Top 5 Shit Pubs in Prague (Followed by 5 Good Ones)

24/7 Herna Bar

Everyone knows Prague is full of blatant tourist muggery intent on astronomically over-charging currency-baffled, bum-bag-toting Americans for soggy Schnitzels. But those places are obvious, and not only in their shameless cruelty - look out for the burly mafioso types guarding the exits - but also in their relentlessly depressing, would-be glamourous exteriors - all blinking neon, laminated menus, and under-dressed female staff.

This piece isn't about those unsubtle staples of the tourist mile but rather focuses on the seemingly innocuous: those pubs that, from the outside, look like harmless if unremarkable drinking-holes. Yet inside all manner of perils awaits you.

All highly subjective, these choices reflect damning verdicts arrived at after a) multiple duff visits b) one bad experience or c) blind prejudice. Enjoy.

5. U Vejvodu, Old Town

A controversial choice for many, I've just never had a good time there. This massive, soulless hall with its half-arsed stab at traditional decor has apparently been over-stuffing foreigners for 600 years (or something). In that time they've perfected a very Prague-ish brand of weary nonchalance. Sold as a slice of "authentic" Czech drinking culture in the heart of the Old Town, it's basically as awful as anywhere else, only slightly cheaper. Predictably the lower prices hardly encourage the staff to be any nicer. I'm sure working in a bar in the Czech Republic is poorly-paid, and certainly I wouldn't want to do it. That it's what the frustrated, mostly middle-aged service staff do as a career forever is not only upsetting but visibly galling for them. They have my sympathy. But that's not going to make them any less bored or unimpressed at the sight of yet another gleeful Brit requesting an absinth. The whole thing grinds on interminably to a deafening, claustrophobic soundtrack of hissing beer taps and hollering stag-parties.

4. Prague Beer Museum, Namesti Miru

The original branch of this not-really-a-museum museum is so dimly-lit that it's impossible to evaluate. Not so this exciting new addition to Prague's collection of anonymous beer halls. Selling itself solely on the fact it serves 200 beers (or something near that) they've forgotten to decorate the place, install functioning toilets and decent furniture or hire actual people instead of angry, malfunctioning robots. Barely concealed hatred vies for place with the timeless of habit of just ignoring customers. All of which is slightly more excusable when someone has been at it for decades, but this place has just opened and the staff are all young. Not that the depressed jobs market is swollen with exciting jobs for the youth of Prague, but at least they've got the hope of something better ahead of them. Also, there's no need to sell 136 beers (or whatever it is). Why not sell five and change them occasionally? That's not going to happen, however, because that would require some care and forethought, qualities found hopelessly wanting. Also, the mascot - a naked sillhouette which resembles a morbidly obese Mussolini guzzling a beer - is just a bit off-putting.

3. Puerto Rico Cocktail Bar, Vinohrady

This desperate, under-loved den of a 'cocktail bar' in Vinohrady occupies a very special niche: that of the unconvincing pan-South American novelty pub. A couple of pictures of Che, cigars, cars, and wizened old men are apparently enough to 'transform' a typical pub into a carnival of cheap exotica. Always semi-deserted with aggressively loud trance music on the sound system, actually ordering a cocktail is a daunting and disappointing experience. You shout at the server several times, wait fifteen minutes, and eventually a semi-solid slop of ice and glow-in-the-dark strawberry flavouring is delivered to your table. Meanwhile, stray wires dangle ominously from the ceiling, holes are patched up with black duct tape, and one middle-aged woman cackles demonically from her smoky corner. Still, she's the closest thing to joy you'll find here. Less a drinking-hole than a sinking-hole right in the middle of my bloody neighbourhood.

2. Any Herna Bar

It feels slightly unfair to moan about Hernas. Sure, the Czech Republic's unique, 24/7 non-stop pubs are horrific by normal, "human" standards, but who hasn't ended up in one at 5 in the morning, noisily engaged in verbal battle, or quietly throwing up in an ashtray, or shooing away the unwanted attentions of some grizzled local lothario, or even being that lothario? Hernas are banned in the Old Town so you'll have to venture further afield to experience them. After all, why wouldn't you? These are places of true community spirit. It's just that the community in question consists solely of bearded old men and the barely contained sexual frustrations of their younger, randier counterparts. Approach with caution, but don't worry too much: everyone's too hammered to fight.

