How to Have a Perfect Day in Prague

Do you know what pure, simple, unbridled, unqualified joy feels like?

For me, it’s Prague. Not the city itself, per se, but a particular moment, on a particular day, sitting under a tree in Letna Park, a half-smoked joint in one hand and a crumbling raspberry macaron in the other, occasional drops of rain slipping through the canopy of leaves and branches, a smile so wide my face could barely contain it.

But to understand why that moment holds such significance for me, and why it felt so profound and so rapturous, I’d have to take you back to the events that preceded it—and even those would not be sufficient. I could run you through an itinerary of my day—breakfast at my hotel, a quick smoke on my favorite bench along the Vltava River, hours spent lazing through the National Gallery at Trade Fair Palace, lunch at some unremarkable spot near Prague Castle, and then up to Letna Park with a small paper bag full of pastries—but you still wouldn’t be able to replicate that moment of joy. And I hope you won’t even try.

*The National Gallery at Trade Fair Palace is wonderfully well-curated and—because it’s away from the tourist centers—wonderfully uncrowded*

Because the story is so much longer and more layered and nuanced than I could convey through a single blog post. Even a novel would struggle to contain it.

And that’s the thing about travel, about life, about how we experience the world: our own lens is so richly colored and contextualized through our personal experiences that there’s just no way to live someone else’s itinerary in the same way.

We see or hear someone else’s travel stories—all the struggles and mundanity and rubbish just airbrushed away, of course—and we want to have that same experience. But we can’t. No matter how faithfully we follow their lead.

I’ve wanted to start a travel blog for years, but I’ve never felt like I had much to offer as far as your typical travel blogs go: I’m not an especially great photographer. I don’t waltz around destinations in gorgeous outfits with my hair and makeup done. I’m not running around looking for Instagrammable moments, and about 50 percent of the time, I start scarfing down food before I can remember to take a photo of it.

*On this particular day in Prague, however, I did manage to snap a photo of my lunch*

I’m just a woman in my mid-30s traveling the world (mostly solo), trying to rack up as many stamps in my passport as I can, balancing a full-time job with a passion for exploring new places and having incredible adventures, and dying to tell my stories to whoever is patient enough to listen.

I think there are lessons to be taken from travelogues that are deeper and more profound than what monuments and museums to visit, and where to have a great breakfast (not that those things aren’t important); I also think that most attempts at travel-inspired profundity tend to end at, “isn’t it amazing, the diversity of human experiences? Isn’t it incredible how nuance exists?” Excuse me while I retrieve my corneas from the back of my skull. (And excuse me later on when I inevitably fall into this same trap; I’m human, AKA, a hypocritical idiot.)

Starting this travel blog is sort of my way of saying, ‘fuck it.’ Fuck being Instagrammable and perfect and fuck having great photos and fuck trying to turn everything into some pseudo-philosophical musings of a privileged white woman with a privileged passport.

I just want to tell stories. To share my experiences. In some humble way, and without expectations, I perhaps do hope to inspire others to venture out into the world on their own. On a smaller and less remarkable scale, I hope to inspire you in the same way that I’m inspired by the travel experiences of others, from Freya Stark to Anthony Bourdain.

And in the same way I’m not trying to follow in their precise footsteps, I don’t expect you to follow in mine. But maybe, the next time you’re in Prague, you’ll decide to spend an afternoon under a tree in a park, and maybe it will mean something to you, too.

But first, I should tell you more about what it meant to me: that story happened in the summer of 2022. It was my first solo trip post-COVID. A year before COVID, in early 2019, I’d moved halfway around the world for a relationship that was doomed from the start. Being with someone who I quickly realized wasn’t right for me was a lonelier experience than anything in the world. In early 2020, I was planning to return to Jordan (where I’d lived for more than a decade before running off on that ill-advised romantic notion), and then COVID happened, and I subsequently got stuck in Morocco for another year. And yet, somehow, a global pandemic is precisely what it took to shake me out of my depression, get me back on my feet, and help me rediscover myself. (At some point, I’ll give a more detailed and meaningful account of all of this—including how travel was the only thing that saved me during one of the darkest, most depressing years of my life. And, now that I think about it, it was also the thing that saved me during the absolute darkest year of my life—the year my brother died. Other stories for other times. Look, maybe, in some ways, this blog is just my replacement for a therapist. Strap in.)

A year after moving back to Amman, after a few more brief flings and infatuations with other men who were absolutely wrong for me, I booked a last-minute solo trip to Prague and Vienna. I’ve been to Prague more times than I can count; it’s one of those places where I feel perfectly content just existing.

That moment in Prague was about more than getting high and eating pastries in a park: it was about realizing just how far I’d come—how happy I was in my own company, how comfortable in my own skin, how wonderful it was to spend a day doing exactly what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it, with no obligations to anyone but myself.

By the time I’d finished my macaron and my joint, the weather had become torrential. I didn’t mind. I walked for an hour through the rain-soaked city, feeling more alive, and more like myself, than I’d felt in a very long time.

To quote Oscar Wilde, “In life we can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.”

This is what traveling allows me to do. And it’s also why you shouldn’t follow me: because your experiences are not mine, and vice versa.

Don’t follow me. But you can follow along with my stories if you like.