Our room in the Jerome House was small and Spartan, with herringbone floors, two twin beds, and high ceilings. It had those peculiarities I’ve come to expect in Europe—a bathroom that only locked from the outside, “satellite!” television with three grainy channels (one devoted entirely to German dubs of Chuck Lorre sitcoms), the aforementioned twin beds when I clearly requested a double—but I was proud of our little room…And more than a little proud of my prodigious bargain hunting abilities for finding a $40/night rate in the middle of the city. I had never arranged and paid for my own stay in a hotel before. Check another box off on the Preliminary Requirements for Adulthood list for me, will you?

The Jerome House itself was located in a heavily graffitied, though quiet part of the Nové Město, across the street from a whitewashed church, and nearly in the shadow of the National Theater. It’s an ideal location, equidistant from all the major pilgrimage sites in Prague. That first night, after checking in, Cec and I took a stroll down the bank of the Vltava. The weather was drizzly, and that walk reminded me much of wandering around downtown Seattle at Christmastime—vibrant and calm and dark and light and warm and cold; surrounded by people, but blissfully alone. Prague Castle and the Charles Bridge glowed beckoningly before us, and as we made our way north we attempted to take I don’t know how many pictures, but you never quite capture what you see. The famous statues of Charles Bridge cast black silhouettes against the purple sky, but their presence felt more reassuring than imposing; as if they’d join in the fun as well, if they could. Near the Old Town tower we ran into a jazz combo (a bass, a trombone, a clarinet, and one of those Dick Van-Dyke style washboard contraptions), who were quite good, though it felt odd to hear somebody warble out “Summertime” in the middle of picture-postcard Old Town Prague (and the middle of winter). We stopped awhile, gazing out on the waters of the Vltava from the north side of the bridge, watching little droplets of precipitation dancing lazily in the lamplight.

“Oh look, it’s snowing.”

“Nah, it’s not cold enough. It’s just drizzling.”

“Rain doesn’t fall like that. It falls straight down.”

“Not drizzle.”

“Uhuh.”

“It does! I’m from Washington, I know my drizzle.”

Then she gave me one of those Cecelia-ish looks that wasn’t so much “agree to disagree” as “we’ll agree you’re crazy and just move on.”

And move on we did. Charles Bridge connects Prague’s Staré Město (Old Town) to its hilltop castle, and the surrounding village-within-a-village called Malá Strana, or Lesser Quarter. We didn’t really have a plan of action for the evening, so we spent our time in Malá Strana ambling up and down its cobbled streets, admiring the exquisite baroque St. Nicholas Church and peeking into souvenir shops. Eventually, inevitably, we discovered a Starbucks and treated ourselves to frappuccinos and croissants. I know, I know—but you have to realize that we’ve been absorbing Czech culture for the past six months and were missing some of our American amenities (no Starbuckses in Brno, sadly). Even worse, we dined at…McDonald’s later on that night, and it tasted good, damn it.

Day Two was devoted to Old Prague, so we made our way back across Charles Bridge, through Malá Strana and up the hill to the enormous Prague Castle complex. We bought a couple of “short visit” passes, which get you into four out of the eight or so publically accessible sites, and walked the short distance from the ticket office to the Cathedral of St. Vitus. Vitus is easily the most beautiful gothic cathedral I’ve ever visited—granted I’ve only ever visited two or three gothic cathedrals in my life, but there it is. Our—and most of the other tourists’ attention—was devoted to Alfons Mucha’s famous stained glass window, completed in the 1920s. The attention was justified perhaps, given how Mucha’s style, with its glowing golds, deep blues, and vibrant reds, so ideally matches the medium, but I felt sorry for the other stained glass works in the cathedral, which are nearly as stunning, particularly Frantisek Kysela’s rose window. I still have a hard time believing that St. Vitus was constructed over a 600 hundred year time span: every element blends together so elegantly and harmoniously. Like the heart of Prague itself, really, which somehow manages to jam buildings of such disparate styles (from medieval to renaissance to baroque to art nouveau and beyond) together and make it look like it was always meant to be.