1. Restaurace Antal, Budejovicka

By some stretch the worst pub I've ever been to. Conveniently, for our purposes, it also represents the apex of all that is shit about Prague pubs. Pleasingly nondescript from the outside, it inhabits a strange limbo between smoky neighbourhood pub and after-work bar. The two worlds clash to dispiriting effect. Men whose poodled haircuts were probably banned in Britain in the 1970s perch upon stools, eyeing all movement with feline curiosity-cum-aggression. The frankly terrifying bar staff make it their mission to impress these watchful, squatting ringleaders by seeing who can be rudest to the unsuspecting non-regulars. The aged, denim-saturated skeletons on stools chuckle mirthlessly to themselves at their minions' shenanigans. The suited after-work types largely get in and out as swiftly as possible. More foolhardy are those, unused to the relentless venom of the oldies, who stick around to get drunk. As the drinks accumulate so does the anger of the bar staff, who take to verbal abuse and deliberately adding extra drinks to the bill. Eventually a sort of pissed Stockholm Syndrome develops in which the victims come to see their treatment not only as appropriate but laudable. You give feeble thanks for their service, go home, and cry yourself to sleep.

Now five of the opposite: places that, for whatever reason, get it right.

5. Duende, Old Town

I hated this place on my first visit, probably because it was full of exuberantly drunk teenagers who insisted on flirting with each other and wearing their baseball hats backwards. Since then they've mercifully been absent, allowing me to appreciate the slightly shabby, messy quality that a few pubs in Prague manage but Duende has perfected. Also, it's right next to Hemingway's, a just-the-right-side-of-posh cocktail bar, and Standard Cafe, a friendly late night coffee shop and bar, so when one is full you can push onto either of the others.

4. The Pub, Old Town

Depending on your perspective this is either a chaotic window into hell itself or a deliriously fun battering ram of the senses. The owners have done everything they can to encourage mass beer consumption - allowing punters to pour their own pints and keeping an international league of beers-per-table on screens around the room (curiously Bucharest always seems to be first). The emphasis is clearly on drunk people's innate tendency to compete like gluttonous feudal barons over who can consume most rabidly: Germans and Americans alike remove their shirts and mount tables in bizarre, highly ritualised displays of drinking prowess. All of which is really quite exciting if you can set aside your, um, dignity, self-respect and intelligence, and just brainlessly enjoy it. It's sort of the drinking equivalent of smashing up old furniture just because you can. If you can't pour a pint of beer at the start of the evening you'll soon be an expert. Drunken idiocy, then, but done right.

3. Cafe Mlynska, Mala Strana

With more hipsters than you can shake a fixie at, this converted water-mill on Kampa island has just the right amount of artiness. It's the sort of place that guide books describe as "relaxed", but is also big enough and gets busy enough to feel lively in the evenings. No one ever shouts at you for mispronouncing "peanuts" in Czech and no one tries to con you out of 30 kc every time you go there, which is at least a relief. The thing that really swings it is the building itself - accessible by a candle-lit bridge over a tributary of the Vltava, it has an unmatchably special atmosphere without being too precious.

2. U Bulinu, Vinohrady

Technically this is a restaurant but so is number one in the worst list. The staff are weird but friendly (one waiter insists on wearing a single white velevetine glove at all times, as if in mourning for Michael Jackson) and for some reason the walls are filled with photos of people with horns. But don't let that put you off: the food's great and the place comes with a bafflingly translated, ludicrously convoluted origin story printed inside every menu. Great fun, and proof that "traditional" Czech pubs can be excellent.

1. V Lese, Vrsovice

So it occasionally gets overrun with earnest looking Magic the Gathering-types, but mostly V Lese gets it right: often-decent bands play in the semi-refurbished basement while people sit around on knackered furniture upstairs. Prague's "older crowd", usually hardy enough to show up anywhere selling booze, are put off by the loud music, meaning there are refreshingly few tobacco-addled, double-denim-rocking snaggle-tooths to be seen (sorry, old Czech men, it's true). Instead nice young people in nice clothes chat amiably and roundly fail to assault each other with the strength of their booze-breath. Call me bourgeois, but it's literally a breath of fresh air.

On Crossing Schengen Borders

Derelict border control point at Bad Schandau

In the strange world of European Union administration, world-altering events take the form of tedious bureaucratic elisions. So it was that the Schengen agreement, almost as an afterthought to a free trade deal, removed all border controls for millions of people. If all the accumulated stuff of Europe was to circulate freely, the functionaries decided with an absurd flourish, people would have to follow. To perpetual amazement, and with more than a hint of wariness, people could suddenly just walk into other countries legally and by the most direct means.

I can remember taking the train from Slovakia to Austria in 2006 (the year before Slovakia entered Schengen; its legal obligation, having joined the EU in 2004). Armed police and sniffer dogs patrolled every carriage, kneeling under seats and checking passports. Two years later I went back to Bratislava (Slovakia's capital) from Vienna, and a friend could carry a bag of weed as freely as he would on the local metro.

