Have No Fear, It's Czech Beer... You're In The Clear!

"In Prague, pork is king ... Welcome to Porkopolis, the land that vegetables forgot" - Anthony Bourdain

Foodie moment

After a confident recommendation from our helpful walking tour guide, we headed off to Prazska street where both the Beer Museum and LocaL Restaurant resides. LocaL Restaurant is a bigger than average restaurant that serves traditional cuisine. Yeah, more meat and taters! We had the beef cheek goulash with potato dumplings and the duck with apple cabbage and onion mash potatoes. Unfortunately, although the beef goulash was really nice, it was extremely on the skimpy side, with only no more than 4 pieces of meat. It was more like gravy soup with a garnish of beef chunks. Bummer! The duck however was substantially satisfying.

Cultural moment

After our lunch we crossed the street to check out the Beer Museum, which is in actual fact nothing like a museum and everything like a normal bar. What's special about it however is that it has 30 local beers available on tap! Now we're talking! The lovely waitress suggested we try the samplers, available in 5 or 10 glasses. We started off with a 5'er, but before we left Prague and after 2 visits to the Beer Museum, we had tasted over half the beers on offer. The tasting glasses are not a typical small size either, 150ml, enough for more than just a taste. On our second visit to the bar, it was later at night, and it was very very busy, the locals must know a good place when they find one. My favourite was the BERNARD ČERNÁ LAVINA, a dark chocolate beer and Lisa's was the blueberry beer ČERNÁ HORA MODRÁ LUNA.

Wow moment

Once again, its hard to pin point a single wow moment for Prague when the entire city (the old part anyway) is a wow moment in itself. We got to see a lot more of it today on our free walking tour and got an awesome overview from the lookout point at the metronome monument. It really is a spectacular city.

Another wow moment, for slightly different reasons, is the metronome monument hill and surrounding parklands. Once (from what I can imagine) a beautiful place, it now has become more like an abandoned concrete jungle, taken over by skateboarders and graffiti artists. Its a "Wow" in the fact that the council could let it get into this much disrepair. It's gotten to the point where the skaters have ripped up the concrete stairs to build their own ramps and jumps. Pretty cool in a dystopian kind of way.

What we learnt today

Lots and lots learnt today on our free walking tour, however since I was too lazy to take notes, only one comes to mind. On the previously mentioned hill and parklands there used to be a statue, one of Stalin, which was built at the time of soviet rule. The story goes that in the process of its construction the citizens became so unhappy with its overbearing egocentric ugliness that the poor sculptor Otakar Švec actually committed suicide. It stood for 7 years to the embarrassment of the Czech government, until it was decided that it could stand no more. It was then that 800 kilograms of explosives were used to symbolically destroy the statue, upon which Stalin's head rolled all the way down the hill and into the river below to cheers from the watching crowds. In its spot was built a new monument, that of the giant metronome meant to represent time lost during communism, but even that seems to be reaching its end of days as the creaking rusting sounds it produces are like it's own mechanical death rattle and creepy to say the least.