After Vitus, the old royal palace was a comparative disappointment. We weren’t allowed to take any pictures (without a “license”), and only a few rooms were open to the public, most of which were empty. One room has the recreation of a throne and some (unidentified) pictures on the walls. We were in and out in less than twenty minutes, with little more sense of the building than it was presumably old, royal, and a palace. Next came the oldest church building in Prague, the Bazilika Sv. Jiří (the Basilica of St. George), whose cheerful red-and-white baroque façade betrays a simpler, more somber interior, filled with Romanesque arches and rough, pale stone. The crypt of St. Ludmila, which can be viewed through an iron grate, occupies the center of the space. Ludmila was the grandmother of (“Good King”) Wenceslaus and was supposedly strangled to death with her own veil on the orders of her daughter-in-law, which is an interesting fact. A more interesting fact re: Ludmila is that she decided to name one of her sons “Spytihněv Přemyslid,” out of what I can I can only assume was some sort of intense, personal vendetta against pronunciation.

By the second day of foot travel, the ergonomic deficiencies of cobblestoned streets become painfully obvious. By the time we reached Zlatá ulička (the Golden Lane), I was ready to have the castle, if not Prague itself, paved with that spongy, foam-like stuff they use in playgrounds. The Golden Lane is a tiny, well-preserved village (well, street, really) nestled along the castle walls. On a sunnier, warmer day I’m sure I would have been enamored with the lane’s jewel-toned little cottages, but some combination of the cold grey sky bleeding the color out of everything, my cartoonishly flat feet, and my claustro-agoraphobia robbed them of much of their charm. The general Disney Worldish atmosphere didn’t really help either; nearly every third house (including, inexplicably, Franz Kafka’s) had been converted into a gift shop. It all felt very pretty, but kind of brittle, empty, and largely devoid of a sense of historicity.

For instance, in the guard tower you can find (beyond, naturally, the tacky leather goods shop) a long corridor filled with bits of armor in glass cases. The armor is from dozens of different time periods in dozens of different styles—Greek, Roman, Viking, medieval, whatever—and all jumbled together. There’s no helpful plaque in sight to explain if we were looking at replicas or something authentic, or why anything had anything to with Prague, and I certainly couldn’t find any logic to the display’s arrangement. I suppose it was possible that the Prague Castle guardsmen just had an extremely active Society for Creative Anachronism chapter going and enjoyed wandering around in crested centurion helmets or staging elaborately costumed battles between Vikings and hoplites, but frankly, I suspect all that armor was shoved in there because, well, it seemed neat and they didn’t have anywhere else to put it.

After a quick stop at Dalibor’s dungeon cell—“Yep, it’s a dungeon.” “Yep.” “Kinda small.” “Uhuh.” “Ready to go?”—our tour of Prague Castle was complete. Vitus: A+, Old royal palace: C, St. George’s: B+. Golden Lane: B-. Next time we’re visiting the Lobkovický palace, which supposedly boasts one of the most impressive private collections in Europe, including a Beethoven manuscript. We’re planning a lot of next times. It was early afternoon at the point and we were both hungry for lunch, so we zig-zagged, looped, reversed, and squiggled (not, ahem, always intentionally) our way down the hill and across Mala Strana to a place called Bohemia Bagel. For a European restaurant, Bohemia Bagel was about as good as it gets: the waiter behaved as if he was entertaining the possibility that he was happy to see us, the atmosphere was cozy, the bagels, tasty, and—perhaps most importantly—the bathrooms, free. Europe does a lot of things right, but nothing offends my American sensibilities more than having to pay to pee. Cec and I were a little more tired than we cared to admit, but after an hour or so of nibbling and resting our feet we paid our bill and left.

“The problem with travelling around during the winter is that it’s too cold to just find a park bench and sit around for awhile. You always have to duck into a café somewhere and pay for a meal in order to rest.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I don’t know, I think I should—never mind.”

