(Kingston, Ontario, Canada)

Prague is one of Europe’s most magnificent cities. And in the 1990s, it was still one of the cheapest. So, looking back from 2020, I still can’t believe how we found our accommodation.

We arrived by train in the middle of the day. A former colleague had given me the name and phone number of a good local hotel. We walked off the train, and paused to organize ourselves. We must have looked like tourists, because a 40-ish fellow eventually walked up to us and casually asked if we needed a place to stay.

To this day, I don’t know why we agreed. I guess it was just a gut feeling that we could trust him. I mean, this guy could have taken us anywhere…and we could have been in very serious trouble. I don’t remember the price…maybe the equivalent of $10.00/night. Anyway, we went.

He owned a sprawling old apartment on a street called Sokolovská (near the “Florenc” metro station). It had really high ceilings, and it had been chopped up into a sort of Bed & Breakfast, without the “Breakfast”. The elevator was microscopic. The room layout was unusual, to say the least, but we each had our own space and we could walk downtown. Was it legal? No idea. But it worked out well in the end, and much better than a similar prior experience in Budapest.

Nothing can really prepare you for your first glimpse of the Old Town Square (Staroměstské náměstí) in Prague. It is huge. And the buildings are on a scale that dwarfs similar main squares in other Czech cities and towns. But it’s even more spectacular if you arrive at night, from the southeast, without looking up too much. We looked back and saw the absolutely stunning cathedral. In Czech, it’s called Chrám Matky Boží před Týnem (“Church of Our Lady before Týn”). My 1999 photos didn’t turn out very well, but my 2014 photos of the same location come close to capturing how impressive it was. Except that I was right under the church when I first saw it, and the light rain made it look even darker and more ominous.

I could fill pages and pages with descriptions of Prague’s cultural and architectural sights. But one of the most memorable things was watching a hockey game between archrivals Slavia and Sparta. These were the top two teams in Prague (and the Czech Republic), but we managed to get standing room tickets on the day of the game.

Hockey in Europe can be scary. Not the game itself, usually, but the ferocious rivalries and the aggression that plays out in the crowd. When you don’t speak the language, and everybody starts chanting and saluting in an “authoritarian” manner, you just hope that you remain unnoticed. It was all very different from when I played hockey there in 2014. I wonder if any of the players I played against in 2014 (some of whom played for the national team at one time or another) were playing in the game I watched in 1999.

Stay tuned for more Czech adventures!