Praha

Fairy tale land. 

The streets are cobblestone and the buildings are colorful. The effect is charm. I will use beauty to describe the hills and the forests and the views in each direction from the bridges, but lovely or charming fit the city itself. The order and detail and grandeur of Parisian architecture is gone, replaced by wider facades, scattered heights, and red-orange roofs. Charming. At the higher points of the city, the view is nuts. There are so many spires and dome roofs colored with a greeny version of robins egg blue. Most buildings, other than the really really old ones (as opposed to just the really old ones), are light. Medieval influence comes through much more here than in France. 

Prague has good cheap beer.  The food is fairly funky and the people, awkward. The city is both beautiful and ugly. But ugly in the kind of way that makes you stare.

The people! Oh the people. Most definitely the awkward club, to quote marge, of Europe. The fashion is hodge-podge outfits. Silly combinations of clothing: a shirt that is both too short and too tight, jeans or pants with strange and loud decoration, and shoes that are trying hard (a kitten heel, maybe something on the top, a chunky buckle wrapping around the heel) to be something other than plain. Hair is worn frizzy. Watching heads, the color is either a non-color--mousy brown/grey--or blue, purple, pink, etc. The bodies are middle centered. Plenty of tall people. Movement seems to not come naturally. One mother and daughter hugged the way I imagine ogres hug. Friendly, frizzy ogres. 

The food is painfully not French. The mustard, sausage, and pizza are good. Everything else is marked by culinary confusion. The transition from simple/rural czech cuisine to czech food influenced by other European cuisines went disastrously. I had a gnocci dish that was literally a paste. City, cool. Food, bizarre but not interesting.