“What?”

“Well, I think I should open up a place in a busy part of the city where you, like, where you rent out this quiet little room for an hour or two…and there are couches, maybe, where you can take a little nap or just hang around.”

“So, a…uh ‘place’ where you rent out a room for an hourly rate?”

“Huh. Yeah, that kind of sounds like uh—“

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, have fun with that, Mark.”

I will, Cecelia, I will. I mean…oh, never mind. Across the bridge from Malá Strana, Old Town Square was still humming with Christmas cheer, with lots of busy market stands, a performance stage, rides for kids, and an enormous Christmas tree in the center. We started with a quick look into the other St. Nicholas’s (confusing, right?) and its chandelier before moving on to check out the Astronomical Clock. The clock, attached to the Old Town Hall tower, is the oldest functioning example of its kind, with countless hands, dials, and astrological symbols. It goes off once every hour in an intricate display that’s somehow both slightly underwhelming and entirely worth it. Clockwork saints and skeletons pop in and out of their little compartments, trumpets go off, a bunch of people peek out from the top of the tower to wave at the crowd below, the crowd below waves back, everybody cheers, and…done.

The Kostel Matky Boží před Týnem (Church of Our Lady before Týn, and no I don’t have any idea who, what or where “Týn” is) dominates the square and might be my favorite building in Prague. With its needle-sharp spires, Týn Church has a fundamentally different feeling from Vitus: darker, dustier, and more melancholic. The Christmas trees lining the long avenues back toward the nave were all bare—though whether out of a desire to match the austere atmosphere or because they had simply already taken to down their decorations I don’t know.

We ran out of steam after Old Town Square, and after a vain attempt to catch the sights of the Jewish Quarter without paying, we admitted defeat. We swung up north slightly to snap a couple pictures of the Rudolfinum auditorium (where Dvorak conducted the first ever concert) before walking south along the river back to our hotel. Cec dozed for a bit, and I slipped into a semi-conscious stupor while watching a ski jumping competition on the Eurosports channel. Yes, I’m as surprised as you that I only managed to fall half asleep during two hours of ski jumping.

By dinnertime we were relaxed and refreshed enough to venture out again, so we found a little Thai place called the Lemon Leaf. Of course, I act as if we stumbled upon all these places through sheer serendipity. We didn’t. The Lemon Leaf was recommended in our guide book. Have you checked out the Rough Guide series? You should.

Cecelia assures me that the Thai cuisine at the Lemon Leaf was not, in fact, the greatest in existence, and that I probably had just been suffering from Thai food withdrawal after all these months. Whatever. That meal was incredible. My red curry with beef and peppers had just the right level of spiciness—enough heat to make my nose run, but not so much that it drowned out the flavor. Have I mentioned that I hadn’t eaten beef in months either? Brno (and the rest of the Czech Republic) is big on pork, and we poor folk have been big on ramen. I had been craving red meat; I’d been falling asleep at night dreaming of red meat, and visiting the Big City was the perfect opportunity to indulge. Cec enjoyed some yellow curry with chicken and potatoes—again, incredible—and for dessert we shared coconut rice pudding with mango sauce and vanilla ice cream. Again, seriously, incredible.

For our last day in Prague, we enjoyed another (complimentary!) breakfast of pastries and cold cuts and checked out of our hotel by 10:00. New Town was our focus, so first we visited the Alfons Mucha museum, about a block off of Wenceslaus Square. The museum consists of about four rooms of Mucha’s works, tastefully arranged, and ranging from some of his early oil paintings, to his famous posters for Sarah Bernhardt’s plays, to his overtly nationalistic prints extolling Czech pride. At the back they show a short, half-hour biographical film—I had no idea that Mucha had spent so much time in the United States, or…at all, even.