On the journey from Posnan, in Poland, to Berlin, you have to change at Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. These days the train dodges the old, impervious checkpoints at the border, the crossing of which goes unannounced. You board a more modern train in Germany, and the language of the staff switches. Apart from that there's little noticeable difference. It's all oddly straightforward. Perhaps because I'm from an island, where all countries seem impossibly distant, but this process of switching over - undertaken with the same level of gravity as a change of coat - still amazes me.

From Prague to Dresden, in Germany, the change-over is even smoother. At the Czech-German border station in Bad Schandau, the Czech staff simply hop off and tip their hats to their boarding German counterparts. In turn the Germans nod and clamber up the train stairs. It's a sort of modest Schandau ballet. Announcements are made in German, Czech and English throughout. A pleasant jingle - the same on both sides - blares out before each station. On the approach to Bad Schandau the train runs past the deserted border control point, visible across the expanse of the Elbe/Labe. It is a ghostly thing: overhanging the river bank, it's a reminder of an alternate, long-dead modernity which involved lots of papers, offices, and long car inspections.

Either side of that building there is pleasingly little difference: only the paintwork on the villas that line the river gets a bit glossier on the German side. The people look basically the same. For countries with a history of bitter enmity, there is little today to distinguish them. This is strangely reassuring, as if to suggest that the past can be buried in a new European present of underlying similarity. Then again, similarity is hardly a bar to conflict.

Although it's become incomparably easier for Europeans in the Schengen zone to travel, the authorities still watch over things, and they have their preferences. When my girlfriend first went to Dresden by train the police got on, gave the different compartments the once-over, and ignored everyone except a Vietnamese family, whose passports they then proceeded to check. No one like to be singled out, especially when everyone else goes without questioning. Of all places, the German Military Museum in Dresden contains a stark reminder of what the internal removal of passport controls means for outsiders trying to get in: on display are two ladders cobbled together from thick tree branches, both used by would-be immigrants to scale the fences between Morocco and the Spanish towns of Ceuta and Melilla on the north African coast. These two exclaves, encircled by miles of metal fencing to protect them from local populations, mark the southern borders of the EU. Freedom of movement within the EU has been accompanied by increasingly hysterical concern about who else is coming in from the outside. A reminder, then, that such freedom of movement is only permissible for EU authorities insofar as it is not emulated beyond EU borders. Those who hold up the EU as an example to be emulated throughout the world would do well to bear this contradiction in mind: in a situation of inherent inequality, the benefits that pertain to the privileged few risk being undermined if they are spread too widely.        

Prague is not the best place in the world...

Our road: Luzicka, Vinohrady, Prague

One problem with expat writing is the tendency to varnish the image of one's adopted home. Few people ever moan about where they've wound up living because everyone ultimately wants it to look appealing. This is one of the major motivations behind writing a blog, after all: to convince the world, and yourself, that everything is just swell. But I can honestly say, despite living here and really liking it, that Prague is not the loveliest place in the world. It's just quite nice. And what most self-affirming blog bilge tries to conceal is that most of us, even the most upwardly mobile, successful and wealthy of us, live in places that are basically just quite nice, and that we happen to live in them largely by chance. For the rare few who have always had a dream place - say, New York or London - you either get lucky or compromise. The rest of us are basically happy if there's a decent pub nearby and good connections to a supermarket. I fall into the latter group: I didn't always want to live in Prague but I do (for now). It'll never be New York, and there's good reason for that.

Near our flat: Part of a city centre or just a village?

Prague has always occupied a peculiar position between the cosmopolitan and the backwater. As seat of the Holy Roman Emperor its splendour was apparently unrivalled. But mythologising this cosy knot in the Vltava proves too easy. Rudolf II might have relocated to Prague in 1575, but this dotty mystic was more an advertisement for eccentricity than raw imperial power. Modern times recall little of Prague's old eminence, instead turning the ancient metropole itself into a nicely fossilised anachronism. Its pre-Hapsburg landmarks - Hradcany, the Radnice, Charles Bridge, the Tyn Church and so on - lie upon it like an ill-fitting suit of armour. Bohemian defeat at Bila Hora (White Mountain) put paid to native religious ambitions, piety subsequently ditched for reasons of national resentment (this long before any atheist-communist put pen to paper). So began the national Dark Ages (doba temna), the conclusion of which - depending on how pessimistic the person you ask - remains uncertain.

