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Debra's
Diary ~ Date: July 2007
Where Budapest
had been too hot, Prague turned out to be a wee bit chilly,
and a bit on the rainy side which posed a bit of a challenge
to make it look good in the small measure of sunshine we did
get. The hardest part though was obtaining our filming
permits; remember, we don't go into museums or parliament
buildings, we film in the street like any other tourist (with
a slightly larger camera and radio mikes and tripod
admittedly) and getting permission to do this was like pulling
teeth. When we finally did obtain them - all official
with stamps all over them - they turned out to be police
permits for the centre of Prague, in case our filming caused a
stir. We should be so lucky. It was all a bit OTT,
and some of the fees for filming were definitely unrealistic -
haven't they heard there's no money in TV?
Filming
in Prague is a challenge - so many beautiful buildings, how do
you show them all? We'd worked out a walking trail
through the city, as we do in all our destinations, but Prague
was difficult. Whereas there were wide streets in both
Budapest, Barcelona and Krakow, Prague was very gothic - which
meant narrow streets that made it hard to get a proper
perspective on these wonderful buildings.
My favourite, without a doubt, was Ginger and Fred, the
Dancing House. I loved it, which is unusual for me as I
don't generally like modern buildings. And not many
people know that we did the piece to camera for it huddled
behind a bus shelter, trying to keep out of the cold wind and
dodge the rain showers!
Prague
has a great atmosphere, and we stayed in a hotel on Wenceslas
Square, which gave us instant access to the centre of
town. We met Vaclav Vitek in the Petrin Park during a
sudden hot spell, and discovered the really charming
restaurant at Nebozizek, where we decided to spend our last
afternoon as well, before going to the airport. Prague
seemed cosy and almost hunched in comparison with the
grandness of Budapest, and it has to be said that the Vltava
river is no match for the Danube. The Charles bridge is
venerable, but the city burghers don't celebrate their bridges
as much the Budapest ones do. The trams were easy to use, and
got us up to our starting point at the top of Petrin Park both dry and
relatively comfortable, temperature wise, but I found the
endless cobbles were hard-going for my hips - not my feet
which were well-shod - the unevenness of surface tended to
cause some nerve-trapping that was unhelpful.
Our
visit to Ufleku brewery was very entertaining, especially at
night when they offer communal dining, basic but good food,
and their special brew whilst being serenaded by various
musicians with accordions and tubas. And the beer was
really good, we tried several in our never-ending quest to
bring you true representation...although I kept a tight rein
on the sausage-eating, tasty as they were.
There
were few reminders of their Communist past; but the ones that
were there were particularly arresting - at the foot of Petrin
Hill, the memorial to the 'victims of Communism' (by which
they mean anyone who suffered during this regime) is shocking
in its depiction in bronze of parts of a man becoming whole
again after the fall of Communism. I had a long-standing
desire to see the memorial to Jan Palach; as a young teenager
I had been profoundly shocked at his self-immolation in
protest in 1969, and his name had stayed in my memory since
then. On the spot where he burned to death there is a
flattened bronze cross that undulates across two humps cobbled
in white - one for Palach, and the other for another young man,
Jan Zajic, who also chose this shocking way to protest a few
weeks later -
they were both 19. Further down the square is a little
shrine with a marble stone, etched with the likeness of both
young men. Very moving and surprisingly hard-hitting in
its simplicity. The Jewish cemetery was also a poignant
visit, the Pinkas Synagogue no less so. There are
side-trips available to the Nazi concentration camp at Terezin
for those with a deeper interest.
We
took a boat trip on the Vltava which was pleasant and gave us
a broader perspective of the riverside buildings, and we also
visited the old castle, although it was a bit of a tortuous
route with tram lines up and road works which made it a bit of
an unattractive road walk. We walked down through the
gardens from Prague Castle, which ended rather abruptly
with closed iron gates and a rather worrying set of narrow
foot bridges that side-stepped the gates and brought you out
onto the road opposite some rather spectacular graffiti -
either that or we obviously took a wrong turn.
Prague
doesn't dwell on its past dark decades - it's full of life and
foreigners, and if some of them are a bit too rowdy on a
Saturday night and have instantly recognisable UK regional
accents, it doesn't detract from its easy-going
vibrancy. Food was patchy; in the tourist areas it is
expensive and not necessarily good, but step away into a
side-street or down into a cellar restaurant and it instantly
improves in both quality and price, and the beer is very, very
good.
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E-mail
Debra at:
grindelwald_prods@lycos.com
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