It’s the last post of the West Bohemian Spa Triangle series! I’m in Prague! Prague is one of those cities that it feels like I should have been to before now. My parents ask “Have you been to Prague?” with alarming regularity and follow it up with “I think you’d really like Prague” despite the fact that I’ve never been because it’s never particularly appealed and the fact that I rarely love the places they love. Spoiler: I did not love Prague. Maybe it needs a second chance in the winter, in clothes suitable for the weather and staying somewhere I can actually sleep before anything switches in my brain.
For me, the primary appeal of Prague is that quite a bit of Mission:Impossible was filmed there. Yes, I love the Mission:Impossible series – the films, not the TV show. I’ve watched most of the first season of the show but it didn’t grab me by the throat in my early-mid teens and so I’ll never be attached to it the way I’m attached to the films. Especially M:I2, and I know even among fans I’m a massive outlier for that and I’m not sorry.
For the last thirty-odd years – since about the time it emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, I suppose – Prague has been a favourite filming location. You’ll have seen it on screen dozens of times, usually playing the part of Paris, Budapest or Moscow primarily because it’s cheaper. The first Mission:Impossible movie is unusual in that Prague was playing the part of Prague. So nothing is disguised and they helpfully set most of it in parts my guidebook wanted me to visit anyway.
I suppose I should say here that there are spoilers first for a 30-year-old film and then for a 15-year-old, so if you intend to watch Mission:Impossible 1 or 4 and don’t want me casually referring to events, maybe come back later.
The first major location in the first film is the embassy where the IMF team surveilles Golitzen stealing the NOC list. That’s the Liechtenstein Palace, just south of Charles Bridge on the west bank of the river. The interior is the National Museum at the top of Wenceslas Square but between a Sunday afternoon and a bank holiday Monday and my sightseeing itinerary, I didn’t get round to visiting. Liechtenstein Palace, tick. “Golitzen’s exit” is a little fenced off area on the north side of the Palace and then Ethan makes his way up and down to Charles Bridge, a two-minute walk away, a couple of times. If you follow the river from that exit, there’s a wooden gate closing off a driveway right by a small riverside restaurant – that’s the gate where Sarah gets killed. Well, it’s not, the original gate has been replaced at some point in the last three decades but it’s here, anyway. This is also a pretty good place for looking across at Charles Bridge. Oh, you can walk across it and you can see it from alongside the river on the other side but this is probably among the best places to see the whole thing in one go from quite close up.
Oh yeah. I wore my Ethan Hunt Eras t-shirt around Prague. Of course I did.
And now up to Charles Bridge. I like Gothic architecture but this bridge left me pretty cold. Oh, I hurried up the steps like Ethan and looked over at the square where the car exploded and tried to imagine Jim toppling over stone walls that I think are too high to topple over, even in your death throes and replaying Mission Impossible was great fun. But the bridge itself… it’s fine. It’s a bridge. It’s a bridge with some statues along it. The main trouble is that half of Prague is crammed onto it so it’s not actually that easy to see the statues and from your viewpoint on the bridge, all you can see of the bridge itself is cobblestones and walls and you can’t see much of it anyway because you’re fighting to get across. I keep hearing that Charles Bridge is a beautiful Gothic structure but I don’t know if I just don’t comprehend Gothic outside of churches or if I need to appreciate it from a different angle. No, as far as I’m concerned, Charles Bridge is massively overrated.
From the east side of Charles Bridge, I took a tram down the river and crossed a more modern bridge, marvelling at how many weirs there are in the river, since that does not ease water travel through a major city, until I found the point beside one of the locks where a phone box was placed so Ethan could call Kittridge. This is actually a nice spot, clear of tourists, with a big willow tree and blue sky and sunshine and I was quite satisfied. It had been a long day – I’d got up early in Karlovy Vary, hiked up the hill to the station, waited an hour and a half for the next train, sat on the train for three and a half hours, eaten very quickly in my dodgy hostel room and then headed straight out for my Mission:Impossible sightseeing. It was unexpectedly hot after the anticipated 4-8° around the West Bohemian Spa Triangle so after a couple of hours of figuring out how to get around Prague, I really wanted a nice cold drink.
