Summer in Bohemia

Prague doesn’t do subtle. It hits you in the face with drama, drowns you in cheap beer and whispers questionable suggestions in your ear as the Vltava rolls on beneath centuries of blood and poetry. If you’re into beautiful architecture, rowdy crowds and mainstream debauchery, then welcome to the show.

I remember an earlier visit to Prague, when the city was chilling with patches of snow. Now, heat shimmers off cobblestones and the Vltava flows heavy. The summertime frenzy has hit hard and the streets are sticky with spilled beer from red-faced Brits, who have hit the bar at U Fleku like a group of piranhas. I think I prefer the silence of the snow, after all.

Lazy afternoon in Kampa park.

I walk around the largest city of Czechia from north to south, west to east. Chasing secrets hidden behind Baroque facades and familiar Instagram angles. Prague has been here forever. Its stones haven’t changed, but they whisper different stories under each new sky.

Meeting an old friend in Park Folimanka.

Walking through Park Folimanka, I discover a giant R2-D2 poking out of the shrubbery. Probably Prague’s way of saying “you’re not in Kansas anymore”. It feels less surreal than it should. This city has a weird way of offering unfiltered oddity. I sometimes catch myself rediscovering a place I had forgotten

In the New Jewish Cemetery, where Kafka and ghostly heads rest, the foliage press in. An beautiful elegy written in leaves.

Kafka and other dignitaries rest under a sea of greens at the New Jewish Cemetery.

Buildings stand stoic through revolutions and regimes, but the trees change. They grow, they die, like humans. Seasons shift, the narrative is altered. As a city ages, so do we. But the Vltava still flows.