On our road

Every year in January Prague briefly renews this national Dark Age. Life retreats indoors, seams of churned snow clog every street, and a fog thick enough to cushion a fall descends on the city. In the long winter, the quiet back streets of Vinohrady (the suburb where we live) linger, empty and without purpose, after the short dusk. Dog walkers tuck their heads inside tufty hoods and rustle through the darkness. By day the sunken murmur of coffee-drinkers defines all interiors; the weary thrum of trams as they accelerate up and down Vinohradska and Korunni does the same for the external world. The drooping pastel apartment blocks blanch beneath the snow and floods of mist. Everything assumes a murky, discoloured layer of browned ice. Shattered faces seek out the reassurance of subterranean cafes. There's something deeply charming about this: the act of exchanging a bruised, mottled world for one of intimacy and warmth. But still, where's the vibrancy? Where's the energy and relish of city life? This, then, is when a place (like a person) has become truly familiar: when its defining quirks are at once annoying and endearing.

Vinohrady with snow

Jiriho z Podebrad farmer's market in February, Vinohrady, Prague

Perhaps it's the tedious reality of all cities: beneath the florid exteriors, all are secretly tethered down by the rigorous monotony of work. It's only in the imagination of the day tripper, off to see the bright lights, that cities are carnivalesque playgrounds. Yet there is a difference between Prague, with its working week austerity and its sleepy, empty weekends, and the bigger European cities. Where can compete with, say, London or Berlin, which in their different ways daily regurgitate the truly vast human energy - financial, industrial, administrative, creative - they draw in from around them and the rest of the world? That, I suppose, is the benefit of being a global entrepot sucking in and redirecting global trade and finance. Though historically it was London which played that role, Berlin's expensive postcommunist make-over, relatively cheap rents, and strong artistic and cultural traditions have led it down a chaotic path to resurgence. Yet chaotic is the key word: Berlin's social contradictions are in fact what make it so appealing, not the success (or indeed lack thereof) of "modernisation" (i.e. liberalisation) of the city's economy. Despite the buzz around innovation (Europe's third "most innovative" region, apparently), the excitement of Berlin comes as much from the opposition to gentrification as the actual process itself. Squats and artistic collectives have fought long and hard to preserve Berlin's cheapness and the right to social benefits and subsidy of the arts. In this sense, Berlin's older - sometimes communist-nostalgist - citizens have something in common with the progressive student-led young: the demand for affordability. There is a certain convergence of tradition and newness in the context of radical changes, making the city's future look open to those who can seize it. The same cannot be said of the deeply polarised society of London.

Wintry quiet: the school on the corner of our road

Neither can it be said of Prague. Although this city's ongoing liberalisation has generated extraordinary concentrations of wealth, an increasingly difficult-to-fund welfare system has tottered into what are seemingly its last days (the previous government only held back because its momentum suffered from corruption scandals; some social pruning seems inevitable, even under the new Social Democrat-led coalition). And while the city has continued to grow - especially relative to the rest of the country - no satisfactory recycling of profits into social welfare has been implemented. The Czech Republic has an apparently investment-pleasing flat tax rate of 15%, making vital maintenance work costly for both municipal governments and private community groups (many apartment blocks remain cooperatively owned but underfunded). Thus the housing-stock is deteriorating, while, increasingly, average-income Czechs are pushed out to the periphery. The Czech economy is finally emerging from a recession of record length. unemployment, low by European standards, still stands at over 8 per cent.

To this observer at least this process has given the centre of Prague an occasionally neglected, stripped-to-the-bone feeling. Lots of the old early 20th century buildings in Vinohrady, where I live, have had expensive renovation work done to them, presumably by private individuals or by co-ops, who have subsequently been unable to afford their upkeep. As such the walls are regaining their famous communist-era layer of grime. Chunks of plaster and paint regularly fall down from the roofs and balconies, requiring whole pavements be roped off to avoid falling debris. And there is a lot of dog shit. What better evidence could there be of continuing alienation and distrust of the capital than the willingness with which people let their dogs excrete on every available surface? Talk about passive protest. To my endless frustration, this means it's risky to ever lower my guard: look up for falling shrapnel; down for fresh droppings.

The not so discreet charm of the bourgeoisie:
Monuments to a vanished class in Vinohrady, Prague 

But Prague still exercises a strange attraction. The city's grandeur is sweetly tempered by its element of the shambolic; its Old Town cannot be beaten for sheer beauty; its skyline is a perfect blend of symmetry and asymmetry. Vinohrady, this twice-gentrified suburb with its uptight, ageing population and suspicious curtain-twitchery, mounts the eastern slopes of the town like some civilisational still-life: the ruins of a vanished kingdom where everyone aspired to bourgeois respectability and kept a cat on a neoclassical balcony. It is the final remainder of the new bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century, which built entire city quarters in tribute to itself. The new world of the 21st century stands uncomfortably in its shoes. 



