Berlin. We talked about architecture. There’s a building about two blocks from our apartment that I thought was Baroque, and she said one of the defining characteristics was the circular archway, along with the mix of patterns, colors, and shapes. That kind of mishmash of different architectural themes. We also talked about the colorways and how horrible the ground level of many buildings is now because of the shops. It’s shocking. You’ll have this gorgeous old building, and then the bottom floor is just visual chaos.

The main event of the day was St. Vitus Cathedral and Prague Castle.

There’s a café attached to our apartment, and there is literally a door from the apartment into the café. We tried to go in through it, but the owner was rude and awkward and weird about the whole thing. The coffee was terrible, and she didn’t even bring me water, though I guess that part doesn’t really matter.

After that, we headed toward St. Vitus. The streets were busy, lots of cobblestones, and driving on them looked almost annoying enough to be illegal. We decided to walk instead of taking the tram so we could see the city. We crossed the Charles Bridge while it was still relatively quiet.

As we approached the castle, we had to choose a way up. We ended up going through tunnels and winding streets. At one point I ducked into some university or Anglo-American university-looking place and asked the café owner if I could use the bathroom. They were very nice. I think they were American, and they were talking about tariffs and commercialism or something while I was in there.

We continued upward, and I stopped to capture a 3D scan of a centerpiece sculpture that I planned to look up later. There were a few pieces around that I thought might be Art Deco. Then I found another Baroque-looking building with a repeated dark pattern wrapping around the upper perimeter and took a bunch of pictures. Sam said people were looking at me strangely, but I’m used to this.

We kept climbing toward the castle. The cathedral really does look down over the entire city. You can imagine people using it as a reference point from almost anywhere in Prague.

Right before the castle, on a narrow incline lined with shops and restaurants, we randomly found a bar that claims to be the oldest bar in Prague. I asked ChatGPT later and I guess that checks out. We ended up going back there later, and it was a blast.

At the top of the hill, a large crowd had gathered in front of the castle. The guards, or military, or whoever exactly they were, were doing some kind of ceremony. There were horns. People wearing red. Soldiers with horns appeared in one of the windows, while other soldiers in what looked like blue felt lined up outside. There were also military police with berets, guns, and canteens.

I still don’t know why I wanted to climb onto the wall, but I did. Someone asked me to get down.

After the ceremony, we headed into the castle complex. It has multiple layers. The way it’s laid out, there’s this massive castle wall perimeter surrounding what is basically the actual castle grounds, and inside that courtyard is St. Vitus Cathedral.

Then we walked out in front of it.

It is absolutely inspiring. Mind-blowing. You can’t even process it properly. There’s too much to take in at once. The scale, the detail, the darkness, the height, the way it dominates the entire city — it’s hard to even form a thought about it while standing there.

By the end of the day I started to feel like shit, so I decided I’d write the rest down later and walk back to the apartment. I finally found water. The alley where our apartment entrance is located has two very different directions you can go. One way is full tourist chaos — bars, noise, the whole thing. The other way is quieter, more formal, more real restaurants and calmer streets.

I went the quieter way.

Much nicer.