Friends in higher place
Writing up-to-date newsletters takes the kind of discipline I’m hoping to find in 2025. For reference, our trip to the Czech Republic was in mid-December. I’m going to catch you up.
We loved Japan. And the universe must have loved us in Japan too, because our exit was traumatic.
TLDR – Here are some highlights:
Virgin Australia moved our flight from Haneda Airport (close) to Narita Airport (very far) without telling us or sending tickets. After a long and tedious phone call, we got the tickets and missed check-in. Thankfully, the staff at Qatar were able to get our bags onto the plane and literally run across the airport with us to make sure we didn’t miss boarding. Sweaty, crying, and hungry, we just made it.
Several passengers on the flight were rude and feral. I wondered if they’d ever been in public before. The worst was the old man seated behind us, who kept reaching through the seats and punching Molly. The crew ended up moving us out of the firing line.
Molly was sick with a raging fever by the time we got to Doha and almost passed out while the staff at the lounge told us our free access passes didn’t work.
Prague
“This isn’t real” is the sentence on high rotation for me at the moment. It began in Prague.
We took a taxi from the airport to the hotel, driven by a young man named Vladyslav. We passed small clumps of hardened snow and brutalist-style apartments on the fringes of the city. Minutes later, Vladyslav was careening through what must have been a movie set—cobblestone streets, pastel and frescoed facades, and people huddled around outdoor heaters drinking mulled wine.
Our first brekkie was spread across several tables and a bain-marie. Bread, cakes, cheese, cold cuts, fresh fruit and raw veggies, yogurt-filled crepes and the like. In a room that’s seen centuries of breakfasts before me, I sat beside a Christmas tree eating like this.
The remainder of our time in Prague was spent in a quirky three-bedroom apartment that Molly had organised almost a year earlier as a birthday surprise. "It’s so freaky, isn’t it great?" she said with a huge smile when we arrived. I am spoiled.
Molly and I got in first, and six of our friends rolled in in pairs over the day. We hadn’t seen Jen for more than a year, Claire and Andy for six months, Maddie and Henry for five, and Ruby for a few weeks. Being in the same room again was magic.
Prague is known for its Christmas markets, and there were heaps dotted around the area we stayed in. The big ones mostly sell mulled wine, roasted chestnuts (which Andy swears are a meat substitute), hot chocolate, wurst, and chimney cakes.
On our first day, we bought snacks and a few bottles of wine from the stalls outside our house, and caught each other up on our trips across the globe.
The next day, Rick Steves’ free guided audio walking tour took us on a journey through the city. It’s not easy to coordinate a podcast listening party between eight people who are walking through a Christmas market, but we got the timing roughly right and paused to take in the sights often.
The tour started in Wenceslas Square, looking towards Prague’s National Museum. The museum had once been a symbol of the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia, with bullet holes from the machine guns of invading soldiers covering the museum’s façade. In 1969, the Czechoslovak Communist authorities ordered for the holes to be covered, but the workers deliberately did a bad job. You can still see the patches of different-coloured plaster they used to cover the holes.
The route took us inside to see examples of Art Deco architecture in the Lucerna Arcade and Art Nouveau at Prague's Municipal House too.
Prague is a treasure trove of romanesque, gothic, renaissance, baroque, cubist, and rococo building styles, although I’m not sure I could confidently tell you what any of those look like. The city made it through two world wars without being destroyed, and the beautiful building styles that have emerged there over centuries still stand today.
Prague’s famous Charles Bridge was our route between the monuments, shops and bars in Old Town and our apartment. It’s a medieval stone arch bridge that crosses the Vltava River, and there’s a river torrent of people on top too. We only crossed it on weekdays because the weekends were packed, and I’ve never forgotten this image from the crowd crush at Falls Festival in 2016.
The Charles Bridge has a row of gas lamps along each of its walls, manually lit by a very tall man in the evenings during Advent. It’s a huge spectacle, and because of the 2016 Falls Festival crowd crush, we watched it from the side of the bridge. He wears a black uniform fitted with a red cape and takes long, certain strides towards each lamp, igniting the gas with a small hook on the end of his pole. He nods once before moving to the next lamp, flanked by hundreds of awestruck onlookers. He is a star.
We went to a flea market on our last day in Prague. It was really cold and really weird. I try to go into second-hand shops with a list in mind so that I’m actively seeking out things that I need, but machetes, bootleg tracksuit sets, Nazi memorabilia, a glass dildo with a dead fly in it, and vintage watches weren’t on my list.
I did come away with a photo of a man carrying a giant bag of cabbage, though.
Honourable mentions from Prague include the view from Vyšehrad, the vego restaurant chain Dhaba Beas, which we visited twice, the staff at the karaoke bar who let me sing Amy Winehouse, and the 50/50 ratio of wine to food I saw in every supermarket (I don’t know where people in Prague buy groceries).
Also shoutout to Henry for going the extra mile to take group photos:
Český Krumlov
We said goodbye to Jen and caught a bus to a small town called Český Krumlov. She’s just down the road from us in London, so we’ll see her again soon. Claire, Andy, Maddie, Henry, Ruby, Molly, and I arrived on Sunday night and learned quickly that most things in town are closed on Mondays. In a way, it took the pressure off, giving us licence to wander aimlessly down cobblestone streets looking at other people’s homes—an activity I’m quite fond of these days. Especially in Český Krumlov. It’s a fairytale town.
The Christmas markets were on, which made the square lively. They sold the classics: chimney cakes, mulled wine, and hot choccy, plus a surprising number of dick-themed Czech souvenirs.
There is a castle in Český Krumlov that was founded some time before 1250. From inside its walls, you can look out across the town and the river that snakes around it.
As we left the castle, we saw a sign warning us not to feed the bears. Perplexed, we peered down into the castle’s moat and saw a large brown bear half-heartedly lifting its food and dropping it again. It was surrounded by tall concrete walls and large floodlights that illuminate the castle at night. There was a pond in the centre of the cell, but instead of water, it contained two crushed beer cans. The bear had no shelter to protect it from bright lights or extreme weather.
The castle’s ‘bear moat’ dates back to the latter half of the 16th century. The historical significance of bear-keeping in the Czech Republic makes it difficult for campaigners to end the practice.
Along the river, we saw a small metal statue of a devil with a searing stare, pointing to his bum. There was enough space between the cheeks to push a coin through them. As a tall girl who exclusively wore ultra-low-rise jeans as a kid because it was the early 2000s and had parents who were liberal with the term ‘coin slot’, I felt seen. But there were two notable differences between us:
His coin slot took coins.
For every coin inserted, he made a wheel spin.
We liked to imagine that if he could talk, each utterance would go something like: “Hey, shmuck, I’ll cut ya a deal—stick a coin in my ass, and I’ll make that wheel turn nice and fast.”
On our last night in town, we had pints in some beautiful old pubs, then went back to the apartment to watch The Family Stone and eat spaghetti arrabbiata made with love by Ruby. Claire Danes’ character is the villain.
My honourable mention from Český Krumlov goes to this strudel (I can’t mention anything else because the strudel would make it look bad). It was the perfect strudel.