Photos by Siobhan

Trotsky on the Train South, 1912: "An Austro-Hungaro-Balkan International!"

Bulgarian soldiers dig trenches in the First Balkan War, 1912

Although the railway line from Budapest to Belgrade proceeds mainly in a southerly direction, from the cultural standpoint one moves eastward... On the station platforms and in the third-class carriages the multilingual, motley, culturally-confused East is displayed before you in kaleidoscopic fashion. Two Bulgarian students, a Serbian student and a Hungarian teacher talk together in an incredible language made up of Bulgarian, German, Serbian and French words... A Bulgarian worker, back from America after four years' absence, shares with a Slovak worker his observations about life across the Atlantic: half familiar words, gestures of explanation, misunderstandings, and the indulgent smiles of persons who are used to grasping only half of what the other one is saying. An Austro-Hungaro-Balkan International!¹

- Leon Trotsky, Correspondences from the Balkan Wars, 1912

As war broke out between the Balkan states and the Ottoman Empire in 1912 Leon Trotsky took his seat on a train from Vienna to Belgrade. This latest military by-product of the concert of European Powers was to shock public opinion in the west with both its speed and its ferocity. Diplomatic efforts on the part of the European powers had the familiar effect of spurring nationalist tensions where they meant to dampen them. Trotsky was in the vanguard of condemnation of atrocities committed by various armies as they criss-crossed each other's territories - though especially of the Bulgarian, closely aligned with Tsarism to its north. His journalism (for leading Kiev daily Kievskaya Mysl) on the Balkan Wars, remarkable for its literary panache, is also an exercise in grand strategy. He is at once scathing of and sympathetic towards 'impulsive', 'underdeveloped' Balkan societies. For Maria Todorova, the influential author of Imagining the Balkans, Trotsky evinces - most surprisingly - textbook liberalism, his "blanket pontification" expressed in a "rhetoric almost as if lifted from present-day liberal think-tanks." But uniting liberal opinion against Tsarism would have been in this itinerant revolutionary's broader political interest. 

Trotsky

Nevertheless, as a 'good European' Trotsky undoubtedly shared the distaste of the European intelligentsia for such vulgar nationalist blood-letting. For a Marxist, too, such fiddly conflicts among malcontent "dwarf states" would have seemed a nuisance. One can't help but wonder - a little childishly - if Trotsky booked himself a First, Second or Third class ticket on that train. And what must those he surveyed - the "rabble" of gypsies and ashen-faced wives, skin darkening as the train ploughed south through the Danubian basin - have thought of this rather uptight, priggish Russian gentleman? 

In his own words, Trotsky was quite appalled by the situation he discovered in Serbia:

"I went to the war in the Balkans thinking of it as not merely probable but inevitable... when I learned that some men whom I knew well - politicians, editors, university teachers - were already under arms, at the frontier, in the front line, that they would be among the first to kill and be killed - then the war, the abstraction about which I had been speculating so easily in my thoughts and in my articles, seemed to me something unlikely and impossible." (64) 

Yet the First World War, again the progeny of Great Power manoeuvres in the Balkans, was just two and half years away. The formation of the Red Army, which Trotsky led in civil war, three more after that. In that conflict so many assertions of western moral superiority to, and sympathy with, the Balkans would quickly be revealed for the nonsense they were. Yet Trotsky was right on one account: "No way forward but federation" (68) was his conclusion apropos the Balkans. History was to vindicate him twice (cunningly though: first as farce; then as tragedy). What prospect, then, of a third?

(The above is partially excerpted from a forthcoming long-form essay on EU integration of the Balkans) 

1Trotsky, The Balkan Wars 1912-13, 58

11 Places You Definitely Should Go in Eastern Europe (And One More You Shouldn't)

Arty silliness at Meet Factory, Prague

As a rule I don't really like travelling. It makes me nervous and irritable. In a world of interconnections, which it's your perilous job to hop between, there's far too much scope for accident, error, breakdown, and general chaos. If anyone has ever been on holiday without a) getting lost and giving in to drink or b) getting lost and having an argument then let me know. But please don't insist that it's all 'part of the experience' because, basically, I'm scared of experiences. If you want to learn about a place you're far better off plucking something from the torrent of publishing that undoubtedly already exists on the subject and actually reading about it. However, there are places which - stumbled upon usually by accident - press themselves upon you in ways books alone can't. Were that not the case, this blog (and countless others like it) wouldn't exist. Here, then, is my grudging tribute to those.

