A Guide to Prague for Beginners

Wenceslas square

In the last few days there appeared two videos on Youtube. The first video was recorded by a tourist in Prague. In it a police officer is playing a song called River Flows in You by the famous Korean composer Yiruma on a piano. Without any exaggeration, this video symbolizes the modern and progressive side of Prague, the capital and the biggest city of the Czech Republic. This Prague is full culture life, it is full of stylish cafés and restaurants offering high-quality food and drinks for very reasonable prices. It is full of smiling waiters and waitresses. It is this Prague in which police officers seem to have a cultivated taste. And there are pianos on the streets (and nobody stole any of them yet).

The second of the two videos is also from Prague. It shows a taxi-driver using a turbo meter hidden under a gear lever. This epitomizes what I hate about Prague – cafés and restaurants not cleaned since the fall of Communism, disdainful waiters and waitresses, swindling taxi drivers, arrogant ticket inspectors, greedy pickpockets and shop owners, and helpless police officers.

I worked for a considerable amount of time in Prague’s tourist industry. I worked in the city centre as a custodian and as a pizza boy and I saw some things on the streets that made me really upset. In this article I want to give some advice to all those who intend to visit the city I live in. Everybody who wants to enjoy Prague and its better half widely known from tourist guides should follow some basic steps.

PRELIMINARY KNOWLEDGE

If you are coming from abroad you should know that there is a shared category, which we can call ‘a tourist’. All the people satisfying tourists’ needs are well aware of this category. It forms a part of their entrepreneurial ethos. This category is hard to define but it has some definite features:

- a tourist is non-Czech speaking

- a tourist has got lots of money

- it is convenient to rip a tourist off

- being polite towards a tourist is superfluous

- a tourist must love Prague and spread its fame abroad

Now you know what it means to be a tourist in Prague. Here, I offer you 5 kinds of entrepreneurial activities in Prague for which the category of a tourist is essential: taxi service, public transport, bureaus of exchange, crowds and jewelry.

1. TAXI SERVICE

Avoid taxi service in Prague as much as possible. When I was in England it was quite commonplace for the people there to take a taxi. However, people in the Czech Republic are not accustomed much to the habit of taking a taxi. One of the reasons is that they know that they can be easily ripped off. The other reason is that there is a very good network of public transport. Public transport in Prague is cheap and it can get you almost anywhere in the city. Locals in Prague rather think of taxi service as of a service suitable for tourists and locals themselves prefer to go by car or use public transport.

A taxi stand at Wenceslas Square

Of course, it is easier to take a taxi when you have some heavy luggage or if you want to get to some remote place. I have also heard of some nice taxi drivers. But to be honest, this is rather unusual. Years ago the city council declared a war on dishonest taxi drivers. When Pavel Bém was in the office of the mayor of Prague, he disguised himself as a tourist from Italy. He took a taxi and he was charged with an astronomical amount of money for a short ride.

Today it seems that the war has not been decided yet. From the video second it is clear that the taxi driver drove a car of probably the biggest taxi service in Prague called AAA Radiotaxi. After the incident, the owner of the company said that the taxi driver was not an employee of AAA Radoitaxi (though the driver drove the AAA’s yellow car!).

2. PUBLIC TRANSPORT

If you intend to spend your time in the city centre you do not need any taxis. Use the public transport instead. But do not forget to do three crucial things. First, buy ticket (all the fares can be found here), second, check the ticket in a yellow box, three, keep the checked ticket. The yellow boxes are located in trams and buses and they also stand at the entrances to the underground. Even if you forget to do only one of the three steps, you may get into a serious trouble. If you saw the amazing Hungarian movie Kontroll, which in a manner similar to David Lynch tells a story about ticket inspectors from Budapest underground, you probably know what I am talking about. The ticket inspectors sometimes exploit their position, they are arrogant and there are even issues with inspectors charging innocent passengers behind passengers’ backs. There is a recent case in which a ticket inspector charged a passenger because of some kind of argue the two had. The passenger did not know that and after several months he came to know that his property had been sequestrated. The ticket inspector was not fired.

