Love and lattes

There are a couple of things that one needs in life.

Love, warmth, shelter, good friends, food and …..lattes.

We live deep in the suburbs of Prague where finding a latte is about as common as a lesser spotted eagle.   We don't live in the gorgeous old town in the centre of the city, nor in one of the foreign ghettos, instead we have gone 'native' but that means no cute high streets and a dirth of coffee shops : (

In fact this loss has lead to the serious overuse of my expresso machine (I'm not sure a domestic machine was designed for such heavy usage).

Can you imagine my absolute delight when I discovered a cafe 2 minutes from our house?  It's brand spanking new, the paint is practically drying, and it opened a week ago.

I couldn't contain my excitement and spoke to the owner in very bad Czech, I think he understood my desperation and gave me a latte, and the kids some cake.

It's no Belgique...but hey who's complaining?

As I sit here with my latte and croissant, I think back to only 20 years ago when I first came to Prague.  I was inter-railing with friends and it had only been 6 months since the Velvet Revolution.  Prague was yet undiscovered, the streets were empty (in fact the shelves were still empty, and there were lines for bread).

Being English speaking and a vegetarian at that, meant it was nigh on impossible to communicate, let alone find anything that resembled a fresh vegetable in the land of meat - we lived on omelettes and bread. The only other languages spoken other than Czech were Russian, and German if you were lucky.

Now there is an explosion of cafes and restaurants, the golden arches and Starbucks are on every other corner and everyone wants to speak English.

Prague has become a modern city, attracting European businesses and an international community.  For many years it's been the most popular tourist destination in Europe.

For me that means choice of products, cafes and restaurants.  But the old Prague is sometimes hard to find, deep beneath the tourist trails and buried behind globalisation and so-called progress.




And when you do find it, it's magical.  I just hope it doesn't get lost completely.