Ghetto Memorial, Krakow, Poland

11. The Jewish Museum, Krakow

http://www.en.galiciajewishmuseum.org/

Going to Auschwitz is basically a decent thing to do, though there are respectful and less respectful ways of going about it. Pulling v-signs and posing for snaps in front of the firing wall is not one of them. I walked around growing increasingly gloomy as tourists snapped endlessly at exhibits of piled human hair and emptied Zyklon B canisters. Like the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty, Auschwitz has become part of a tourist rat run, inevitably emptied of meaning by the commodification that comes with it. What needed reiterating was the fact of its being the actual place where well over a million lives were violently ended. Sadder, and more sobering, is the Galician Jewish Museum in Krakow. It stands on a little side street on the edge of Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter. Inside Krakow's tiny remaining Jewish community puts on talks promoting Jewish-Central European relations and exhibits artists with a Jewish connection. The permanent exhibition contains photos of relics of Galician Jewish life: hand-carved animal engravings unique to the region, many still to be found nestling in the Polish countryside. It is a reminder of the specificity of the lives lost, and a refutation of the effect of the endless recycling of statistics, which, appalling though they are, tend themselves to dehumanize. Visit while reading Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands for a particularly brutal juxtaposition.

Read: Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder

Belgrade-Sarajevo in the snow

10. Take a Train from Belgrade to Sarajevo and back again

Not an experience I actually relished. On the way there we forgot to buy water for this nine hour journey, winding up with a block of jelly-like cheese, some bread and two beers. On the way back my only company was a pair of quiet Bosnian students on their way from Sarajevo to their home in Doboj. Needless to say, they were a little confused by the purpose of my journey to Belgrade. 'From there I'm flying back to Warsaw,' I explained. It must have seemed terribly convoluted, and indeed it was. The train barrels through largely unremarkable landscape, leaving Bosnia and entering western Serbia via the empty Krajina plains of eastern Croatia. Yet travelling by train gives you the opportunity to see into people's lives, the tracks cutting behind the backs of villages, their gardens and homes laid out for the eyes of curious observers. The still pertinent landmine warnings that dot hilly and wooded areas are made all the more shocking by the fact kids on bikes play freely around them. Abandoned houses sit alone in the snow. Occasionally, in the north, Serbian flags can be seen hanging down over the tops of garden fences. The terrifying experience of stern Croatian border-guards disappearing with my passport aside, it was at least an eye-opener. Closed until 2010, they still only run one train a day on the line between Belgrade and Sarajevo, and given the status of Balkan diplomacy it might not last long. A monument to Yugoslav nation-building and the terrible ethnic breakdown that ensued in the 1990s, its renewed existence is in itself a marvel. See the New York Times' photos of the journey here. While you're at it you could do worse than reading Trotsky's collected Balkan War journalism, especially his accounts of the chaos and exuberance of train travel in the Balkans. For an account of what exactly continues to divide the region, the anarchist activist for Balkan federation, Andre Grubacic, writes journalism that is fiery, informative, and necessary.

Read: Trotsky's Balkan War journalism; Andre Grubacic's Don't Mourn, Balkanize!

Some serious wall, Berlin

9. Hohenschoenhausen Stasi Prison, Berlin

http://en.stiftung-hsh.de/

Once the DDR security police's biggest prison, the fleeing former occupants had no time to ditch its shocking contents. What was discovered was as alarming to outside observers as it was already suspected by DDR citizens. Torture, standing-cells, interrogations rooms, and cosy, well-equipped offices helped sustain what was - at the time - the most high-tech surveillance state that ever existed. Eric Hobsbawm once said that the DDR had to be considered, even by the western Left, a "going concern" - i.e. a real possibility for change in the capitalist world, one worthy of supporting - despite it being a "nasty little place". That ambiguity can be debated, and the presentation of the museum today laudably encourages it. Members of the public are shown around either by students of the regime or former inmates. Ideological arguments over the state's legacy are encouraged. As our party was told, former Stasi men keep showing up in the tour groups, stepping forward to have a pop at those they once interred there. All of which adds an air of the surreal to proceedings. This is actually what prevents the complex from turning into a mere museum piece: its importance is still contested. Anna Applebaum's book Iron Curtain ably demonstrates how, throughout postwar eastern Europe, it was the security forces which the communists took hold of first, whilst still ruling in relatively democratic government coalitions. Without the Soviet-backed security police, communist power could not have been consolidated. That those secret services later became so pervasive and so powerful should come as no surprise.