I’m still mystified about the cafe. It was just before 5pm by now and they had a jazz evening starting at 8. Nonetheless, while I was allowed to go in to get a drink which I could drink outside, I wasn’t allowed to sit inside without a ticket, despite it being three hours before the event. Still, I was hot enough in my lined cold-weather trousers that I was delighted to sit outside.
Back across the river at the next bridge, back on the tram and off to the Old Town Square where the aquarium-fronted restaurant is supposed to be. First, that was all a set, inside and out. Second, you can’t really even see where Ethan runs away from the flood after he blows up the fish tank because there was a big Easter market on the square. I’d already sort of gathered from Karlovy Vary that green beer is a thing in Czechia but seeing it here as well, I did my little bit of reading and discovered that Good Friday is called Green Friday in Czechia and so it’s celebrated – if celebrating is the right word – with green beer. Some of it is genuinely green through ingredients but it seems the main method of creating green beer is just green food colouring. I’d been warned several times that although you’ll see chimney cakes everywhere, they’re not Czech. At least three countries claim ownership of chimney cakes so it’s hard to say where they’re actually from but then again, it no doubt pre-dates 21st century national borders so it’s not impossible that multiple modern countries could claim ownership. Anyway, I tried to make sense of the square when I couldn’t really see most of it, wandered around, talking myself out of spending a fortune on a hand-forged bell made by one of the two blacksmith stalls that I couldn’t take home in my restricted luggage anyway.
Next up was Max’s apartment, which is actually a gigantic Art Nouveau concert hall. I never quite figured out which is the door that Kittridge & co stormed but they’re all pretty and entirely worth worth wandering all the way around. Literally just down the road from here is the junction where Ethan gets picked up to see Max (“Can I trouble you for a match?”) and that would do me for the day. It had been a long day, my feet were tired and it was still a bit of a hike back to the hostel.
But I was out again the next morning to cross off my last major stop, which is the castle. Partly because you have to go to the castle when you’re in Prague and mostly because it apparently plays the part of the Kremlin in Ghost Protocol. It was only when I got home that I realised that despite departing from and arriving back into Prague main station and storing my luggage there on my last day, I never got round to finding the decorative old parts of the station that star in the backstory of Ghost Protocol. Neither did I bother to find the anonymous streets north of the Old Town Square that double as Moscow after Ethan escapes from the hospital. But I can at least find the Kremlin courtyard!
It took a while – I knew that it was a particular courtyard but as I walked up the hill and into square after square, I wasn’t recognising anything and that’s because the courtyard I was looking for was a quietish one tucked away at the eastern end, which is the opposite end of the castle complex to where I walked up. Yep, this is the Kremlin square. Yes, I absolutely walked across trying not to visibly swing my legs like a Russian soldier and humming the Kremlin With Anticipation soundtrack. Seeing people walking out through the other end, I followed them and ended up watching the Changing of the Guard at noon, which is an excellent display of marching and clicking weapons and has some amazing music that’s less military fanfare and more cinematic but also has a lot of time when everyone’s just standing there sweating in their fur-trimmed uniforms and not doing anything.
I think that’s it for Mission: Impossible tourism. I went back to the Old Town Square after I’d been to the castle and had a chimney cake (it’s tasty; I don’t care if I’m not sampling genuine Czech cuisine!) and a cup of raspberry lemonade, I did a little souvenir shopping (got to get some Bohemian crystal earrings, even if they come from a tourist shop and have never even dreamed of Bohemia) and then I occupied an hour or so by taking the tram down the river to the Ruins of Libuse’s Bath, which is part fortress, part watchtower and part bathhouse, perched on a little cliff above the river just south of the tourist centre. As baths go, I’ve seen baths which more resemble baths but it seems there’s an entire second castle complex up there on the cliff, so if I ever find myself back in Prague, I’ll take a closer look, as well as do the historic part of the main castle and maybe even see the Old Town Square without any major event covering it. I felt quite lukewarm about Prague so at the moment I’m not feeling any particular burning desire to go back but Monday’s post is all about the one thing in the city I fell hard in love with, so be back here for that…
I Am A Polar Bear 