After Mucha, we explored Wenceslaus Square itself. We browsed our way through a book store, briefly considered catching a movie, and walked up to the National Museum, at the other end of the long, narrow Square. There, we found an enormous photograph of Vaclav Havel hanging from the building, in front of which lay hundreds of red candles, flowers, and condolences. Havel (who died 18 December) really was the father of the modern, democratic, Czech Republic. I wonder if any current American politician’s death would be greeted with such widespread, truly heartfelt grief.

We wandered aimlessly after Wenceslaus Square, and got lost a couple of times. We found—and this time we really did stumble upon them—another gothic gate tower, and a small church (St. Giles’s), and, luckily enough, the exuberantly colorful Jubilee Synagogue. We had a bus back to Brno to catch at 6:00, and we found ourselves in the strange position of dearly needing something to do for the next five hours, but not really wanting the time to go by all that quickly. We had one last major landmark planned—the Obecní dům (Municipal House)—but figured it would only be worth a couple of hours. Fortunately, we went early.

Despite its bureaucratic-sounding name, the Municipal House is actually a concert hall and performance space, built at the turn of the century during a period of intense nationalist fervor. As the unquestioned expert on the genre, I can definitively state that the Obecní dům is the finest Art Nouveau structure in existence. Right, right—hyperbole, sorry. As an amateur travel enthusiast, I can definitively declare that the Obecní dům looks awfully nice. Lunch at the Municipal House Café felt quintessentially European. The ceilings were fifteen feet high, the chandeliers were crystal, the paneling, mahogany, and the waiters wore crisp, white linen. I ordered to lamb stew with fried potato croquettes, sautéed spinach and a tall glass of Urquell; Cec, a salmon and egg sandwich and a coke. Not quite ready to leave—I still don’t think we’re ready to leave—we spent a good hour and a half in our booth people watching, sipping espresso and trading bites of chocolate torte and coconut cake.

The Municipal House is seven stories tall and contains about 650 rooms in total, but only a few are open to the public, and only then through a paid, guided tour. It’s worth the price. Smetana Hall is the centerpiece of the House, where every year they hold a spring music festival that I’d dearly love to attend. Our guide—a matronly, no-nonsense type dressed all in black—pointed out the box from which the President and Lord Mayor open ceremonies before briskly leading us on to a series of themed rooms. Highlights included “the Brasserie,” done up to look like a French café; the Oriental Room, a room with an enormous, elaborate (and empty—it’s quite old) fish tank; and the Mucha-designed Lord Mayor’s Room, covered in murals of Czech history and mythology. The tour concluded with a visit to a performance space in the basement that had been converted from the wine cellar during the last major renovation in the 90s. Naturally, grapes, vines, and bottles were recurring motifs, and a figure with a man’s body, but a monkey’s head (the Czech symbol for drunkenness) grinned out over the entryway.

All too soon, we found ourselves out in the cold and dark, with only an hour left to spare. We cicled Náměstí Republiky for a while, bought a Prague-themed refrigerator magnet (Cecelia’s new tradition), and, not at all prepared to leave, hopped on the subway back to our station. A short, uncomfortable nap on the bus later, we were home. I can understand now why Brno suffers from a bit of an inferiority complex in regard to Prague. Don’t get me wrong; I love Brno. Brno has its own—quite lovely—churches, squares, palaces, and shops, and a surprisingly relaxed vibe for a city of over 400,000 people. It’s a great place to live, really—but Prague is something else. Maybe it’s the energy of the place; that fusion of old and new, gothic and Art Nouveau, quaint and cosmopolitan that thrums through you.

Or maybe it was just the thrill of travelling again. I had foolishly thought that living in Europe would feel like a two-year-long vacation. It doesn’t. Everything routinizes, normalizes. Life in Europe loses much of its old world charm when the everyday mundanities of chores and bills, stress and worry, begin to settle in. That’s the fun of travelling: leaving before the novelty wears off, before you can adapt and catch your balance, before you slow, and stop. I need to see more—of Prague, definitely, but other places too. All the places I said I’d visit before life and school and Cec’s work got in the way. How about Vienna?