Read: Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, Anne Applebaum; Stasiland, Anna Funder

Advertisement for Wade Goddard's collection Enclave

8. War Photo Ltd. Gallery, Dubrovnik, Croatia

http://www.warphotoltd.com/

I visited while this anomalously reflective gallery was displaying Wade Goddard's series of photos taken in Mostar during the Croat siege of the Herzegovinan capital. The permanent exhibition is equally striking, though perhaps overly broad, and suffers from an attempt to exclude Serbs from the halo of victimhood. As a demonstration of the politicisation of mass killing and ethnic crime that still goes on in the former Yugoslavia it is chilling, cutting straight through Croatia's EU-backed, tourism-driven success. The peace that holds in the Balkans is pegged largely to the project of EU integration, yet no broader inter-ethnic settlement has been reached outside of the narrow focus of all parties on cooperation with the west. What this means for the people of the former Yugoslavia is a whole series of unanswered, though highly contested, political questions. The gallery preserves and re-presents those questions for international holiday-makers who appear otherwise uninterested. Visit it while reading Susan Woodward's excellent study of the collapse of Yugoslavia, which asks important questions about the role of apparently diplomatic, peace-brokering international institutions in the country's breakdown and, by no means a necessary result of that collapse, the outbreak of inter-ethnic war.

Read: Balkan Tragedy, Susan Woodward

Arty silliness at Prague's Meet Factory

7. Meet Factory, gallery and club, Smichov, Prague

http://www.meetfactory.cz/cs

This monument to artistic silliness is barmy in all the right ways. Established by Czech 'bad boy' artist David Cerny (he of the massive floating middle finger), it's got just the right mix of pretentious exclusivity and rough-edged grottiness to make it by turns hilarious and provocative A very good exhibition of the art of dissent - focusing on Pussy Riot, but including all sorts of witty and vulgar outrage - combined with a man in an excellent onesie cutting people's hair as others thoughtfully looked on. As it got later, the club got going, a suitably eccentric indie-jazz outfit complete with yelping vocalist keeping everyone happy. There was even some pretty awesome burlesque. How's that for civil society? Prague how it's meant to be then: full of wanky would-be poets doing odd things in shuttered factories. Rarely does a place live up to its own myth; this is one of those times.  

Read: A play by Vaclav Havel while sporting a neckerchief and goatee

Spot the accordionist: Kino Bosna

6. Kino Bosna, Sarajevo, Bosnia

Kino Bosna is, as its name suggests, a former cinema in the heart of Sarajevo. The stage and plush seating are all still there, along with at least some of the fancy drapery, now grubby and threadbare from beer and revelry. Even in the middle of February, when we went, it was stiflingly crowded, people spilling out onto the street. It has just enough old worldiness about it to feel grand, though it's rough-edged enough to be exciting. Despite its obvious 'coolness' it felt peculiarly representative of Sarajevo itself: a clash of Habsburg administrative, moderninsing grandeur with more raucous Balkan folk culture (somewhat inevitably the house band patrols the aisles, provoking singalongs and collecting change). Don't take the book with you, but you could do worse than read Misha Glenny's panoramic historical survey The Balkans:1804-2012 for a sense of the clash and collaboration of cultures both local and foreign which produced Sarajevo's sense of colour and excitement.

Read: The Balkans: 1804-2012, Misha Glenny

Memorial to the Gdansk Shipworkers, Gdansk, Poland

5. The Roads to Freedom exhibition, Gdansk, Poland

Your ticket comes in the form of a meat ration coupon! There are dummies in ill fitting grey uniforms and bad wigs! There's a mock up of a state-run corner shop, its shelves characteristically stripped! After this opening triple salvo things trail off a bit, with fairly familiar anti-communist tropes cropping up. The emotional and practical alliance forged between the battle-ready new Pope (an unquestionable hero in Poland, despite his deep conservatism) and the hardy, no-nonsense Gdansk shipworkers has been well-told. Norman Davies' second volume of Polish history really comes to life at this point. I read Victor Sebestyen's Revolution 1989 but I'm sure there are plenty of good accounts out there. The photo exhibitions and arrayed tools of police repression are pretty standard fare in this part of the world. Yet as a memorial to the first mass workers' opposition to emerge in the eastern bloc in thirty years, the exhibition has an irresistible story of moral purpose, and eventual victory, to tell.

