In the past, I have left as early as twelve hours before a flight was scheduled to take off – five hours to get to Toronto, three hours before an international flight, and then I left four hours of “squishy” time for traffic, food stops, border crossing, etc. After getting to the airport ridiculously early several times, I tried to aim for eleven hours, but we left late, so we actually left ten hours before takeoff. We skipped food (because of the early evening flight, we were just going to have lunch in the airport), breezed through the border, and hit no real traffic. As such, we were sitting at the gate three full hours before the flight took off. Which was then delayed twenty minutes. Meredith is pushing for nine hours for the next Toronto-based trip. She likes to live wildly.

The flight was uneventful, but the trip from the airport to our hostel was not so easy. Mer waited until we were waiting for the bus to tell me we needed to take the bus to a certain stop to transfer to the Metro. Fair enough. That we would take to a stop to transfer to another line. Okay. Which would take us to a stop where we would go up to street level, to catch a tram. In a city in which we had not traveled before, with signs in Czech, while jet-lagged. What could go wrong?

It actually was not too bad – we did struggle a bit with trying to figure out which direction of tram we should take, but Mer saw a famous church spire that got us fixed on the map, and we headed away from it toward our hostel. Never mind that it turned out to be the wrong church – it still worked. We also wandered a bit on the far end trying to find the right street, but it all worked out so that we were checking in around 9:30 am. Sadly, our room would not be ready until 3:00ish, so we stored our bags and headed out to explore the city – the jet-lag-breaking nap would have to wait.

We were smart enough to buy three-day passes for all public transportation in Prague, so the tram-to-metro and metro-to-tram riding we did all day was easy to do. We went down to the Old Town, where Mer took me on the start of a Rick Steves walk, starting in Wenceslas Square, which has a museum on one end, and the other end leads further into the Old Town. We ambled though the square in a little bit of a fuzzy-brained fog, but it was exciting to be in a new city (for me – Mer, of course, had been here for a couple days in the 1990s).

We went down a narrow and cool (if commercial) street that ended in a huge square where the Old Town Hall sits on one side and Tyn Church on the other. It is a really beautiful space, with pretty buildings, open space, and a huge monument to a priest who tried to reform the church in the 1400s – Jan Hus. He was excommunicated and then burned at the stake for trying to do so, but he has been a symbol of Czech independence ever since (even as they were dominated by the Habsburgs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire).

The Old Town Hall has a complex and cool clock from the 1400s that tells the time, the zodiac, the amount of daylight, the time of sunrise, and so on. Of course, it is so complicated, I could not figure out how even to read it as a clock. But, on the hour, it gives a small automated performance before sounding the hour, to hundreds of camera-toting tourists. First, Death turns over his hourglass and starts ringing a small bell. Then, two windows open up, and the Twelve Apostles appear at each window. Finally, a rooster crows, and the windows close, and then the hour chimes. It is a remarkable clock, despite seemingly not impressing the teen boy behind us who was being ribbed by his family for having a “we waited ten minutes for THAT?” attitude. He was smiling as they gave him grief. I liked the clock.

It was about noon, so we took the Metro to a quiet neighborhood for lunch. It was a little out of the way, but Mer wanted a quiet lunch away from tourist hordes, and it was lovely. We ate outside next to a small round “square” bordered by five-story apartments.

Back to the main square, we did more of the Rick Steves walk, passing through Ungelt Sqaure (where merchants once stored wares, since there were only two entrances), then peeked into a highly decorated Baroque church which was sadly closed, but had provided windows to look though. We wandered down to the Fruit Market Square, which was fairly small and cozy, and past the Estates Theater that now seems to focus on Mozart operas, and finally ended up at the Powder Tower, which used to be the main gate in the city walls. It is beautiful and imposing.

Next to the Powder Tower is one of the most magnificent buildings I have ever seen – the Municipal House. It is a fabulously decorated homage to Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau was a celebration of new techniques of construction that allowed the architects to incorporate elaborate curved designs into iron decorations and stained glass and tile work and mosaics. The Municipal House is pleasingly decorated inside and out with art everywhere. It is a grand building, and I loved it.

We had managed to get to the early afternoon, so we headed back to the hostel, getting there about 2:30. After an initial protestation from the new desk clerk that we were too early, the original clerk explained things to him and he let us have our keys so we could finally go get a three-hour nap, followed by a shower. We both felt much better after that.

We had supper in the same neighborhood as where we had lunch, in a small beer garden. There may have been a German tourist or two, but we did not hear anyone speaking in English. So, another quiet meal.

We finished the evening off by strolling though the now-lit city to the Charles Bridge, build by Charles IV of the Holy Roman Empire in the 1300s. The bridge is beautiful itself, and the Vltava River is pretty to look at, but on top of all of that, it overlooks the Prague Castle, started by Charles, and it’s one of the largest castles in the world. At the center of the complex is the striking St. Vitus Cathedral. It is a remarkable spot, even if we had to share with hundreds of other tourists.

As an aside, this bridge is shown in Spiderman – Far from Home, and I was able to identify where that scene was shot, which was very cool. But the movie shows the bridge empty of people. I’m here to tell you that is never the case on a good-weather evening; even a quick shower of rain did not dampen the spirits of the crowds on the bridge and in the small square.

We walked the full length of the bridge and back, and then headed home. Mer had figured out which stop to use on the tram to get us really close to the hostel. The only issue is that the tram going TO the city stops there, but the tram coming FROM the city does not. We discovered this the hard way, overshooting our stop by about a mile or so. We decided to wait for the return tram, but it was a little creepy on a deserted bridge in the dark.

And so, having clearly become masters of Prague’s transit system, we wrapped up day one.