Two Sisters in a Boat and a Spinning Head

The Hubby is working his way toward status with Hyatt, the way some men work toward a black belt. So when my sister and I planned our summer trip to Prague, he booked the hotel on his account, to get credit for the nights. Technically, you only get credit if you actually sleep there, and the Hubby was in America. So he called the hotel ahead of time to let them know his wife would be arriving first. Technically true. He just wasn’t arriving at all, not for another two months.

What he did not mention was that his wife would be bringing another woman.

I checked in alone, looking like a woman whose husband was right behind her. I collected the keys to a room with one king bed, dropped off the bags, went back outside, fetched my sister, and the two of us walked quickly past the front desk.

I could feel the receptionist doing the math. Husband who personally phoned in from another continent. Wife with a mystery companion, brought in after the paperwork was done. I wanted to explain, but there’s no casual way to say “She’s my sister!” that doesn’t sound exactly like what someone with a secret lover would say. And the truth, that we were telling a small loyalty-points fib, wasn’t much better. So I said nothing, and we rode the elevator up in the dignified silence of two women who have shared a bed many times since one of them wet it in the 1970s.

This is the second summer in a row we’ve done this, so it’s officially a tradition, and the best part isn’t Prague. It’s that the Sis and I laugh the way we did as kids, when chocolate milk would spray out of our noses. If you asked me what was so funny, I couldn’t tell you a single thing. We just laugh until we can’t breathe, and then one of us says something like “the fridge,” and we start all over again.

The Fridge

About the fridge. The hotel was the Lindner Hotel Prague Castle, up on the hill next to the Strahov Monastery, and Mark’s points bought us the last cheap nights before it moved from Category 1 to Category 2: 3,500 points for two nights, 5,000 for the rest. On the first night we stocked the minibar fridge with cheeses and yogurts, and the next morning they were exactly as warm as when I pulled them out of my sun-baked backpack. I went down to reception to report it. The woman there explained, patiently, that the fridge was not supposed to be cold. It was supposed to be “slightly cool,” for the minibar items. There was no way to make it colder, and, her face suggested, no reason a reasonable person would want to. The food survived anyway, which says something either about Czech dairy or our standards.

Everything else in the hotel was lovely. There’s a sauna. There’s a free drink in the bar if you skip housekeeping, and we definitely skipped housekeeping. One evening a wine company took over the terrace, so we sipped our wine to live music. And there was a big bathtub. My current apartment only has a shower, so I lay in that tub for a full hour, topping it up with hot water like a woman tending a stew.

There’s also a round reading room off the lobby, where we found a book called Doupě. It tells how an entrepreneur named Petr Chmela and an architect Stanislav Fiala took a row of forgotten garages and turned them into a music club so cool, we sat there with stars in our eyes, googling whether we could visit. Members only, by invitation. We have not been invited.

The Secret Staircase

The Sis came to Prague with exactly one thing on her agenda: to find the secret staircase. It goes through a house called U Zlatého stromu, At the Golden Tree, and it’s a narrow passage of steps that has connected the square at Pohořelec to the grounds of the Strahov Monastery since at least the end of the 16th century. St. Norbert, who founded the order of monks that built Strahov, looks down at you from above the entrance. We found it on the first day. She looked so pleased, that I knew that anything else Prague offered from then on would be a bonus.

Kafka Applauded

Having peaked on day one, we needed a new mission. The Sis picked David Černý, the Czech artist who seems to make statues mainly to see what the city will put up with. So we turned Prague into a scavenger hunt (here’s a guide to Černý statues). His giant bronze babies have puckered slots where their faces should be, like something that escaped from Stranger Things. Outside the Kafka Museum, two bronze men pee into a pool shaped like the Czech Republic, the relevant parts move.

Our favorite was Kafka’s head: a huge mirrored head made of stacked metal layers that spin apart every so often and then click back into a face. My sister watched it for a long time and said, Finally a work of art that shows exactly how I feel. We sat down in the sweet shop right next to it, ordered cake, and watched three more performances. Each time, a little crowd gathered, and when the head did something especially dramatic, they clapped. It was sweet.

Klementinum, the Prettiest Library You Can Only Peek Into

I have wanted to see the baroque library at the Klementinum for years, so I tried to book two weeks ahead, which I thought was plenty. It was not. In summer, the tickets vanish immediately, the half-price 9:00 and 9:30 tours go first. So I emailed them. We’re coming from Slovakia, I wrote, and I have always wanted to see the Klementinum. Is there any way…? They wrote back, reserved two tickets, and told us to skip the line and come straight to the register. We waltzed past a two-hour line of people.

You don’t actually go into the library. You stand in the doorway and look in, because the books are old and precious and we are just one of those. And it’s still breathtaking. The Astronomical Tower upstairs has antique instruments and a 360-degree view of the city. Our guide told us that lots of visitors come because of Dan Brown’s latest novel, and leave disappointed. None of it is true, she said, with the calm of someone who has broken this news to Americans daily since last autumn.

Eating Like a Castle Employee

On the grounds of Prague Castle, beside a tourist restaurant with tourist prices, is Vikárka jídelna, the canteen where the castle staff eat. It’s our favorite hack. The food is good and costs half of what the people next door are paying. We also ate the obligatory duck and svíčková, and at a place called Namastey, some of the best Indian food I’ve had outside of India. Between meals, we squeezed through Čertovka, the narrowest street in Prague, which is so narrow it has its own pedestrian traffic light. Surprisingly, we both fit.

We also went up to Vyšehrad, the city’s other castle hill, to see the Basilica of Sts Peter and Paul. Every inch of the inside is painted in Art Nouveau vines and saints. It’s the only church like that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of churches. On the castle side, there’s a little street called Nový Svět, New World, that looks unchanged for centuries, and in its center, U Raka, a wooden log cabin that seems to have wandered down from the mountains and decided to stay.

The Boat

All I wanted, the whole trip, was to go on a boat. Every day I said, “Tomorrow, the boat.” And every day we ended up on the wrong side of the city, or reached the river after the boats had gone to bed. We did have drinks and klobasas on the houseboat restaurants moored along the Vltava, which was lovely, but a different animal entirely. Like wanting to fly and being offered a banquet on a parked plane.

What we did have was a three-day public transport pass, which also covers a small ferry that shuttles people across the river. One evening, around nine, we caught what turned out to be the last ferry of the day. It dropped us on a little island close to the other bank. We walked around looking for the way off, didn’t see one right away, and pictured ourselves spending the night on the island, munching on warm mozzarella. So we turned around and ran back onto the same ferry, past the ferryman, who had just watched us get off and was now watching us immediately get back on.

He didn’t say a word. He was the grumpiest man in Prague, a person who goes back and forth across the same stretch of water all day, every day, and had long ago stopped checking anybody’s tickets, let alone their reasons. Later we found out there’s a perfectly good path from the island to the riverbank. So that was my boat trip: two crossings of about four minutes each.

On one of the afternoons, we climbed the terraced beer garden in Riegrovy sady, three levels under big trees, and drank some Radler. Another day, we searched for “the best ice-cream in Prague” that led us to Puro. Nobody warns you that even the “small” cup at Puro is massive. We ended up sitting on the riverbank, eating as fast as we could, gelato running down our fingers and dripping into the Vltava.

Same time next year?

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