Czech This Out

I've got a soft spot for Prague, it's the very first city I backpacked in, the first city I hostelled in. Back before travellercliche. Back at the start of the internet travel age. So long ago that Prague isn't even in the Czech Republic anymore. Well Czechia.

So I went back. But this time it was a stag do so the wide-eyed wonder of my more innocent years was substantially more red-eyed.

And no-one wants to hear about a stag do. The things that seemed hilarious at the time (the taxodermy tiger, Edgerley Edge, goulash in bread, the Nationwide text, the koala bar, the sinister accordianist, the 80s cafe, and a coffee, etc) will at best seem like cliquey in-jokes. So I shall gloss over that as much as possible and leave you with two recommendations. One for the best bar, one for the best cafe. And by best I mean weirdest, obviously.

Alchemy was a bar that seemed to base itself on Knightmare. Or a nightmare. There was a point in the evening when a cloaked figure in a plague mask carried a box of smoke to the table next door and presented them with a tarot card. You don't get that in Wetherspoons. Often. 

If you find yourself in that bit of Prague between the Old and New Towns follow the chalk signs to breakfast and you too might find yourself in Anicaffe. It's a chintz-lined cafe-cum-spa run by a lady who oozes personality but never seems to be entirely sure where she is or what she's doing. The food was good. Everything else was bonkers. Try and find it.

After All This Time?

I went to that there Harry Potter Studio Tour (first time to Watford - box tick). I took my mum for mothers' day, it seemed to be a popular mother-son destination, although I suspect we were above the expected demographic. 

I really liked it. Is it because Harry Potter is a guilty pleasure? Not really, a. I'm pretty blatant (I came third in a Harry Potter pub quiz a couple of weeks back) and b. I think it was more the scale of it than the HarryPotteriness. I really hadn't appreciated the amount of detail in the films. Five hundred handwritten-and-aged labels on bottles just in the back drop of the potions room. That's ridiculous right? A real chocolate phoenix as a table display in the background? And then there was all the things they made that they couldn't really use because CGI was better - a massive animatronic hippogriff for example. So much detail. It gave me a whole new respect for people who have to recreate worlds. 

Not blogged for a while. Do you wanna hear about the other culture I've done? Not really? Tough, telling you anyway. 

A lot of the gigs that I've been to over the last few years have been legacy gigs; bands I liked back in the day celebrating twenty years since their hayday. I assumed that the David Devant and His Spirit Wife gig would be the same. It wasn't they mainly played new stuff. What? 

Post Modern Jukebox on the other hand were a very different, crowd-pleasing beast. (You've not heard of them? They're worth a YouTube.) I did get slightly disconcerted as it seemed like the name had been franchised out, presumably so that you can have a bunch of PMJs touring at the same time. Is that really cynical? M'eh. Who cares. They were a lot of fun. 

Talking of postmodern jukeboxes, also saw Girl from the North Country. The Dylan not-quite-jukebox-musical that people seem to be raving about. I'll let you listen to their raves instead of mine...