First look at Old Town Prague, Czech Republic

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(the article below accompanies this video)

More travel movement today, Central European style. Masayo and I took a complicated series of trains from the small town of Kutná Hora and its ghastly Church of Bones all the way to the world-famous capital city of Prague. Since we spent most of the day click-clacking along train tracks and arrived in Prague as the late afternoon darkness was already descending, we didn’t see too much of the city. My blood sugars behaved the opposite to what I expected all day – high when they should have been easy to control, and good when I expected a high.

Diabetes and the Czech Republic – always keeping things interesting.

The day began poorly in Kutná Hora for me – the pizza that I’d negotiated so well last night had conspired while I slept to dump more glucose into my bloodstream. I woke up at 5:30 am feeling high, and was indeed: 302. I took three units of Humalog, and was groggy enough that I didn’t even remember to take a BG selfie for this page.

I was still 239 at 9 am. Man, pizza’s got some staying power. Masayo and I went to the dining area of Penzion Centrum and ate the same bread ‘n’ eggs ‘n’ bacon breakfast as yesterday — though, curiously, today the coffee was “regular”, not full of gritty grounds.

Coffee in Central Europe – always keeping things interesting.

We checked out of the lovely Penzion Centrum and strode to the tiny little train station near Old Town Kutná Hora. If you’re a trainspotter or otherwise a fan of rail travel, Kutná Hora město station would be an absorbing place to find yourself. Quaint and functional, with green grass growing between the tracks and, today at least, a bright yellow train waiting to take us ten minutes up the tracks to the larger hub of Kutná Hora hlavní nádraží station. Which it indeed did; we changed there to a larger train bound for Kolín.

We were on our way! Always exciting to be bound for a new horizon.

We would have to have some good luck once we arrived in Kolín though, because we’d only have six minutes to transfer to our train for Prague. And we don’t know anything about Kolín station – how many platforms there are, where ours might be, how we’d jump off and find the correct train.

More worryingly, I noticed that the train we were on was running about four minutes behind schedule. We’d have two minutes at Kolín station. Gulp.

When we arrived, several other passengers hopped out and walked very briskly into the station. I guessed that they must be transferring to Prague too and Masayo and I followed them into the tunnel. Sure enough, I saw a screen indicating our train at a certain platform; we ran up the stairs to the platform with our big backpacks and leapt onto the train, just in time.

Rail travel in unfamiliar places – always keeping things interesting.

Our new ride was a state-of-the-art double-decker train providing lofty views of the serene and largely featureless Czech countryside. I read the World War II book I purchased in Kraków, Poland on the way as the train stopped at every single station until Praha Masarykovo nádraži, the main station in Prague. We disembarked but weren’t done yet – we caught yet another little local train on a spur line to Praha-Dejvice station so we could easily reach our hotel.

After a 1.2-km walk to the hotel through a quiet, washed-out residential area under an overcast sky we checked into the Jelení Dvůr Hotel, where I’d made a reservation through booking.com. This is a somewhat unusual place for us – not a guesthouse or a pension but an actual hotel. We have a keycard and a laughably pricey minibar and signs written in German, Czech, Russian, and English. The wifi works well too. The location of Jelení Dvůr, on a large hill overlooking Prague Castle, is its main selling point and a big reason we chose it.

Unfortunately my blood sugar still wasn’t behaving – after checking in I was 219. Curse that pizza!

We were hungry and went out for a late lunch/early dinner at about 4 pm. We didn’t know what facilities might be around the hotel but we quickly found a lot of touristy shops and restaurants down the hill behind the hotel on a windy little road that leads to the castle, which a major tourist site.

We found a place called Restaurace U Labutí and I ordered one of the tastiest meals I’ve had on this trip: potato gnocchi with mushrooms, and beef strips in a cheese sauce, plus a hot chocolate. Unfortunately, perhaps, the hot chocolate was as thick as the one I’d had at the Ukrainian restaurant back in Kraków. What would this do to my already-high BG?

In the spirit of getting over my mental block against taking large-enough Humalog shots, towards the end of the meal I elected to take a second injection, figuring that the first hadn’t been enough. So I bolstered it with another six units and made a mental note to watch my BG very carefully for signs of falling too low too quickly. Even though meals like this always make me high.

Road food – always keeping things interesting.

We had just enough light left in the afternoon to go check out Prague Castle a little bit and the long steep tourist road beside it. Since there is no shop at all near our hotel we ducked into a small market here to stock up on some simple food for a late dinner later: crackers, cheese, yogurt, and a can of beer for me.

Back in the room I whipped out my OneTouch to see how my great double-Humalog experiment had gone with the thick gnocchi and even thicker chocolate drink. It had been a resounding success: 138!

Now that’s a bull’s eye to be proud of.

Later we had our “dinner” which should have been easier to handle, diabetically, than the restaurant lunch: everything had nutrition info printed on it so I knew exactly how much insulin to take. It didn’t work though: at 11 pm I was 251. All that thick food recently must be hanging around, acting slowly on me.

All in all another busy day for us as we streaked across the Czech Republic on several trains, found our new hotel in a great new capital city, and had some excellent food. I even had a surprisingly good blood sugar reading, however short-lived it was, and made some progress in getting over my low BG paranoia.

We have scheduled three days here in Prague so tomorrow we’ll go down and get to know Prague a little better. I’ve always heard that the city is one of Europe’s truly magnificent capitals of culture so I can’t wait!

Have you ever been to Prague?

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