A walk on the marginally wild side

Day 2 of my excellent adventure here in Czechia. I’m relieved to report that there is wi-fi in my room. It’s not what I would call high speed—more DSL than cable bandwidth—but at least it’s holding.

Yay.

While I chose Prague for a couple of reasons, you’ll recall that one of the main goals was to just get out and get away. So I have no intention of engaging in non-stop go-seeing. With that in mind, I just did a bit of mooching about yesterday to acclimatize, so to speak.

One amazing thing about my hotel is the breakfast. Here are some highlights:

I have to say that this was quite a spread. Scrambled eggs, natch, and breakfast meats (although I’m mildly troubled to notice that it doesn’t seem to be the Czech custom to actually brown your bacon or sausage; they looked to have been steamed—I hope they were cooked through), but then all the special dietary items—gluten-free and diabetic.

(Thinking that latter is for the Viking Tours crowd. Who, BTW, absolutely flooded the breakfast room.) The beans in tomato sauce I’m thinking were for any Brits happening by.

But here’s the surprise: over at the station with juices, waters and the push-button espresso-cappuccino machine, a bottle of Czech sparkling wine.

It was okay; certainly better than anything I’ve tasted out of the Old Dominion.

Also, what looked like chocolate cake and chocolate brownies next to your usual pastries. That's the breakfast of champions.

Plus—and this escaped my attention until I’d already had the scrambled eggs and was just swanning about trying to get some photos of an interesting bas relief on the building across the street—a made-to-order omelet station.

Huh.

Last year, my hotel in Québec City also came with breakfast, and I found that it was enough to keep me going all day without eating until time came for dinner. That’s my plan for here, too.

So, fortified for the day, I wandered off to see some walkable sights. In addition to the breakfast, a hotel amenity is a mobile phone assigned to the room. It’s fully functional, and they tell me I can make local and international calls for free. But, while preloaded with annoying ads (which no doubt pay for the service) it’s also equipped with internet capabilities, so I let Google Maps be my guide.

The driver who brought me to the hotel from the airport told me that every year, shops start jumping the gun on Christmas a little earlier. And here you see it on my way to the WorldFamousAstronomicalClock:

And here’s the WFAC:

While waiting for the apostles to trot by on the hour, I noticed not one but two Viking tour groups. What’s interesting is that they deliver their spiels via (probably) Bluetooth-enabled tech. The guide speaks in a normal voice into her headset mic; paying punters listen with receivers and ear pieces. That way the guides save their voices and there’s no danger of any freeloaders attaching themselves to the tour.

As an aside, a major economic driver of Prague appears to be guided tours. Here are just a few I saw in Old Square in a matter of about five minutes. All languages.

I scoped out what’s called the Jewish area; decades ago it would have been the ghetto. Everything closed for Shabbat, so I’ll return today. The Jewish district is one of the reasons I chose Prague. But by then my back was starting to yammer at me, so I repaired to the Art Deco Imperial Hotel, which is where the guy who cuts my hair stayed the last time he was in town. TBH, I didn’t see much Deco about it, although the restaurant was certainly tiled to within a millimeter of its life. But I sat in their tiny lounge-bar with a bottle of Mattoni sparkling water (quite nice) and a glass of some local red (a little more tannin than I like, but drinkable) to Think Thoughts.

The hotel does follow through with the Art Deco notion to some degree. A couple of design elements in the bar:

And in the ladies’ loo:

Plus—the background music was 30s and 40s, so there’s that.

That perked me up enough to get me through the walk back to the hotel. (Not my hip joints this time; my back. Jeez.) Happy to find the wi-fi on; if not running, at least a hopeful walking. A nice soak in the Euro tub with Japanese bath salts and then I realized that it’s Saturday night and I had no restaurant reservations.

Well, the concierge got me a table at a place within walking distance, on the seventh floor of a tower. They could “fit me in” at 1800, but that was okay, because I’d eaten nothing since brekkies. Rather unsurprisingly, “fit me in” equated to “we have no one here for the next 90 minutes”. But again—nothing ingested since 0900, so fine.

The Russian-novel-length menu, interestingly, was in English and German (although the actual names of the dishes were in Czech). I skipped over the pedestrian stuff and looked at the “Traditional Czech Cuisine” and havered between duck, venison and wild boar.

But look: you can get duck and even venison fairly easily in the New World. I had the latter in Québec. Half a duck roasted in honey sounded delish, but I didn’t think I could manage all of it. I asked the server about the wild boar, because I’ve never had it. (I wanted to ask if it was really wild, but I didn’t think her English could handle it.) She thought the venison, boar and something else were kind of alike, but I took her to be saying that the wild boar was not at all like domesticated pork. For one thing, red meat.

So, I went for broke. Wild boar, baby.

Here’s the menu description: “Marinated wild-boar sirloin baked on thyme with fresh blackberry sauce served with Old-Bohemian roasted potato mush lumps [yes, you read that right] and real boletuses tartar with forest herbs.” (The boletuses turned out to be akin to mushrooms, if you’re asking. I can’t speak to whether they were real or imaginary. But they were tasty.)

I started with a soup described as “Old-Bohemian mild cream of river crayfish served with crayfish meat, butter toast and sour cream.” Well—there was more cray than fish, if you get my drift, but it wasn’t bad. Viz:

Here’s the wild boar, before:

And after:

On the question of whether the boar was really wild, or some kind of farmed product, let me just note that that boar—wild or not—had a very nice life, because the meat was exceptionally tender.

On my server’s recommendation, I went with a half carafe of a Czech red, which turned out to be perfect for both the soup and the wild boar.

By the time I’d finished that boar, I thought, “Estoy satisfecha.” No room for dessert.

And so, tired but happy, I waddled back to the hotel.