A Graduation Trip to Prague

Prague has been standing on the banks of the Vltava for more than a thousand years. In the fourteenth century, under Charles IV, it was the seat of the Holy Roman Empire and one of the largest cities in Europe, and it has been collecting layers ever since: a medieval core of narrow stone streets, gothic towers, baroque facades, art nouveau details on the corners. The wars that flattened so many European capitals in the last century mostly passed it by, so the centre is not a reconstruction of itself: the astronomical clock has been ticking on the old town hall since 1410, and Charles Bridge has been carrying people across the river for more than six hundred years.

They call it the city of a hundred spires, and from any high point you understand why: wherever you look there is a tower, a dome or a green roof breaking the skyline, with the castle watching everything from its hill on the other side of the river. But it is not a museum. The streets below are full of life, with terraces everywhere, beer halls where the glasses never stay empty for long, and a constant flow of people crossing from one bank to the other. It is a city made for walking, which is exactly what we did.

We planned this one as a graduation trip. After four years of sharing classes, exams and deadlines, a group of eight of us, almost all from the original group that started together, took the chance to celebrate it with a trip together. We flew in on a Monday night in the last week of July and stayed until Saturday afternoon, which gave us five full days for the city.

We spent them going from one landmark to another: the old town square, the churches, the Gunpowder Tower at the entrance of the old city, and Charles Bridge, which we crossed in the middle of the crowds, between the statues and the street musicians. One day we also climbed to the Žižkov monument, where a giant equestrian statue of Jan Žižka, one of the largest in the world, guards the memorial, with a wide view over the city. And, obviously, we tried the local food and the beer, which in Prague is not optional.

Not everything was in the plans. The apartment turned out to have exactly one bathroom for the eight of us, so showers became an exercise in organization, one we somehow managed to solve. We slept split in two rooms of four, and in mine, someone, who will remain anonymous, snored more than enough for everyone. The nights were spent talking about old anecdotes and asking each other random questions. And half of the group ended up with an Uber driver whose strange comments about football and even stranger Spotify playlist became the running joke for the rest of the week.

The photo from Letná Park was a bit spontaneous. We were passing nearby, and I remembered having read about this viewpoint, so I took the camera and headed to the spot. From up there, the bridges over the Vltava line up one behind another: Charles Bridge in front, full of people from end to end, and behind it the rest of them, with the little boats scattered on the water in between. Of all the photos I took that week, this is the one that stays as the picture of the trip: it shows the beauty of the city better than any other, with the same bridges we had been crossing back and forth all those days.