3. BUREAUS DE EXCHANGE

Bureaus de exchange lurk on almost every corner
in the city centre

Avoid bureaus de exchange, especially those that advertise 0 % commission. Everybody sees the monstrous zeroes but not everybody reads the conditions written in small letters under the seducing ads. It is better to exchange your money before you come to the Czech Republic. Or if you forget to do that or have different reasons for it, you can also use bureaus de change located in banks (KB, ČSOB, Česká spořitelna, Raiffeisenbank, etc.). Banks are reliable in these matters.

I remember a Spanish tourist who was given at a bureau de exchange less money than he expected. The man complained about the amount of money but the lady in the bureau sitting behind the counter was arrogant and refused the complaint. I asked about that at a local police station but they told me this agenda had not come under their competence and gave me a contact to the National Bank instead. In that case it would mean that the tourist was supposed to write a complaint to the National Bank. But I suppose that tourists do not want to come to Prague to do red tape sightseeing. Funny is that even if the National Bank decides to fine the bureau, it cannot force the bureau to give you your money back.

So, when you are really forced to exchange your money at a bureau de exchange in Prague, ask first about the amount of money you would receive for the amount you want to exchange.

4 CROWDS

When a place is crowded, mind your personal belongings. What make Prague an interesting and beautiful place are its narrow streets. But as you can imagine, this kind of urban environment is very favourable for pickpockets. Prague is a popular destination for gangs of pickpockets and cutpurses. If you avoid any inconvenience, mind your personal belongings. Also, do not give money to beggars. They are not in need – they do not simply want to work.

I bet Prague was an inspiration for the city of Ankh-Morpork known from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.

5 JEWELLERY SHOPS

The last point is intended for those who are coming to Prague to spend more money than ordinary tourists. The Czech Republic is well-known for some of its products – glass, bijoux or precious stones. The two most precious stones that can be found in our country are Vltavín (commonly known as Moldavite) and Bohemian garnet (commonly known as Pyrope).

There is only one company that is allowed to mine pyropes and turn them into some beautiful jewelry. The company is located in the city of Turnov in the Central Bohemia and is called Granát Turnov. Yet you can buy the Czech Garnet jewelry in hundreds of jewellery shops in Prague. Why is that so?

One of many jewellery shops in Prague.
Do they sell fake gems here?

The problem is that lots of foreign tourists have heard of the Czech Garnets but they do not know anything else about them. They come to Prague, visit some jewelry in the city centre and buy some nice  jewel with garnets. Three years ago the Czech TV ran a story about Prague jewelries. Reporters in disguise bought some garnet jewels in random jewellery shops in the city centre. In every single instance they bought something what was not worth its value. After some scientific examination, the supposed garnets were said to be either a colored glass or a cheaper variant of garnet, usually almandine. The coverage can be found here, but unfortunately it is only in Czech.

If you want to buy some nice Czech piece of jewelry, I advise you to visit one of the two official shops of Granát Turnov located in Prague.


IS PRAGUE REALLY WORTH IT?
I do not think that there are other big European cities without their problems. I suppose that you can get robbed almost anywhere in Europe. Years ago a thief stole my bike and bikes of my brother and father in Amsterdam near the Stock Exchange. I do not think that the crime rate in Prague is above the European average. But what makes Prague special is unwillingness of its officials to fight the grey zone of entrepreneurial activities connected to the tourist industry in the city. Last year, National Geographic broadcasted a documentary about Prague called Scam City. In it, the TV presenter Conor Woodman depicted Prague as a city full of vice. Prague officials complained to National Geographic saying that the documentary was staged. Whether or not was the documentary staged remains still unclear. However, a group of Czech documentary creators created an ongoing series of documentaries as a response to Scam City. Their conclusion seems to be above all expectations: even if Scam City was staged, it depicted real things.

I do not want to discourage anyone from coming to Prague. I think that Prague is really worth visiting. But I think that as long as officials do not want to bear the responsibility for the vices of their city, tourists coming to Prague should be aware of the dark side of Prague.