Spending a month in Prague offered us the opportunity to feel a little settled, as if we lived somewhere for a bit. During our travels we tried to balance seeing several places over a few days with seeing one place for 30 days. Since we spent a good amount of time traveling around Continental Europe, it was nice to end that part of our journey exploring Prague - a beautiful, inspiring city.

Penguins on parade. Or standing totally still.

A view of Prague Castle from one of the parks near our apartment. A pretty spot to view the city at night as well.

When we have a couple weeks in a place there’s less pressure to see everything. We approached our visit as part-time tourists. Meaning we spent a lot of time working on our blog, writing, editing images, drawing and painting. Lucky for us there was a great farmers market in a park near the apartment and when we wanted a break we’d take a walk over there during one of the four days a week it was open and purchase some delicious, in-season food. Czech food is pretty hardy. It tends to consist of delicious dumplings, fried schnitzel and other meaty saucey things. Fans of lighter fare, we usually bought food from the farmers market to make at home.

Typical Czech food you'd eat before passing into a food coma.

We also read and finished two large books we picked up at a book shop in Budapest; Ryan read some nerd book about magic from the 1980's and I read “Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl”. Ryan said he actually read two books about magic while we were there.

Sunset view from our apartment. The light was very nice and great for drawing and painting.

As with most places we’ve visited, we spent a lot of time wandering around exploring the city. Prague has an amazing history that really embraced and pioneered varied styles of architecture and sculpture. When combined, they offer a lot to gaze at while wandering the streets.

From the architecture collection of the National Gallery of Prague, we viewed the exhibit "Dream and Reality: 30 years of Architecture History” and saw a lot of drawings, models, and photographs that went into making Prague the capital and cultural center of the Czech Republic. Another exhibition at the Prague City Gallery, “The Restless Figure,” was a display of Czech Sculpture from 1880 - 1914. It was clear to see the inspiration and influence artists at the time drew from Rodin. His style of sculpture was quite different from his contemporaries and this influence can be viewed among many buildings, parks, and monuments throughout the city.

Inside the stacked book tower at the one of the many libraries of Prague.

We saw sculpted "sketches" of these figures at the Restless Figure exhibit. This is a detail of the monument to Palacký.

Monument to Palacký, considered one of the three Fathers of the Nation.

Something that makes exploring a city easy is a kick-ass public transportation system that runs at regular intervals and feels clean and safe. Prague totally has that! We bought month long metro passes when we arrived which meant we never had to think about what it cost or tickets or anything, to take a bus, tram or subway. The system coverage was awesome and we were never more than a short walk, or short ride, from where we wanted to be.

A view of our neighborhood from one of the parks nearby.

One place that didn’t require traveling was the craft beer bar BeerGeek, located about five minutes from our apartment. As with most craft beer bars we’ve visited in Europe, BeerGeek seemed to be full of ex-pats and tourists, not locals. Although I think the bar was staffed with locals. The beers were cheaper then they are in America. For about $3.00 you could have a nice brew and $3.00 is about three times the cost of the local, tastes-just-like-everything-else-in-the-world lager. BeerGeek got a good portion of our money during our stay. They also had takeaway beer and a larger takeaway store about 15 minutes from the apartment.

Typically when we’ve stayed longer at a place, we’ve been able to establish relationships with people in the neighborhood. Usually the people we’ve rented from or by going on a paid tour of some kind, we meet people and get to learn more about what it’s like to live in the place we’re visiting. Maybe because we focused a lot more on working so we didn’t go out as much, or maybe because it was summer and a lot of Czechs tend to have a house in the country outside the city, or maybe because we failed to learn the language; for some reason, this time we didn’t connect with the locals.

Ryan played a pickup game of soccer one day as we passed a park where guys were playing on a turf field, he invited himself to join in. They played every Wednesday at 5:30 so Ryan went back one of those days and played a game. He said his legs felt like lead and that he hadn’t run in a really long time, but he still scored 3-4 goals. After the game, when he hoped to have conversation and drink beers with his new Czech mates, he quickly realized they mostly spoke Czech and he did not. He thanked them for the game and returned to our place, Czech friendless.

Another night we went out late to a Karaoke Bar called “Poison.” We noticed it across the street from a fancy coffee shop we’d been visiting and promised to return and possibly make friends? At first the place looked promising. There were two groups of people at the bar and the host was singing a Red Hot Chili Peppers tune when we arrived. We ordered some drinks. Ryan had some Absinthe drink that looked like Ecto-Cooler, and I had a Moscow Mule. They were good. Then Ryan got up and sang a song and everyone left. And later, while we were singing another song some people came in and walked around and then they left. And that was it. Just us, the bartenders and the host. We had an entire Karaoke Bar; I mean Ryan had an entire Karaoke Bar to himself, for the evening. He did sing some duets with the hostess. I may have even joined him on stage for a song or four. We had fun, but we didn’t meet anyone to ask a million questions about what it’s like to live in Prague. Maybe that’s ok.

We did get a lot of work done while we were there and for the first time on our trip, we didn’t have to apologize for being American and Donald Trump and try and explain to others what the heck is happening with the United States these days.

Next time- Ryan shares his take on Prague with lots more pictures and a few more stories.

Now, more pictures.

Sculpture face stomping on top of the theatre.

"Man Hanging Out," a sculpture tribute to Freud.

This is the third largest bronze horse statue in the world. It sits on top of Vitkov Hill.