Read: God's Playground: A History of Poland Vol.II, Norman Davies; Revolution 1989, Victor Sebestyen

After sunset, Prague gets creepy

4. Prague's Hidden Old Town

Prague's Old Town is deservedly famous, all the more so for escaping the 20th century relatively unscathed (save a bit of Nazi arson during the Prague Uprising). But owing to its major sights lying on a single route (the so-called Golden Mile) it gets horribly congested, and is overwhelmed by cheap souvenir shops and terrible pubs. Though quieter and less ornate than the rat run between Na Prikope and Charles Bridge, the route down to the river from Betlemske Namesti offers relief from crowds and an experience of what Prague might have been like in the 1960s, if not the 1860s. Starting at Betlemske kaple (Bethlehem chapel) - the first in the Bohemian Crown Lands to conduct services in Czech - wander its largely deserted residential back streets, where shop fronts retain an air of care-worn dilapidation and the staff are no more welcoming. At night its deep shadows, the dim glow of street lamps, and only occasional pedestrians, give it a real air of creepiness. This is the Prague of which Angelo Maria Ripellino wrote in the 1960s - a Prague whose seedy, narcotic energy was buried in underground taverns, only occasionally spilling out into the foggy night air. This Prague has been largely vanquished from the Prada shops of Josefov. Once home to brothels and radical religious reform movements alike, this historically poor quarter of the Old Town can still evoke the piled up history of Prague's nefarious underworld.

Read: Magic Prague, Angelo Maria Ripellino

Ready for action: Cesky Krumlov

3. Go Rafting in Cesky Krumlov

If a mode of transport doesn't involve the sole use of my legs, it'll probably get me a bit worried. As with my near-death kayaking experience in Dubrovnik, rafting on a drizzly day in Cesky Krumlov was not a prospect that filled me with joy. As it turned out the whole thing unfolded quite calmly, the Baroque and Gothic spires of the town rising up over the tops of tousled, ramshackle houses as we bobbed leisurely past. The gentle pace left ample time to peak into the holiday homes stacked up on the river bank. Egon Schiele's studies of the town give it a romantic, tumble-down quality, though the poetic effect is muddied by heavy, tea-bag-stain browns. This dubious compliment was not appreciated and, like some dodgy medieval necromancer, the locals eventually ran him out. On this soggy spring day, dirty water trickling down off everything, he's vindicated. A deep sense of weariness weighed down on the clouded town, a thin mist rolling off the river and clogging up the narrow streets. The only change of pace came as we slid down weirs, which are basically man-made rapids used to trouble novice rafters. After each one we collided with the river bank and ended up drifting, backwards, upstream. Not an entirely graceful affair after all, then. Bideleux and Jeffries' A History of Eastern Europe paints a vast picture of precisely the sort of dynasty - Habsburg, Eggenburg, Shcwarzneburg - who governed towns like Krumlov throughout the region. Its splendour is largely down to those vanished masters.

Read: A History of Eastern Europe, Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries

Exhibits at the Outdoor Museum, Tallinn

2. The Outdoor Museum, Tallinn, Estonia

http://www.visitestonia.com/en/north-estonia-open-air-museums

Perfectly preserved and restored, a vast collection of housing is tucked away in this mega-compound. All in various states of decay when they were brought in from the wild, all have been nursed back to health. What makes it special is the Estonian commitment to historical reenactment. The act never drops. I stumbled upon a remarkably well-acted domestic bust up between a couple in the midst of making lunch. The argument continued long after I awkwardly excused myself. Keep a store of enthusiasm for the staple folk dances that kick off in the courtyards of village meeting-halls. The boundary between reality and fiction collapses, as Estonians revel in a disjointed historical mash up, the epitome of Fredric Jameson's concept of the postmodern pastiche of historical forms.

Read: Anything by Fredric Jameson 

Budapest courtyard

1. Stay in an apartment in Budapest

Hostels are overpriced and usually full of awful people you'd otherwise go to great lengths to avoid meeting. The solution is to stay in a nice apartment that some arty couple have renovated before giving it to the world. It's comfortable, warm, and generally cheaper than other options. Plus, at the end you leave feeling like a real person, rather than a beer-soaked gap-year cartoon enthusing about how much you love traveling and 'experiencing new things'.

Read: Something cosy and familiar

And one place you definitely shouldn't go:

Olomouc Diocesan Museum

Museums in the Czech Republic are generally not much cop, but this is a sort of shit-museum-concentrate, a veritable puree of everything that's dull, overly precious and frankly intimidating about collecting and exhibiting old stuff. Firstly, the collection is made up of the cast offs of local bishops, so it's about as fun as a visit to a priest's living room. The staff are all over sixty and greet visitors with feeble smiles, hiding their deep suspicion and dislike behind an air of pushy enthusiasm. Whether it's boredom or distrust, they all feel compelled to tiptoe, silent and phantom-like, a few paces behind you. At one point the floor is deemed so remarkable that you're forced to wear slippers to walk on it. All this while being forced to inspect centuries of hoarded religious paraphernalia under their watchful eyes. 'What's this?' Siobhan asked, pointing at a display. 'Don't know, don't care,' I replied, which sounds petty, but by that point, exhausted from being shepherded from one boring assemblage of pottery to another, it was true. Joyless from start to finish.