Praha 1

Sunrise on the Charles Bridge

The first time I came to Prague, and the last time before this week, was in 1977.

Then I arrived on the train from Vienna; the city and the country were still under Soviet rule, and the place looked like something out of ‘Mission Impossible’.

It was grey. And colorless in a way that only Communist Eastern Europe could be.  There were no stores. No billboards. No lights. No colors. No advertising. No nothing.  

The buildings had not been painted or indeed refurbished since the 1930s, if then.  

I was in Prague to work on my Watson Foundation project, photographing Jews of Eastern Europe, and Prague was high on my list. So high, that is was one of the first places I went.

I was 22 years old, and I had just started to travel the world on my own.  

This was long before Prague would become a backpacker’s destination. There were almost no tourists. And those that there were were from Bulgaria or Romania or the Soviet Union.  English was totally unspoken. Russian was the second language, after Czech.

I arrived in Prague with no hotel reservations. Such things were not possible in the Communist Eastern bloc.  But I had read tht there was an Intourist office at the train station, and that I should proceed there immediately upon arrival and secure a room.

When I got to the Intourist office, the woman at the desk, who barely spoke a word of English simply told me ‘nyet’. No hotels. No rooms.  

This too was very much how the Eastern Bloc operated.

There was no point in having a discussion. Nyet. 

No.

Outside the Intourist Office I was approached by an old, broken down, toothless woman completely dressed in black.  She stood no more than 5 foot tall, and her hands were old and mangled. Wisps of silver hair peeked out from beneath a black shawl.

“Room”? she asked. “Zimmer?”

I nodded, and with my best college German, understood that she was offering a room in her own home. 

This was illegal in The Democratic People’s Republic, this kind of entrepreneurial stuff, but she kept motioning me to be silent and followed her. She asked about a dollar a day, which was a lot in the communist economy.  Also highly illegal.

We got on a streetcar and rode for a short distance, then got off and started wandering down some really dark, narrow and unappealing streets.  The whole city was old, and like her also draped in black. Nothing had been cleaned or painted or repaired for years and years.

Finally, we reached her house.  A battered and weathered wooden door on a side street. 

She extracted an iron key and opened the door.

The interior was worse than the exterior.  

A few sparse bits of furniture. An old metal table in the kitchen. A single light bulb.

We walked down a narrow wooden hallway, totally unlit, to a room at the end.

“Zimmer”, she proclaimed, and I dropped my backpack.

It was a single metal cot, with a stool next to it for a table. The walls were old and peeling. A single light bulb on a wire illuminated the place.

Down the hall she showed me the toilet that I would share with her family.  It had no seat. There was not toilet paper, but instead a pile of neatly torn squares of newspaper.

I took it.

So I would not get lost, she wrote down the address for me on a scrap of paper. I was to show this to anyone when I wanted to find my way back.  As no one spoke English, she wrote it in Czech. Then she made me repeat  ‘Praha 1. Praha 1″  That was our neighborhood, so I would not forget. Praha 1.

Thirty-two years later I came back to Prague, and to a vastly different city.

It is alive, vibrant, colorful, exciting, rich, fun, and above all else, painfully beautiful.

Today it looks like Paris or Stockholm.

This time I flew in and we took the taxi to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

They just opened here in Prague, and whenever I can, I like to stay at Mandarin Orientals. I think they are among the world’s best hotels. 

In Prague, they have converted an ancient monastery to a 5-star hotel and spa and it shows.

The place is magnificent. Hushed, as a former monastery should be.  Polished wood compliments the polished marble and glass.  The staff is as highly polished as the floors. And almost as silent.

Our bags were taken to our suite and after a few minutes we decided to head out and take in the city.

There is a gated courtyard to the Mandarin Oriental, and outside, the quaint and pedestrians only cobblestone streets and small shops are an absolute delight.

I had walked only about 30 feet or so when I glanced up at the first street sign I saw and read it so I could find my way back to our hotel. 

There we were.

Praha 1.