The Prague Hilton

I’ve only ever stayed in one big chain hotel in Europe: the Westin Grand in Berlin. It was when I was traveling for Pennington and there was no room at the avant garde hotel hosting the school fair I was attending, and so the travel agent booked me a room at the cheaper Westin Grand. It is, easily, my favorite hotel in the world. Grand is a good word for this hotel; a historical building that is elegant and refined and retains its old world charm while embracing the comforts of a modern hotel. The lobby was used in a James Bond film or one of the Mission Impossible movies, with a sweeping grand staircase. It truly is an exceptional, and one of a kind, hotel.

We generally don’t stay in big chain hotels over here. It’s partly by budget, but mostly by choice because there is so much more character and culture in small hotels and B&B type pensions. When we decided we would come to Prague for New Year’s, we checked out our favorite hotel, At The Golden Scissors on Kampa Island, where a scene for a Mission Impossible movie took place, but it was full. We decided to go budget and stay at Richie’s Hostel, right on the main drag to the Charles Bridge. It would also be a recognizance mission to see if the hostel was a good one for students if a future trip were to come to Prague. It didn’t take long before I chickened out. A hostel on New Years? It sounded like a potential nightmare. Plus, the fact that they were charging a 100% surcharge for New Years week meant it wasn’t that much of a bargain. So we looked around and found a B&B near the Charles Bridge which only cost a little more than the hostel and booked it. It took a lot longer for us to get cold feet on the B&B. But we started thinking about Nikolas and how we might best entertain him in Prague, especially if it was cold or wet or miserable outside. A B&B seemed like it might get a little claustrophobic.

And so we started looking for a hotel with a swimming pool, which pushes you into the big-chain-hotel-category and big-chain-hotel-prices, and after much deliberating chose the Hilton. It was a fair amount more than the B&B, but less than the other options, and includes breakfast, something the others didn’t offer. The lobby is enormous, a world inside the hotel, with the eight storeys of hotel rooms encircling it. There are long hallways for Nikolas to run in, slippery marble floors to drive cars on, shoe shining machines by the elevators which you can use every time you go up or down in the elevator (we must have the cleanest shoes in Prague), and a lovely pool. It’s not unlike the Hyatt out on Route 1 in Princeton or the Renaissance by the Philadelphia Airport (although much bigger with 773 rooms!), which means it feels like you could be anywhere in the world and not in Prague at all. But it is comfortable and elegant and a special treat for New Year’s, and so we’ll make the most of our time here and try to enjoy both the hotel and the city.