Travel Writing - Prague

This is meant to be like an extract...

 

 

Standing here looking over the low wall of the Charles Bridge, I feel a strange warmth wash over me – I am in a fairy tale. As the sky grows darker, dripping black ink onto the furthest edge of the horizon, the city of Prague is flooded with fire-warm lights, not dissimilar to those strung across the Christmas trees back home. It is in the incandescent glow of these night time lights that the city truly comes alive. Streets of market stalls that tower with braided buns and sweet loupák (a bread that I have come to love), clusters of brightly lit cafés, hordes of people spilling out from theatres and museums, their spirits heightened by the sight of the Vltava river, which flows silently through the capital. No one rushes home, though even now in the melting spring the wind is bitter enough that they might.

   We are on our way to the castle, walking slowly through cobbled streets, and already I can see its winding turrets reaching up from the earth like arms to the Heavens. Though I have been here once before, the city is different now: alive somehow with the electricity that pulses through the annual throng of over four million tourists – quadruple the population of this enchanted city.

   My last visit was during the winter, when icy lattices made diamonds of the stonework and fresh snow softened the gothic nature of the Czech Republic’s oldest buildings. Now there is no frost, and I see Prague for what it is: an ancient city that thrums with culture, its golden-grey buttresses a perfect likeness to the ones I imagined while reading all my favourite stories – Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast. While it is fair to say that there is something sinister about the shadows cast by crouching gargoyles, the hairs that stand up on my neck only deepen my love for this city.